Heh. That might work in some scenarios... However, the advantage of the laptop that's not to be overlooked: you can bill it back to the client rather painlessly most of the time. The satellite uplink cost would be a lot harder to justify. You often pay for the expertise of one or two people in a given location, which doesn't justify that type of cost. It'd be fun to play with one if I could justify it though.:-)
Yes, but you don't need fast, random access to it, so tape drives do the job quite well in just about all cases. If they can't, well, that's what networks are for... Linking different computers, each holding lots and lots of data.
Mostly agreed. Except that there are instances when you need "fast radom access," as you put it, when you can't access it over the network; These places exit. Think Courtroom. Think other company's office that might not like an outsider's laptop on their network picking up IPs. Think the home of a witness you need to depose. Think of most restaurants where lots of business gets conducted over lunch.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm taking about relational databases. Who do you think does the relating?
Document review is a human process. The software is a tool that facilitates it, making it possible to leverage the data at your disposal on a scale not possible with indivual, unlinked human minds. People have breakthroughs that could be critical when they are not near a network. Being able to pull together resources quickly (which leaves out tape), while on the move, like when you're on a plane, could make a huge difference.
Setting up networks that provide this same level of performance is not always possible. Some places have limited, high-latency bandwith options making a localized, intermittantly networked solution the most appealing. I (and the people I work for) would like to have a consistently high-speed, stable, low-latency network everywhere our clients and co-counsel are, but that is simply not reality.
Read my post closer. Not all clients have a lot of money or resources. I like it when FTP/SCP/RSYNC are faster than the way I outlined in my post, and use them when that is the case. But often, they are not, and not for tech reasons necessarily.
This is an instance of using judgement to determine what is The Right Tool for the Job.
As for using PNG, sure, that'd be fine too, but right now, the industry doesn't make the use of it that they could. I'd say that is just a matter of time. The tiff thing is what we're stuck with because of their ubiquity and accessability; they also have historical presence in the industry. If you've ever been around the legal biz, one of the first things you'll notice is they are slower than most to embrace change. That's why we end up making images to manage so much paper. It's a paper-intensive profession. More so than most. I encourage change to these "rules" where I see a way it will be accepted, but you have to play within the framework you're alotted.
If you don't, people who depend on you will turn the volume down on you and find someone else.
Believe me, I think it's extremely important to be aware of what's out there and I strive to be ready when someone throws something cutting edge at me (more than many of the lumps who call themselves IT professionals). You never know if the next client will dump a load of PNG files from the website they got sued over in your lap in my business. Who knows? It could be you. When your attorney has to respond to a subpoena on your behalf, do you want his IT guy telling him he can't turn over the materials because you couldn't FTP them to him?
Live in the real world, friend. Dream and prepare for the future. It'll be here all too soon.
You know, I would, but they want me to type in some information, and to force me to accept a cookies from them, so I'll just stay away from them, as I do with the NY Times.
Lie and delete the cookie, like everyone else does. Or live in ignorance. Your choice.
Favorite quote from the article: "Not many of us know what to do with 1,000 20-terabyte drives--yet, that is what we have to design for in the next five to ten years."
Heh. I do, so get designing. The various law firms reviewing documents from cases like Enron (criminal , bankruptcy, and civil procedings), Microsoft's antitrust suit, the SCO v. IBM, etc. etc. need that space to store all the materials from their case work. Lots of paper from all those places get turned into electronic images managed by very large custom databases.
Guess how many Group IV tiffs and pdfs some of these become. Answer: millions. In five or ten years, cases such as these will likely consist of collections of data that large. Terabytes of data for cases such as these are not uncommon now. Enron could get this big by itself by then. It's well on its way to becomming one of the largest cases of all time. Check this out. Whoa.
Word up, my brotha. I can't count how many times our FTP server has been hacked. The authorities are a lot more reliable at busting people for stealing from FEDEX or UPS than they are for script kiddies messing up your server. The result is often the same: you lose your data until you can restore it.
Only thing is, seems like the FTP gets messed with a whole lot more often. The major shipping carriers insure you equipment and data too.
I work in a AmLaw top 100 law firm in DC. We do a lot of complex litigation work. We use software such as Concordance, Ringtail, and Litgator's Notebook (runs on Lotus Notes) to manage collections of documents. The documents are scanned to group IV tiff; the meta data and OCR text that is extracted from the documents at scan time is loaded into another database that overlays the images.
These tiff file collections run into the millions.
Of course the point of doing this is to facilitate collaboration on document review between us, our clients and our co-counsel. These people are often 1000s of miles apart, and nearly as often have crap for IT resources (equipment and personnel).
There are ways of accessing this stuff over the internet securely but it's never quite the same as having the real version of the software. This form of access often proves to be impractical for the lawyers who travel alot depending on the type of access they can get wherever they end up.
So what often happens is, we end up dumping the entire collection on a laptop with a big hard drive or a bigger firewire or USB drive, so they can work without access to the internet and then replicate changes when they can get the laptop back on ethernet or a POTS line.
Collections of images and databases (not to mention the various Power Point presentations and word processing files) can very easily run over 50GB. Moving this across the LAN, over my PC BUS to another hard drive and then FEDEXing it is certainly faster than doing the same transfer using FTP or SCP. Not to mention, that way I can install the software (properly) and test the whole setup before I send it off. The extra wear and tear I save on my psyche from NOT having to explain how to install all of the software, point it to the image collections, and deal with equipment I have no control over while being screamed at by extreme Type A attorneys going to trial makes that laptop look like a pretty good investment.
These are good if you have someone on the other end of your FEDEX run who know how to open the case on a PC and install a HD themselves. I can setup one machine with everything, image the hard drive, make copies on other drives and drop them into FEDEX pouches as fast as I can make 'em. I can't think of a faster way to move a few 100 GBs of stuff to a half dozen places inside of a day. If someone has ideas, I'm all ears.
Some of the switchers in my corporate LAN haven't been "identified." 1200 other people can obscure one or two OSX laptops if your admins don't care/don't monitor properly
I'm a white guy living in Prince George's county and can verify that this is so completely untrue. Lusers at my office have no trouble reaching me when I'm on call. I guess Verizon can tell I'm white when people call my phone.
all those highschool principals back in the 80s could have just pushed out some new wallpaper to all those Spuds McKenzie/Big Johnson tee shirts. So many hours of detention, pages of disciplinary notes, etc. saved.
Re:Sacrifice without War
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
Guess none of their war servers were running IIS. Some script-kiddie could have put a stop to it before it got out of hand like that.
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Heh. That might work in some scenarios... However, the advantage of the laptop that's not to be overlooked: you can bill it back to the client rather painlessly most of the time. The satellite uplink cost would be a lot harder to justify. You often pay for the expertise of one or two people in a given location, which doesn't justify that type of cost. It'd be fun to play with one if I could justify it though. :-)
Mostly agreed. Except that there are instances when you need "fast radom access," as you put it, when you can't access it over the network; These places exit. Think Courtroom. Think other company's office that might not like an outsider's laptop on their network picking up IPs. Think the home of a witness you need to depose. Think of most restaurants where lots of business gets conducted over lunch.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm taking about relational databases. Who do you think does the relating?Document review is a human process. The software is a tool that facilitates it, making it possible to leverage the data at your disposal on a scale not possible with indivual, unlinked human minds. People have breakthroughs that could be critical when they are not near a network. Being able to pull together resources quickly (which leaves out tape), while on the move, like when you're on a plane, could make a huge difference.
Setting up networks that provide this same level of performance is not always possible. Some places have limited, high-latency bandwith options making a localized, intermittantly networked solution the most appealing. I (and the people I work for) would like to have a consistently high-speed, stable, low-latency network everywhere our clients and co-counsel are, but that is simply not reality.
Read my post closer. Not all clients have a lot of money or resources. I like it when FTP/SCP/RSYNC are faster than the way I outlined in my post, and use them when that is the case. But often, they are not, and not for tech reasons necessarily.
This is an instance of using judgement to determine what is The Right Tool for the Job.
As for using PNG, sure, that'd be fine too, but right now, the industry doesn't make the use of it that they could. I'd say that is just a matter of time. The tiff thing is what we're stuck with because of their ubiquity and accessability; they also have historical presence in the industry. If you've ever been around the legal biz, one of the first things you'll notice is they are slower than most to embrace change. That's why we end up making images to manage so much paper. It's a paper-intensive profession. More so than most. I encourage change to these "rules" where I see a way it will be accepted, but you have to play within the framework you're alotted.
If you don't, people who depend on you will turn the volume down on you and find someone else.
Believe me, I think it's extremely important to be aware of what's out there and I strive to be ready when someone throws something cutting edge at me (more than many of the lumps who call themselves IT professionals). You never know if the next client will dump a load of PNG files from the website they got sued over in your lap in my business. Who knows? It could be you. When your attorney has to respond to a subpoena on your behalf, do you want his IT guy telling him he can't turn over the materials because you couldn't FTP them to him?
Live in the real world, friend. Dream and prepare for the future. It'll be here all too soon.
Lie and delete the cookie, like everyone else does. Or live in ignorance. Your choice.
Favorite quote from the article: "Not many of us know what to do with 1,000 20-terabyte drives--yet, that is what we have to design for in the next five to ten years."
Heh. I do, so get designing. The various law firms reviewing documents from cases like Enron (criminal , bankruptcy, and civil procedings), Microsoft's antitrust suit, the SCO v. IBM, etc. etc. need that space to store all the materials from their case work. Lots of paper from all those places get turned into electronic images managed by very large custom databases.
Guess how many Group IV tiffs and pdfs some of these become. Answer: millions. In five or ten years, cases such as these will likely consist of collections of data that large. Terabytes of data for cases such as these are not uncommon now. Enron could get this big by itself by then. It's well on its way to becomming one of the largest cases of all time. Check this out. Whoa.
Word up, my brotha. I can't count how many times our FTP server has been hacked. The authorities are a lot more reliable at busting people for stealing from FEDEX or UPS than they are for script kiddies messing up your server. The result is often the same: you lose your data until you can restore it.
Only thing is, seems like the FTP gets messed with a whole lot more often. The major shipping carriers insure you equipment and data too.
I work in a AmLaw top 100 law firm in DC. We do a lot of complex litigation work. We use software such as Concordance, Ringtail, and Litgator's Notebook (runs on Lotus Notes) to manage collections of documents. The documents are scanned to group IV tiff; the meta data and OCR text that is extracted from the documents at scan time is loaded into another database that overlays the images.
These tiff file collections run into the millions.
Of course the point of doing this is to facilitate collaboration on document review between us, our clients and our co-counsel. These people are often 1000s of miles apart, and nearly as often have crap for IT resources (equipment and personnel).There are ways of accessing this stuff over the internet securely but it's never quite the same as having the real version of the software. This form of access often proves to be impractical for the lawyers who travel alot depending on the type of access they can get wherever they end up.
So what often happens is, we end up dumping the entire collection on a laptop with a big hard drive or a bigger firewire or USB drive, so they can work without access to the internet and then replicate changes when they can get the laptop back on ethernet or a POTS line.
Collections of images and databases (not to mention the various Power Point presentations and word processing files) can very easily run over 50GB. Moving this across the LAN, over my PC BUS to another hard drive and then FEDEXing it is certainly faster than doing the same transfer using FTP or SCP. Not to mention, that way I can install the software (properly) and test the whole setup before I send it off. The extra wear and tear I save on my psyche from NOT having to explain how to install all of the software, point it to the image collections, and deal with equipment I have no control over while being screamed at by extreme Type A attorneys going to trial makes that laptop look like a pretty good investment.
These are good if you have someone on the other end of your FEDEX run who know how to open the case on a PC and install a HD themselves. I can setup one machine with everything, image the hard drive, make copies on other drives and drop them into FEDEX pouches as fast as I can make 'em. I can't think of a faster way to move a few 100 GBs of stuff to a half dozen places inside of a day. If someone has ideas, I'm all ears.
Some of the switchers in my corporate LAN haven't been "identified." 1200 other people can obscure one or two OSX laptops if your admins don't care/don't monitor properly
I'm a white guy living in Prince George's county and can verify that this is so completely untrue. Lusers at my office have no trouble reaching me when I'm on call. I guess Verizon can tell I'm white when people call my phone.
all those highschool principals back in the 80s could have just pushed out some new wallpaper to all those Spuds McKenzie/Big Johnson tee shirts. So many hours of detention, pages of disciplinary notes, etc. saved.
Guess none of their war servers were running IIS. Some script-kiddie could have put a stop to it before it got out of hand like that.
What next, are they going to sell their collected account info to telemarketers so they can call to sell you concert tix?
"Hello, I see you just downloaded..."
This deserves to die a horrible, untimely death.