My wife, having retiredfrom her longtime employment in the local community college wanted a new computer. (We have several in the house, of course, but she reasonably wanted one devoted strictly to her use.)
After carefully reviewing options for a modern laptop — and after Fry’s unconscionably refused to deliver a Sony they had agreed to sell us — went to the local Office Depot where we selected a Compaq laptop with a slowish (1.73 GHz) dual core processor, 2 Gigabytes of RAM, a nice looking screen, Wifi, built in Web Cam and about everything else we wanted except for built in BlueTooth. (So we’ll buy a dongle and plug it in to one of the three USB ports.) The machine had only one basic flaw: it came with Vista Home Premium with Service Pack I and the store wouldn’t arrange for a downgrade to XP.
The whole thing cost about $500 which seems to be a reasonable base price for a base laptop these days. You can pay lots more for faster and more powerful, but we thought the machine reasonable for e-mail, surfing, word processing, digital pictures, DVD burning and playing and so forth. In fact, we’ve been writing about a $500 price point for basic computing for many years. The only difference is that a modern $500 computer can do a lot more than a 90s $500 computer, and if you buy it in Euros, it costs even less.
We had the machine for less than a week when the WiFi just stopped working. No Internet. I could have plugged in a wired connection to the Internet, but that would have been too much effort. Not that it was fun to spend literally hours on the phone with HP technical support, but after a lot of testing and trying various approaches, the Tech Support person gave up and suggested the final remedy: re-install Vista.
Reinstalling the Operating System is a pain, not because the procedure is complex or time consuming, but because the process brings your computer back to the state in which you bought it. Gone are all the changes you’ve made. Gone is the customization of existing software. Gone is the new software you’ve installed. Gone are the documents you’ve saved to the hard drive, including your Outlook contacts, events and e-mail, the digital pictures of your grandchildren, the MP3s you downloaded from iTunes, the eBooks from Fictionwise and the audio books from audible.com.
You can back up your documents (including the Outlook PST file) to your backup hardrive, and a lot of the folks who sold you content will let you download it again, free of charge. (And digital rights management may prevent you from transferring some locked files back to your “new” drive.) So you prbably won’t lose much, but it is an aggravation.
But as this computer was almost brand new, there was little material to back up, and we could easily download Open Office and Firefox again, so we agreed. The huge hard drive — 250 Gigabyte — included a backup partition containing all that was necessary, so we just pressed (figuratively) the backup button, let the machine run, and went to dinner. When we came back, a new machine, and WiFi worked fine.
What was wrong? I can only assume there was a Vista problem.
And things were fine for a couple of weeks, until suddenly FireFox wouldn’t run because of a corrupted file.
> “What did you do dear?”
<”Nothing”
> “Well reboot and it will work.”
< “I did that. Still doesn’t work.”
> “OK! I’ll get to it”
Should be easy. Right? Should be, but this was Vista. Wherein hangs another tale.
Announcing the Launch of earlyCASE ~ A FREE Early Case
Assessment Software Now Available for Legal Professionals
earlyCASE software sets new standard for early analysis and culling of
documents, data and metadata for eDiscovery
Ah! Electronic Discovery Analysis: let’s read more:
ATLANTA, GA (August 11, 2008) – Atlanta-based earlyCASE, an innovator in advanced early case assessment for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and eDiscovery, today announced the launch of its free software available for download from www.earlycase.com . earlyCASE is a web-based application which runs on your local PC and analyzes the ESI that your computer can access without the data ever leaving your computer or network.
Runs on your local computer, and it is FREE! Sounds Interesting.
earlyCASE allows you to see and understand all of your data before it is processed for discovery. It supports multiple languages, extracts metadata, generates hash values, detects duplicates and creates a local inventory database of documents and emails. earlyCASE allows users to make informed discovery decisions and easily cut down the size of data sets through filter and culling rules before going into the discovery process and review.
Sounds like a preprocessor of some sort. Why review all of your data if you can only tag the relevant stuff?
Companies spend millions of dollars annually on the review and analysis eDiscovery phases. By assessing data early and reducing the sets of data going to review, the cost of processing and the time to review can be drastically reduced in the overall eDiscovery lifecycle.
“We are excited to introduce earlyCASE,” said Tom Strack, CEO of earlyCASE. “earlyCASE brings a real understanding to the eDiscovery process at the earliest moment, the lowest cost, and at an unprecedented speed, giving clients a more realistic view into what data they have at stake. With data storage continuing to increase in size, it is common to have terabytes of information to process and review. earlyCASE can analyze that data and decrease the data sets that need to be reviewed, reducing not only eDiscovery budgets, but managing their legal risk. earlyCASE can process the data without it ever leaving where it is stored, using your own people and equipment. “
And you — or at least the client, hopefully together with its lawyers — can do it. On Site. And there is a free version.
earlyCASE is offered in two versions, a Basic (FREE) version and a Professional version for a small flat rate charge, regardless of the amount of data you analyze. The Basic version offers 15 high quality eDiscovery reports, one which estimates your processing and review budget while providing an immediate understanding of your data. Through the Professional version, a 26(f) report for meet and confer is available to help clients reduce legal risk exposure by offering a necessary view of the legal case information—custodians, context, third parties, and more. earlyCASE provides you the tools and results to best understand, define and memorialize the ESI going into the meet and confer. Duplicate document detection and container processing (zip, rar, arc) are the primary reasons most people use the Professional version of earlyCASE.
ah! There is a free version with, but it won’t read files within standard archives, and it won’t provide attachment MetaData and other information you probably will want. The Web site says the professional version costs $198 per run , with unlimited data, which doesn’t sounds terribly expensive. The company representative tells me that all of the processing is done locally, and you end up with a local Microsoft Access database to use as much as you want.
For more info if you want to do some pre-analysis analysis, surf over to : www.earlycase.com
But before you use it, you’ll also want to check out this page on the earlyCASE Web site, which tells you one way the company can provide all that stuff free of charge — or how you can become an advertiser and obtain (presumably little more than contact) information about who’s using the program and how much data was processed. Nice of them, actually, to place the stuff where potential users can see it.
There’s also a link to a page for Level 9 Corporation, which apparently is the real name of the company, and which has a set of Terms and Conditions of Use buried under a link for the L9 site’s "Privacy Policy ". Probably just misnamed, as the "agreement" is relatively innocuous, as long as you don’t mind litigating in Georgia. (To be clear, and to make sure we are not getting involved with the Russians, that is "State of Georgia, United States of America". )
Level 9 is a great "gee, I’ve heard of that company before" name, that has been involved, over the years, with books, short stories, a tv show, computer games (all tending towards techy, hacking , science fiction sort of stuff) over the years. This Level 9 isn’t connected with the other stuff, of course, but if you think you’ve heard of the company before, years ago, that’s why.
askSam has been around a long while, and is a useful way to store information. The company has been showing off, for years, by tossing all sorts of PD literature and other information into its own program, You can then search by using a purchased version of the product, or a free “viewer”. From Shakespeare to confirmation hearings to US Budgets to transcripts of Presidential Debates, check here. The askSam folks appear to have very eclectic tastes.
But we just loved the headline on the Press Release introducing the new version:
askSam Releases askSam 7 to Organize Information
Accurate, certainly, but doesn’t really tell us a lot. Well…when you read the entire thing it looks a little better.
Perry, FL — askSam Systems is now shipping version 7 of askSam, its popular free-form database software. askSam lets you organize, search, and analyze both structured and unstructured information. askSam can create searchable databases from different types of data, including email, word processing documents, Web pages, PDF files, spreadsheets, and other databases.
askSam 7 offers a completely new way for askSam users to organize and navigate their information. Dynamic Folder View lets you place your information in folders and sub-folders based on field content. So everything is organized, dynamically, as you enter it. Save Word Documents, PDF files and other documents directly into folders, even save Web Pages directly from Internet Explorer. askSam 7 also allows you to drag and drop attachments, such as images or other documents, directly into an askSam database.
In addition, the program — and the Reader? —
[. . .]now connects with all major web search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Windows Live, and more. Highlight a word or phrase and right click to immediately perform a web search directly from askSam. With the askSam Home Page you can now open and search multiple files from one screen. The home page provides immediate access to create a new database, your most used askSam files, common features, and more.
And, as everything else, these days, faster and better.
Also included are faster searching, improved user interface, a tabbed file interface, automatic updates and the ability to narrow your search results by searching only within the results of a search.
I hadn’t realized that askSam didn’t have the ability to search within the “hits”. We use that sort of thing elsewhere, and it is useful.
Pricing begins at $150 and jumps to $400 if you want full text indexing. For more information, to buy, or to download a 30 day free trial, surf over to www.asksam.com
We’ll try to review the new version in the next few weeks.
Jim Puzzanghera in the LA Times reports that the IRS is going after major employers, including the University of California system, for back taxes for being unable to document the personal calls made or received by employees over employer-provided cell phones.
The Internal Revenue Service still considers cellphones to be a pricey fringe benefit and has started enforcing regulations beginning in 1989. That’s when Congress decided that mobile phones should be treated like company cars and other executive perks: Their personal use qualifies as extra compensation.
The law requires employees to keep detailed records of all calls made on their work-issue cellphones, indicating whether they were business or personal. If they don’t, the phone and wireless service are deemed a perk that must be listed as taxable income to the employee.
Most employers were unaware of the rules until the last few years, when the IRS began cracking down and requiring additional taxes to cover the value of the cellphone service provided to employees.
I haven’t heard of any law firms getting tagged for this, but will have to check it out. With all of those Blackberrys out there there must have been someone who hasn’t kept logs. And think of all of the personal e-mails that are received and sent using an employer-supplied Smart Phone. Or do the IRS rules cover only phone calls?
In the meantime it is sort of fun to watch Wall Street on one of the old movie channels, and remember that,k in 1987:
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that actor Michael Douglas carried as he strolled along the beach was roughly the size of a brick and cost $3,995 when introduced three years earlier. A call during peak times cost upward of 50 cents a minute.
And how much did you pay for your first cell phone?
ILLINOIS DEED PROVIDER, INC., has sent me a letter ofering to obtain a copy of the recorded deed to my home and send it to me for only $79.50.
I decided to pass, but I wonder how many innocents send in a check or charge it on plastic.
If you want to pay $79.50 for a copy of the deed to your home, you can check them out here. I wonder if someone could undercut them by charging only $69.50?
Google has been king of the search engines, and more important King of the Click Ads, for a long time now. Two ex Goole Employees and a another search engine expert from IBM and Stanford, have announced a competitor, Cuil (pronounced "cool").
For the full story, read here.
July 28, 2008 (IDG News Service) A former Google Inc. employee and her husband launched a new search engine on Monday called Cuil (pronounced "cool"), aiming to topple Google by indexing more Web pages than the search giant.
Cuil Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif., is led by Anna Patterson , a former leader of Google’s search index, and her husband, Tom Costello, who researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM . The two, president and CEO, respectively, met at Stanford.
Russell Power, the third co-founder of the group, also worked at Google on search indexing, Web rankings and spam detection. He works as vice president of engineering at Cuil.
Why does the world need another search engine?
[The company] said it has indexed 120 billion Web pages and can provide results organized by ideas with complete privacy for users.
(emphasis added)
Other than the privacy concern how is Cuil different?
Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analyzing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.
My first use of the service wasn’t impressive — it couldn’t handle my search because of overloaded Web site — but I’ll keep trying, particularly if I can figure out how to add Cuil to my Firefox Search box.
Give it a try. The URL, of course, is www.cuil.com.
Mark your calendars: LegalTech - Feb. 2 - 5, 2009, New York City!
I’ve written favorably about Skype before, never thinking about whether my conversations can be intercepted.
Silly me!
But Doug Mohney at FierceVoIP isn’t as silly:
High-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry have said it isn’t a problem to listen into Skype conversations, implying that there is a back door built into the program.
Heise online has talked to a number of parties present at a June 25 meeting between ISP representatives and the Austrian regulator on lawful intercept of IP services who confirm the report. Skype has declined comment on if the software has a back door or if there is a specific key for decrypting data streams.
Rumors have been floating around on Skype selling a special listening device to interested governments and there has long been speculation about a back door to the program. Because Skype’s code and protocols are both proprietary and closed, security experts have long wondered what Skype is capable of and what risks may arise in deploying the software in an enterprise environment.
Austrian officials have demanded that ISP allow the interior ministry to install network bridges and Linux servers in their network centers to copy and filter data traffic. If they don’t, officials will work to enforce more expensive European ETSI lawful intercept standards.
Read the article from Heise-Online, here.
Don’t you feel safer, now?
If you’re involved in “legal staffing” — which, I guess, includes any lawyer who might be looking to better the current situation as well as large firm recruiting partners — the Cowen Group has added a blog to its already informative Web site, at www.cowengroup.com.
The Cowen Group (www.cowengroup.com), a leading search firm specializing in the legal technology market, today announces the launch of an online blog, www.opportunityknocksblog.com, as a place for sharing thoughts, ideas and hot topics facing the legal staffing industry today.
“This blog provides experts in the industry with a place to learn and voice what is happening with the staffing in the legal technology market,” stated David Cowen. “It gives a voice to the issues that this industry is facing. There is much growth happening and it is important for the law firms and corporations to have a solid understanding of the talent that is needed to bring them to the next level. I am hoping this forum provides this for both hiring managers and job seekers.”
The company has also updated their Web site which can be found at www.cowengroup.com. Their site offers valuable information and posts open positions for the legal technology job market.
This sounds like a new product idea for our brave new global marketplace
(AMSTERDAM, July 15, 2008) ? Kluwer Law International has launched Kluwer Merger Check (www.kluwermergercheck.com), a unique new online tool edited by Sarah Beeston of Van Doorne N.V. Kluwer Law International is part of the Wolters Kluwer Law & Business group, a leading provider of research products and software solutions in key legal and compliance specialty areas (www.kluwerlaw.com). Kluwer Merger Check allows users to identify jurisdictions in which a proposed transaction (merger, acquisition or full-function joint venture) is subject to a notification obligation under national or supra-national concentration control regimes. Users are led step-by-step through a clear and concise set of questions and answers ? enabling them to identify the notification and filing requirements that relate to their transaction.
?I welcome the arrival of Kluwer Merger Check which should help law firms and companies clarify jurisdictional issues relating to mergers and acquisitions. It seems to be easy to use, informative and accurate,? said Philip Lowe, Director General, DG Competition of the European Commission.
Jurisdictions Covered Kluwer Merger Check covers the following jurisdictions: European Union, EFTA, Austria , Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. About the Editors and Contributors
The editor, Sarah Beeston, leads the European and Competition Law Group of Van Doorne in Amsterdam. The co-editor, Marnix de Mej, is an associate in Van Doorne?s European and Competition Law Group. Contributors to Kluwer Merger Check include: Raoul Hoffer, Binder Gr?sswang, Vienna; Koen Platteau, Loyens & Loeff, Brussels; Peter Petrov, Borislav Boyanov & Co, Sofia;Andreas Thoma, George L. Savvides & Co, Limasse; Jiri Nemec, Brzobahat? Broz & Honsa, Prague, Jens Munk Plum, Kromann Reumert, Copenhagen; Tanel Kalaus, Raidla Lejins & Norcous, Tallinn;Niko Hukkinen, Roschier, Helsinki; Emanuelle van den Broucke, Salans, Paris; Alexander Birnstiel, N?rr Stiefenhofer Lutz, M ?nchen; Judit Budai, Szecskay, Budapest; Alan McCarthy, A&L Goodbody,Dublin;Livia Magrone Furlotti, Nunziante Magrone, Milan; Dace Silava-Tomsone, Raidla Lejins & Norcous, Irmantas Norkus, Raidla Lejins & Norcous, Vilnius; Nicola Camilleri, Fenech & Fenech Advocates, Valletta; Agnieszka Stefanowicz-Baranska, Salans, Warsaw; Edurne Navarro, Uria Men?ndez, Brussels; Joaquim Caimoto Duarte, Uria Men?ndez, Lisbon; Lucian A Bondoc, Salans, Bucharest; Ondrej Du?ek, Peterka & Partners, Prague; Guenter Bauer, Wolf Theiss, Ljubljana; Edurne Navarro, Uria Men?ndez, Belgium; Stefan Perv?n Lindeborg, Mannheimer Swartling, Brussels, Trond Stang, Schjodt, Oslo; Subrata Bhattacharjee, Heenan Blaikie, Ontario; Steven J Kaiser, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, Washington; Sarah Beeston, Van Doorne N.V., Amsterdam.
For more information or a free two-week trial of Kluwer Merger Check, go to www.kluwermergercheck.com, contact a sales representative at +1 800 638 8437 for the United States and Latin America, +1 800 268 4522 for Canada , (+31) 172 64 1562 for Europe and the rest of the world, or e-mail nysalesorder@aspenpublishers.com for the United States and Latin America, cservice@cch.ca for Canada or sales@kluwerlaw.com for Europe and the rest of the world.
We’ll try to pound on it a bit for a full review, but if anyone has tried this, or may have use for it, please drop me a note.