Do you have any tips on how you got your son interested in the computer? Is your son closer on the specturm to Asperger's than autism? My 4 year old son is on the spectrum too and I have been trying to get him intersted in the PC, with varying success. My two year old, who is Neurotypical, loves TuxPaint (with a touchscreen). The 4 year old is getting interested, but he doesn't seem like he's doing it purposefully, but rather as a perseveration (he tries to control the TV too by touching the screen). His primary deficit is in expressive communication, so I have been thinking about getting something like VoiceBuddy (http://edimensional.com/index.php?cPath=23), so he has to speak to play games. However, until he takes more of an interest in the PC, in general, I think it would be a waste of money. Please PM me, as I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
I worked on a PeopleSoft implementation for a large US University on payroll, specifically. I cannot believe they would push a payroll implementation into production without being pretty damn sure it's going to work correctly. Payroll is not the thing you want to get wrong! I know, first hand, about the convoluted business rules and complexity that make these implementation so difficult and risky, but that's precisely why you do testing (and plenty of it). As someone else pointed out, they should have run test payroll cycles in parallel until any differences were resolved or documented as acceptable. I find it particularly appauling that Deloitte let this happen. They deserve more of the blame than the school administrators. They should know better. It is there business to know better. Presumably, that's that they're being paid for.
After my University's PeopleSoft implementation they had a change of heart regarding ERP. To replace their current financial system they have adopted the "Community Source" model. Basically, it's the open-source model, but "the community includes some organizations or institutions that are committing their resources to the community, in the form of human resources or other financial elements." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_source. This model seems more appropriate for all public sector enterprises versus each shelling out tax payer money to high price consultants and vendors. Take, for example, the states' Medicaid Management Information Systems. Every state has their own system, some outsourced to folks like EDS for millions. As a tax payer, I would much rather see my state pool their resources with other states, all of which have the same need, to create their own solution. That doesn't mean every state has to have the same business rules. Ideally, the "kernel" would be modular and flexible enough to meet their unique needs, but if not they can fork it. This would probably cost the states less up-front, but certainly there would be substantial savings in the long run as well.
I recently replaced our main family PC (a P3 running Windows 2000) with an Athlon 64 X2 running Fedora 7. The installation was amazingly smooth. My onboard LAN, video, and sound all worked "out of the box." The only additional driver installation required was for our HP printer/scanner, which was easy as "yum install hplip." I was very happy with the system, except for needing to restart my router every day or two (likely not linux's fault, but not a problem in 2000). Unfortunately, it failed the wife test. She had trouble getting used to the tabbed-browsing in Firefox and was generally unhappy with OpenOffice (in her words, "it just isn't the same"). I think given time she would have gotten used to Fedora, but it wasn't worth listening to her moaning, so I installed XP last night. What a frickin' hassle... All of the onboard components needed to be installed one-by-one (with a reboot in between) and SP2 took close to an hour to install (with another reboot required). For some reason, every time it reboots it reads/writes to the HD like mad, which I don't think was happening with F7. I hope that stops once everything is installed. I'll install Office and the printer/scanner drivers tonight and expect at least a few more reboots. I just hope the wife doesn't have a problem with Office 2007...
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any tips on how you got your son interested in the computer? Is your son closer on the specturm to Asperger's than autism? My 4 year old son is on the spectrum too and I have been trying to get him intersted in the PC, with varying success. My two year old, who is Neurotypical, loves TuxPaint (with a touchscreen). The 4 year old is getting interested, but he doesn't seem like he's doing it purposefully, but rather as a perseveration (he tries to control the TV too by touching the screen). His primary deficit is in expressive communication, so I have been thinking about getting something like VoiceBuddy (http://edimensional.com/index.php?cPath=23), so he has to speak to play games. However, until he takes more of an interest in the PC, in general, I think it would be a waste of money. Please PM me, as I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
I worked on a PeopleSoft implementation for a large US University on payroll, specifically. I cannot believe they would push a payroll implementation into production without being pretty damn sure it's going to work correctly. Payroll is not the thing you want to get wrong! I know, first hand, about the convoluted business rules and complexity that make these implementation so difficult and risky, but that's precisely why you do testing (and plenty of it). As someone else pointed out, they should have run test payroll cycles in parallel until any differences were resolved or documented as acceptable. I find it particularly appauling that Deloitte let this happen. They deserve more of the blame than the school administrators. They should know better. It is there business to know better. Presumably, that's that they're being paid for. After my University's PeopleSoft implementation they had a change of heart regarding ERP. To replace their current financial system they have adopted the "Community Source" model. Basically, it's the open-source model, but "the community includes some organizations or institutions that are committing their resources to the community, in the form of human resources or other financial elements." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_source. This model seems more appropriate for all public sector enterprises versus each shelling out tax payer money to high price consultants and vendors. Take, for example, the states' Medicaid Management Information Systems. Every state has their own system, some outsourced to folks like EDS for millions. As a tax payer, I would much rather see my state pool their resources with other states, all of which have the same need, to create their own solution. That doesn't mean every state has to have the same business rules. Ideally, the "kernel" would be modular and flexible enough to meet their unique needs, but if not they can fork it. This would probably cost the states less up-front, but certainly there would be substantial savings in the long run as well.
I recently replaced our main family PC (a P3 running Windows 2000) with an Athlon 64 X2 running Fedora 7. The installation was amazingly smooth. My onboard LAN, video, and sound all worked "out of the box." The only additional driver installation required was for our HP printer/scanner, which was easy as "yum install hplip." I was very happy with the system, except for needing to restart my router every day or two (likely not linux's fault, but not a problem in 2000). Unfortunately, it failed the wife test. She had trouble getting used to the tabbed-browsing in Firefox and was generally unhappy with OpenOffice (in her words, "it just isn't the same"). I think given time she would have gotten used to Fedora, but it wasn't worth listening to her moaning, so I installed XP last night. What a frickin' hassle... All of the onboard components needed to be installed one-by-one (with a reboot in between) and SP2 took close to an hour to install (with another reboot required). For some reason, every time it reboots it reads/writes to the HD like mad, which I don't think was happening with F7. I hope that stops once everything is installed. I'll install Office and the printer/scanner drivers tonight and expect at least a few more reboots. I just hope the wife doesn't have a problem with Office 2007...