Do be aware that tools like Access and php, and ASP and python and java... encourage you to do too much client-side. It's important to consider using in-database stored procedures and (often updateable) views where appropriate for efficiency and clean structure. You can then use an Access-like app to provide a user-interface to that higher level database interface, instead of just poking around in the raw tables.
Wow. This really should get an "application developer knows best" vs "DBA knows best" flamefest.
Yes, but H is 10^-9 magnitude less than E or something like that. I don't want to find my physics or electromagnetics books to find out for sure.
There is no effort made really to shield MRIs, as it is not very practical. They're just kept far away from everything else that might be affected by them. Industrial MRIs are quite unshielded, too, except by distance. It's just easier to keep magnetically sensitive materials out of the area.
When I worked at UCSD, I used to walk by the NMRI lab in Urey Hall outside. I did it once with a paper clip on a string, and it did get pulled out a bit when the MRI coil was energized...
You don't wear a lead apron when you get an MRI, and your body part is inches away from a rather strong magnetic field. The health risks from MRIs are from the materials used as contrast agents, as they can invoke allergic reactions.
Yet you wear that lead apron at the dentist's office when you're getting dental x-rays.
Under most local laws in the US, any part of a tree that crosses the fence/propery line is legally the property of that propery owner. It doesn't matter that the trunk of the tree happens to be owned by the other property owner.
Are you sure about this? I did some looking on nolo.com about this, and, well...it's not clear. If a branch of a tree I own falls off and damages the neighbor's property, it's my responsibility (reasonable). If the neighbor decides he doesn't like the branches, and prunes them off, it's his bad, especially if the pruning harms the tree.
If I park my car on the neighbor's lawn, he's perfectly allowed to complain, call the cops, etc., but not key in a new racing stripe.
Well, let's argue "piracy". Technically, piracy is theft on the open seas. In fact, it is still rather common in the various shipping lanes in SE Asia. Cargo ship/boat is accosted by a group of pirates, who then take the cargo (and possibly kill that boat's crew), and it probably gets fenced on the black market or folded into legitimate trade elsewhere.
I think the "piracy" angle has been pursued because it's easy enough to analogize the Internet to the Open Seas, but it's not really accurate. If I was somehow pirating music, I'd think that I've actually stolen a load of CDs off of a ship, truck, etc., something that actually involves deprivation of property.
The end result of p2p is loss of sale or opportunity. If that's bad, then why are not negative music and movie reviews, that can also act to reduce the opportunity for a given commercial work?
The RIAA is really acting to preserve a given business model. I suppose that's their choice. Too bad they're not really looking into other opportunities to make $$$.
Or, you go to a friend's house. Is it theft now? Well, I'd argue that there is ambiguity there due to the First Sale doctrine. Certainly, if you sold it to your friend (ooops, I kept my ripped tracks from it), the RIAA does not get any $$$ from that sale. This has already been established in lawsuits brought against music resellers (i.e., The Wherehouse, et al) that the RIAA lost.
Again, why all this concern about what casual copyright violations may bring about compared to actual piracy (i.e., CD duplication houses continuing to press CDs after fulfilling their run of authorized versions, and then allowing those extras to be sold...).
The big $$$ being lost are not to you and me and everyone else P2P'ing, but to the groups that are into the large-scale piracy.
It was, of course, far easier for the cops, etc., to go after bars selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition than it was to identify the larger producers of the illicit alcohol. A few producers and distributors of the stuff were caught, but not enough to put a crimp in the business. Sounds a lot like the illegal drug trade in the US, too. Hammer the users and street pushers, yet the distributors and producers pretty much go along, worrying more about their rivals than the long arm of the law.
But, like illegal aliens, there is too much $$$ on both sides of the issue, that nothing will really come about to actually stop it.
There is no way that Mexico can really afford for the $$$ that get sent back down to the US from emigres (legal and illegal). There is no way that those who use illegal immigrant labor, knowingly or unknowingly, will really let the US try to stop the flow, because probably more than one of the HNICs have nice houses, with nice lawns and landscaping, good maids and nannies, have a good, cheap car mechanic shop, etc., that will get priced out or go out of business if they do let such efforts be acted out in a serious fashion.
Then, since several of them are elected (or dependent upon the graces of elected officials to keep them employed), if the demographics of areas like SoCal, Arizona, NMex and Texas continue, parts of the US will kind of be in the situation that Israel was in with Gaza and West Bank. What if all those illegals demand a right to vote, and what if they get it? Time to cut losses before the whole country is "infected" and the real Israelis have their democratic processes used to literally vote ALL of them out...
They mostly train them to identify and tag mines and underwater IEDs.
The most critical part about retrieving them is not that they *could* "attack" divers with their head-mounted laser beams (where are those sharks when you need them), but that they've been captive-raised all their lives, much like the dolphins at the SeaWorld parks.
4: American company hires "local" employee Americans want to get paid too much, want too many frivolous benefits like health insurance with low copay, 401K with nice employer match, etc. It is usually not the wages that hurt American employees, it's how management feels about benefits. Most people on slashdot have never worked for a company where they start out part-time, with this Golden Ring of working full-time, only to finally toil long enough to make it to full-time, and then REALLY get treated like a piece of shit by the company and management... Similar to employees in many companies that have some benefits kick in once employee is working 30 hrs or more per week.
It's cheaper for the company to have 6 dipsticks working 20 hrs/week just at wage than it is to have 2 salaried employees (and their benefits) doing the equivalent work... Company can more or less control wages, but it cannot control health care costs.
5: Foreign company hires American employee to work in the foreign company.
My bet is that 5 just doesn't happen all that much. Can't have "Americans" taking away jobs from the citizens...
Besides, if you really want to feel like you're being played for a fool, go get an out-of-state hunting or fishing license, especially in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado or Idaho...
Supply and demand, simple as that. Resident tuition is also generally remarkably lower than non-resident tuition. Most legislatures demand that the state's colleges charge "full price" tuition to non-residents. Because resident tuition is cheap, cost of living has a higher probability of being cheap, more in-state students apply for limited supply of enrollment slots. Because $$$ then isn't a limiting factor, schools have no choice but to make resident enrollment standards higher. Non-resident applicants have $$$ as a main limiting factor, not enrollment slots, so, to encourage more non-resident students (and, their "full tuition" tuitions...), enrollment standards are lower. Esecially for (wealthy) foreign students.
Politics has a hand in it as well. It looks good for legislators and governors to be able to brag to their colleagues (and/or fend off the PC Police) that they have a "diverse and broad" student population. Fill in your favorite minority groups.
"His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet threatens democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon often known by the term cyberbalkanization."
You mean that it'll be even more powerful than PACs, opinion groups, churches and synods, etc. that seek to be the squeekiest wheel or most righteous saints come election time?
Are you sure? Movie critics have not really thrown society over the cliff or dissolved the cohesion like a giant bottle of Billy May's newest wonder solvent. Many of us probably have a couple of movie or book critics we might pay particular attention to, and if they give a movie or book a good review, we'd be more likely to see the movie or buy the book...
And then there's NPR, Top-40 & New Country radio stations. Lots of groupies with those, yet even in the stark commercial desert that is Clear Channel/Infinity Broadcasting, other formats still work, too.
For every "affinity buyer", there is a non-null set of people who exist that will do just the opposite, more or less, on purpose or with intent. People who buy at Wal-Mart as much as possible vs those who go out of their way to NEVER shop at Wal-Mart (or Nordstroms, Suxs 5th Avenue, Whole Paycheck, etc).
Until Wal-Mart decides it can actually do high-end sales with the volume advantages it has with its cheap-at-all-costs super stores, then I think the commerical world is still probably safe.
...and what was BellSouth's profits over the last 5 years?
Needless to say, they'll probably also get some sort of tax credits from the fed and state govments, and of course if they have to borrow, they have excellent cash flow and will get great credit lines...
Allowing DSL service without phone service at the same rate will cost the company money because the costs of the line are not recovered.
This is pretty much a red herring.
How many new, physical phone lines are set up each day, vs the number of physical lines already established?
All of the equipment, in most cases, is recovered in 2-4 years (it's certainly depreciated within 5 or 7). The costs of an actual phone line installation are spread out over the number of circuits per line. Which is why fiber is so bitchin' compared to copper. One splice for as many curcuits go down the fiber instead of 24x4, for a typical copper line. Of course, when it goes fibercopper, demuxing the fiber to copper invokes all those splices/junctions, it is the only place it has to be done. And once they're set up, they're left alone.
The ILEC does not come out and rip out the phone line when service is discontinued by a customer. They run a little program on the 7ESS switch that turns off that number.
Just like the cable companies do not bother to disconnect your cable anymore if you stop paying (you will probably still get analog channels...), they just turn off your digital service at the head end.
Live where you do not have natural gas service? You can get it established if you pay to have the line extended to your house. Of course, then all everyone else in your neighborhood has to pay is the connection from the curb to the house... All future owners of your house do not then have to pay the same connect fee, they just get an acct established.
Someone has to eat the initial costs. For the company, the rest is easy money once that initial physical hookup has been made.
Joe Celko's books would be a good place to start ("SQL For Smarties") for expanding your mind regarding SQL.
But he writes all his queries using ANSI-standard syntax where possible. Oracle 10g (9.2) just seemed to join the modern ages to support ANSI join syntax as well.
--typical Oracle left outer join syntax: Select a.name, b.*, c.* from table_a a, table_b b, table_c c where a.id = b.id (+) and b.id2 = c.id2 (+)
--ANSI 89 left outer join syntax: Select a.name, b.* from table_a a LEFT OUTER JOIN table_b b (
LEFT OUTER JOIN table_c c on b.id2 = c.id2) on a.id = b.id
At least since 9i though it supports the CASE statement, as well as the non-standard (but traditional) DECODE() function.
The hierarchical tree support in Oracle is...well...it's there (I'm not a fan of it).
Some of the newer options for doing running sums, etc. since 9i are quite useful, and beat writing a bunch of subqueries or using cursors to do it the traditional way.
Java for stored procs? Knock yourself out. I'd stick with PL/SQL unless you have to use/write Java SPs.
I haven't checked for sure, but I don't think Oracle supports full outer joins, so you have to union a right outer join and a left outer join:
instead of:
select a.field1, b.field2 from table_a a FULL OUTER JOIN table_b b
you have to do:
select a.field1, b.field2 from table_a a, table_b b where a.id = b.id (+) UNION select a.field1, b.field2 from table_a a, table_b b where a.id (+) = b.id
Oh... and in oracle, the empty string is equivalent to NULL...
select decode(NULL, 'is not null', 'is null') from dual union select decode('', 'is not null', 'is null') from dual...should return you two records that say, "is null"
100 folks becomes a company of 5000 folks distributed
Yes, because chances are the successful 100-FTE company will get absorbed by a 3000-5000 FTE company, not grow into that level, and the bigger company will just absorb or migrate.
But if the 100-FTE company does grow, it's not going to happen immediately. If it took 15 months to get to 100 FTE, it'll take 14x50 months to get to 5000, at least.
Besides, "what will happen if the IT Dept gets hit by a bus" matters a lot less than "will our product suck?" or "will be sued for something?".
Unless just starting out, chances are, things will keep rolling for awhile on their own, even if the entire IT dept suffers simultaneous cerebral hemorrhages one night. Which means, the company will get to throw good consultant $$$ at it until they come up with a new plan.
IT is important to a company, but it's not as important as AP/AR...
How many companies out there are sole proprieterships? What about LLCs, where one of the people happens to have/bring in about 80% of the billables.
Just about every "owner" or "CEO" fits the "business revolves around one person". Apple now w/o SteveJ? Yeah.
Besides. The real person your business revolves around is your bookkeeping service and accountant, because you probably don't have time to deal with the former, and you probably could maybe balance your personal checkbook to save your life, but that's it (unless you happen to also be an accountant).
Is that server you bought last week depreciable as a capital asset or a consumable? Is that investment property you bought to "expand to in a few years" depreciable? Can you Sched 167 your Ferrari this year?
Because come IRS audit time, your accountant will make you or break you.
...almost never. All those cameras are centrally and manually controlled (pan, tilt, zoom, focus, etc), not by built-in autofocus like your digital camera, etc. Plus, in a casino, do you realize that at any given spot on the gaming floor, there are probably multiple cameras that can zoom in on you, at different angles?
Slashdot Mirror
Do be aware that tools like Access and php, and ASP and python and java... encourage you to do too much client-side. It's important to consider using in-database stored procedures and (often updateable) views where appropriate for efficiency and clean structure. You can then use an Access-like app to provide a user-interface to that higher level database interface, instead of just poking around in the raw tables.
Wow. This really should get an "application developer knows best" vs "DBA knows best" flamefest.
Yes, but H is 10^-9 magnitude less than E or something like that. I don't want to find my physics or electromagnetics books to find out for sure.
There is no effort made really to shield MRIs, as it is not very practical. They're just kept far away from everything else that might be affected by them. Industrial MRIs are quite unshielded, too, except by distance. It's just easier to keep magnetically sensitive materials out of the area.
When I worked at UCSD, I used to walk by the NMRI lab in Urey Hall outside. I did it once with a paper clip on a string, and it did get pulled out a bit when the MRI coil was energized...
You don't wear a lead apron when you get an MRI, and your body part is inches away from a rather strong magnetic field. The health risks from MRIs are from the materials used as contrast agents, as they can invoke allergic reactions.
Yet you wear that lead apron at the dentist's office when you're getting dental x-rays.
Under most local laws in the US, any part of a tree that crosses the fence/propery line is legally the property of that propery owner. It doesn't matter that the trunk of the tree happens to be owned by the other property owner.
Are you sure about this? I did some looking on nolo.com about this, and, well...it's not clear. If a branch of a tree I own falls off and damages the neighbor's property, it's my responsibility (reasonable). If the neighbor decides he doesn't like the branches, and prunes them off, it's his bad, especially if the pruning harms the tree.
If I park my car on the neighbor's lawn, he's perfectly allowed to complain, call the cops, etc., but not key in a new racing stripe.
Well, let's argue "piracy". Technically, piracy is theft on the open seas. In fact, it is still rather common in the various shipping lanes in SE Asia. Cargo ship/boat is accosted by a group of pirates, who then take the cargo (and possibly kill that boat's crew), and it probably gets fenced on the black market or folded into legitimate trade elsewhere.
I think the "piracy" angle has been pursued because it's easy enough to analogize the Internet to the Open Seas, but it's not really accurate. If I was somehow pirating music, I'd think that I've actually stolen a load of CDs off of a ship, truck, etc., something that actually involves deprivation of property.
The end result of p2p is loss of sale or opportunity. If that's bad, then why are not negative music and movie reviews, that can also act to reduce the opportunity for a given commercial work?
The RIAA is really acting to preserve a given business model. I suppose that's their choice. Too bad they're not really looking into other opportunities to make $$$.
...which is what all sane parents should do. I know I will. Let them sit the night in jail before paying their bail the next morning.
So you go to the library instead and do it.
Again, is it now still "theft"?
Or, you go to a friend's house. Is it theft now? Well, I'd argue that there is ambiguity there due to the First Sale doctrine. Certainly, if you sold it to your friend (ooops, I kept my ripped tracks from it), the RIAA does not get any $$$ from that sale. This has already been established in lawsuits brought against music resellers (i.e., The Wherehouse, et al) that the RIAA lost.
Again, why all this concern about what casual copyright violations may bring about compared to actual piracy (i.e., CD duplication houses continuing to press CDs after fulfilling their run of authorized versions, and then allowing those extras to be sold...).
The big $$$ being lost are not to you and me and everyone else P2P'ing, but to the groups that are into the large-scale piracy.
It was, of course, far easier for the cops, etc., to go after bars selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition than it was to identify the larger producers of the illicit alcohol. A few producers and distributors of the stuff were caught, but not enough to put a crimp in the business. Sounds a lot like the illegal drug trade in the US, too. Hammer the users and street pushers, yet the distributors and producers pretty much go along, worrying more about their rivals than the long arm of the law.
But, like illegal aliens, there is too much $$$ on both sides of the issue, that nothing will really come about to actually stop it.
There is no way that Mexico can really afford for the $$$ that get sent back down to the US from emigres (legal and illegal). There is no way that those who use illegal immigrant labor, knowingly or unknowingly, will really let the US try to stop the flow, because probably more than one of the HNICs have nice houses, with nice lawns and landscaping, good maids and nannies, have a good, cheap car mechanic shop, etc., that will get priced out or go out of business if they do let such efforts be acted out in a serious fashion.
Then, since several of them are elected (or dependent upon the graces of elected officials to keep them employed), if the demographics of areas like SoCal, Arizona, NMex and Texas continue, parts of the US will kind of be in the situation that Israel was in with Gaza and West Bank. What if all those illegals demand a right to vote, and what if they get it? Time to cut losses before the whole country is "infected" and the real Israelis have their democratic processes used to literally vote ALL of them out...
I read about a case in Oklahoma where they were going to try two boys who were 7 and 9 as adults (in a murder case).
Good.
The helical antennae circularly polarize their beams.
Anybody know what's on the new civilian channel?
New episodes of "Lost".
"Light rail construction (which is not elevated) has been ongoing for years now, but most of the costs associated with it have to do with tunneling."
Only if you decide to tunnel. No reason you can't put it on the surface.
Uh...have you been to Seattle? How would you propose to get Light Rail across Lake Union, or even to West Seattle?
I don't think the voters of Seattle would put up with traffic changes like Portlanders did with MAX.
They mostly train them to identify and tag mines and underwater IEDs.
The most critical part about retrieving them is not that they *could* "attack" divers with their head-mounted laser beams (where are those sharks when you need them), but that they've been captive-raised all their lives, much like the dolphins at the SeaWorld parks.
4: American company hires "local" employee
Americans want to get paid too much, want too many frivolous benefits like health insurance with low copay, 401K with nice employer match, etc. It is usually not the wages that hurt American employees, it's how management feels about benefits. Most people on slashdot have never worked for a company where they start out part-time, with this Golden Ring of working full-time, only to finally toil long enough to make it to full-time, and then REALLY get treated like a piece of shit by the company and management... Similar to employees in many companies that have some benefits kick in once employee is working 30 hrs or more per week.
It's cheaper for the company to have 6 dipsticks working 20 hrs/week just at wage than it is to have 2 salaried employees (and their benefits) doing the equivalent work... Company can more or less control wages, but it cannot control health care costs.
5: Foreign company hires American employee to work in the foreign company.
My bet is that 5 just doesn't happen all that much. Can't have "Americans" taking away jobs from the citizens...
Besides, if you really want to feel like you're being played for a fool, go get an out-of-state hunting or fishing license, especially in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado or Idaho...
Re: resident vs non-resident enrollments...
Supply and demand, simple as that. Resident tuition is also generally remarkably lower than non-resident tuition. Most legislatures demand that the state's colleges charge "full price" tuition to non-residents. Because resident tuition is cheap, cost of living has a higher probability of being cheap, more in-state students apply for limited supply of enrollment slots. Because $$$ then isn't a limiting factor, schools have no choice but to make resident enrollment standards higher. Non-resident applicants have $$$ as a main limiting factor, not enrollment slots, so, to encourage more non-resident students (and, their "full tuition" tuitions...), enrollment standards are lower. Esecially for (wealthy) foreign students.
Politics has a hand in it as well. It looks good for legislators and governors to be able to brag to their colleagues (and/or fend off the PC Police) that they have a "diverse and broad" student population. Fill in your favorite minority groups.
"His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet threatens democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon often known by the term cyberbalkanization."
You mean that it'll be even more powerful than PACs, opinion groups, churches and synods, etc. that seek to be the squeekiest wheel or most righteous saints come election time?
Are you sure? Movie critics have not really thrown society over the cliff or dissolved the cohesion like a giant bottle of Billy May's newest wonder solvent. Many of us probably have a couple of movie or book critics we might pay particular attention to, and if they give a movie or book a good review, we'd be more likely to see the movie or buy the book...
And then there's NPR, Top-40 & New Country radio stations. Lots of groupies with those, yet even in the stark commercial desert that is Clear Channel/Infinity Broadcasting, other formats still work, too.
For every "affinity buyer", there is a non-null set of people who exist that will do just the opposite, more or less, on purpose or with intent. People who buy at Wal-Mart as much as possible vs those who go out of their way to NEVER shop at Wal-Mart (or Nordstroms, Suxs 5th Avenue, Whole Paycheck, etc).
Until Wal-Mart decides it can actually do high-end sales with the volume advantages it has with its cheap-at-all-costs super stores, then I think the commerical world is still probably safe.
...and what was BellSouth's profits over the last 5 years?
Needless to say, they'll probably also get some sort of tax credits from the fed and state govments, and of course if they have to borrow, they have excellent cash flow and will get great credit lines...
Allowing DSL service without phone service at the same rate will cost the company money because the costs of the line are not recovered.
This is pretty much a red herring.
How many new, physical phone lines are set up each day, vs the number of physical lines already established?
All of the equipment, in most cases, is recovered in 2-4 years (it's certainly depreciated within 5 or 7). The costs of an actual phone line installation are spread out over the number of circuits per line. Which is why fiber is so bitchin' compared to copper. One splice for as many curcuits go down the fiber instead of 24x4, for a typical copper line. Of course, when it goes fibercopper, demuxing the fiber to copper invokes all those splices/junctions, it is the only place it has to be done. And once they're set up, they're left alone.
The ILEC does not come out and rip out the phone line when service is discontinued by a customer. They run a little program on the 7ESS switch that turns off that number.
Just like the cable companies do not bother to disconnect your cable anymore if you stop paying (you will probably still get analog channels...), they just turn off your digital service at the head end.
Live where you do not have natural gas service? You can get it established if you pay to have the line extended to your house. Of course, then all everyone else in your neighborhood has to pay is the connection from the curb to the house... All future owners of your house do not then have to pay the same connect fee, they just get an acct established.
Someone has to eat the initial costs. For the company, the rest is easy money once that initial physical hookup has been made.
subst x: \\server\share
works too.
Does he know the history behind empty strings and NULL's in Oracle?
My theory is it slipped into the system, and it's unfortunately stuck. Talk about legacy code...
Joe Celko's books would be a good place to start ("SQL For Smarties") for expanding your mind regarding SQL.
...should return you two records that say, "is null"
But he writes all his queries using ANSI-standard syntax where possible. Oracle 10g (9.2) just seemed to join the modern ages to support ANSI join syntax as well.
--typical Oracle left outer join syntax:
Select a.name, b.*, c.*
from table_a a, table_b b, table_c c
where a.id = b.id (+) and b.id2 = c.id2 (+)
--ANSI 89 left outer join syntax:
Select a.name, b.*
from table_a a
LEFT OUTER JOIN table_b b (
LEFT OUTER JOIN table_c c on b.id2 = c.id2)
on a.id = b.id
At least since 9i though it supports the CASE statement, as well as the non-standard (but traditional) DECODE() function.
The hierarchical tree support in Oracle is...well...it's there (I'm not a fan of it).
Some of the newer options for doing running sums, etc. since 9i are quite useful, and beat writing a bunch of subqueries or using cursors to do it the traditional way.
Java for stored procs? Knock yourself out. I'd stick with PL/SQL unless you have to use/write Java SPs.
I haven't checked for sure, but I don't think Oracle supports full outer joins, so you have to union a right outer join and a left outer join:
instead of:
select a.field1, b.field2
from table_a a FULL OUTER JOIN table_b b
you have to do:
select a.field1, b.field2
from table_a a, table_b b
where a.id = b.id (+)
UNION
select a.field1, b.field2
from table_a a, table_b b
where a.id (+) = b.id
Oh... and in oracle, the empty string is equivalent to NULL...
select decode(NULL, 'is not null', 'is null')
from dual
union
select decode('', 'is not null', 'is null')
from dual
100 folks becomes a company of 5000 folks distributed
Yes, because chances are the successful 100-FTE company will get absorbed by a 3000-5000 FTE company, not grow into that level, and the bigger company will just absorb or migrate.
But if the 100-FTE company does grow, it's not going to happen immediately. If it took 15 months to get to 100 FTE, it'll take 14x50 months to get to 5000, at least.
Besides, "what will happen if the IT Dept gets hit by a bus" matters a lot less than "will our product suck?" or "will be sued for something?".
Unless just starting out, chances are, things will keep rolling for awhile on their own, even if the entire IT dept suffers simultaneous cerebral hemorrhages one night. Which means, the company will get to throw good consultant $$$ at it until they come up with a new plan.
IT is important to a company, but it's not as important as AP/AR...
Really?
How many companies out there are sole proprieterships? What about LLCs, where one of the people happens to have/bring in about 80% of the billables.
Just about every "owner" or "CEO" fits the "business revolves around one person". Apple now w/o SteveJ? Yeah.
Besides. The real person your business revolves around is your bookkeeping service and accountant, because you probably don't have time to deal with the former, and you probably could maybe balance your personal checkbook to save your life, but that's it (unless you happen to also be an accountant).
Is that server you bought last week depreciable as a capital asset or a consumable? Is that investment property you bought to "expand to in a few years" depreciable? Can you Sched 167 your Ferrari this year?
Because come IRS audit time, your accountant will make you or break you.
From a user perspective, GroupWise *SUCKS*.
Some of the other Novell stuff isn't bad, though.
...almost never. All those cameras are centrally and manually controlled (pan, tilt, zoom, focus, etc), not by built-in autofocus like your digital camera, etc. Plus, in a casino, do you realize that at any given spot on the gaming floor, there are probably multiple cameras that can zoom in on you, at different angles?