This! I Asked Slashdot about cloud storage for our small office a while back, and we ended up getting a four-bay QNAP NAS. That's probably overkill for home use, but we've been completely satisfied, and I'm seriously considering a lighter-weight edition for personal use.
It's end-of-life, insofar as it's running Server 2003, out of warranty, and developed a persistent RAID error that has defied diagnosis and cure over about two days and four tech support calls of attempts.
Not exponentially, at least in terms of staff. I don't expect us to top 20 bodies at any time during the useful life of this hardware. But I do expect more and more courts to go the way of the federal system with PACER/ECF. In fact, one of our local jurisdictions is already e-Filing. And we are increasingly able to get, say, squad car video in digital formats. So I do expect our data volume to increase at a rapid clip. We're at ~100 GB now; I don't want anything less than 2 TB of storage room.
We've played with Amicus, which is server based, but not been thrilled. We do a lot of contingent work, so the hourly billing features aren't so important. We also do a lot of travel, so the ability to check the office calendar on a smart phone, or copy a client's file onto a USB stick, is indispensable.
Otherwise, we're too small for Sharepoint and one person handles our books with a local install of QuickBooks.
Call us cousins up here in tornado alley, and on the floodplain of a major river. I am very, very interested in using cloud-based services for offsite backup - the further from our next federal disaster declaration, the better.
That said, I'd rather get a dropbox or carbonite style service but work off of local copies for our hour-to-hour needs. We're on a DSL connection and I have not been delighted by any cloud-based word processor I've tried.
3. Legal documents are written using serious software, not trivial web apps. They have numerous technical requirements and typographical conventions that must be strictly adhered to, in some cases to the point where courts will specify the precise font you must use for all submissions, for example. You don't write this sort of thing in Google Docs, where the concept of a cross-reference has yet to appear and the numbering styles available are one small step past "numbered" and "not numbered".
This!
We have fifteen years worth of investment in carefully styled MS Word documents. Format matters, not just for courts, but for clients who expect a certain level of professionalism and consistency. Telling a client, "Yeah it looks all funny because we decided to start using iGoogleBook's TweetDocs and haven't got it all figured out yet," does not inspire confidence. Also, our best typists are 80 wpm and/or using keyboard shortcuts as a matter of spinal reflex. Cloud document services just aren't there yet.
It'd be fair to say we're underusing ADS. We have it, and we use it for our basic login credentials, but we don't really have any need to segregate our internal users into groups.
We have a very binary approach to data access. Everyone in our small office needs to be able to see all of the client files. No one outside of our office needs to see a blinking thing. So by one-size-fits-all, I mean that our receptionist has access to the same file set that our senior partner does - she has to, if she's going to be able to tell a client when his next court date is.
At this point, I've flushed about two days of what would otherwise be billable hours in trying to nurse our old server back to health, and now I'm here on Sunday trying to figure out where to go next. You're right that the process would have been worse if I hadn't been able to look up and quickly decipher a few key error messages online, but I regard a certain amount of time as the price of doing business.
With Windows, I'd call myself a power user, but I'm no full fledged network admin. I'm not intimidated by a CLI and a bit of a learning curve, but I don't have commands memorized, either. With *nix, I'm only slightly more skilled than a monkey banging on the keyboard at random.
I'll readily concede that I cannot root-proof a NAS device on my own, or anything else for that matter. I'm pretty limited in my ability to troubleshoot a mis-configured firewall, too. But we have to have something, and I'm mainly wondering if a NAS device is inherently more vulnerable or more buggy than a full-on file server.
Clients emphatically do not have access to our file server. Quite a few of them are facing very serious criminal charges, and a certain number might even be guilty. Frequently a client will want to send us files; we accept those by e-mail or physical media. Occasionally a client will ask for a copy of his file; we're pleased to burn that to CD-ROM.
At present, we do not have an FTP server. We'd had a fairly hefty network (for a business of our size, at least) set up back in 2008, but I'm not married to anything so long as we can get access to our files at off hours and on the road.
Agreed that RAID is a must, as is independent backup. At present, we have a tape drive. Sometimes the secretary remembers to run it, sometimes she doesn't. But even when she does, she keeps the tapes on site and close by "so we don't lose them". One small fire, one small flood, one pissant vandal, and *shudder*. I know the cloud backup providers will surrender to subpoena power without a fight. But I also know how to get a protective order on attorney-client privileged files after the subpoena is issued. As I see it, there's no way to keep any kind of record, ever, without risking an outsider discovering it. But if cloud-based backups (especially automated, encrypted cloud-based backups) let us mitigate our disaster risk and cut out the oops-forgot-to-change-the-tape factor, they're the lesser of two evils.
Right now, we're a two attorney firm (me and my boss, who's very game but a little green when it comes to tech), looking to hire a third. We also have a pool of about five support staffers. We all have to be able to access one another's files - I'll write a memo to file, which Boss will review, the he'll dictate a letter for Paralegal A, who asks Paralegal B to help her find the recipient addresses and print off the enclosures, and then back to Paralegal A who scans and files the outgoing letter to our correspondence. The paralegals are high turnover, and prone to downloading scamware. I do what I can viz education and virus removal, but there are limits. We also travel cross-country with a specialty arbitration practice we have, and need to be able to access client files from the road.
As to what our server doesn't do, we POP into our e-mail, use Google Calendar for our scheduling, and have our simple little WordPress website hosted offsite. No real reason to change this at this point.
I'm not OK with former co-workers making backups and carrying them off; no attorney is. But I'm even less OK with trying to parcel out file access on a case-by-case and employee-by-employee basis
California already does defy federal law by allowing medical marijuana by prescription. Technically, all the producers and consumers could be busted on federal charges, state legal or no. But as a practical matter, the Feds rarely if ever prosecute "legal" users.
* IAN Your Lawyer. Do not take legal advice from strangers on the Internet.
I lost a parent as a young teenager. My siblings were tweens. We have lots of peek-a-boo and Saturday morning couch fort memories, and don't get me wrong, we cherish them. But what I really miss now, as a grown woman, was getting to know my father as an adult. He was a great father for us as children, but we were too young and/or too sheltered for really open conversations on those thorny adult issues that most parents dread. The man I've gotten to know second-hand through his peers was a thoughtful, interesting, complicated guy. I wish I could have known him as a peer, too.
Whatever medium you and your wife use (and you should participate too, no parent is an island), don't neglect the shades of gray, and the things you'd only say to someone you trust after a couple of beers.
Ha, I know what you mean about the pictures. The movie's never quite as good as the book, and the illustrator never quite captures it, does she? And TV is better with the subtitles on. But that's how I feel now, as an adult with better reading comprehension than listening comprehension.
Generalizing here, but poor kids in the developing world are not read to on their mothers' laps. Nor are they sprawled on the carpet with the Sunday comics, or even watching Sesame Street. We in the developed world really take for granted all the pre-literacy work it takes to get a first grader reading aloud in class. For small children (and under-served adults) just acquiring literacy, a page full of text is an overwhelming, discouraging sight. Even leaving aside the contextual clues you get from the images themselves, illustrations are valuable just as a way to break the written content into manageable chunks.
I'm all for wiring the developing world. Believe me I'm *exquisitely* sensitive to how expensive per title paper media is in a developing economy. I lived high on the hog by local standards on 300 USD a month while I was there, and did all my reading out of a free library in the capital city, 8 hours away. I couldn't have afforded books and newspapers in my town, even if there had been anyone selling them.
I do mail care packages of children's books back to my old stomping grounds. And I keep an Amazon wishlist of appropriate titles so that friends and family can chip in if they want. And I sent my old laptop down there recently for a school computer lab they want to start.
OLPC and Project Gutenburg and the rest are great steps forward, and perhaps it is small-minded of me to rain on their parade. But the German aid agency (GTZ) that donated my town library's books had the best of intentions, too. It's a little late for me to get heavily involved with any of these organizations, so don't mind me as I wring my hands here and fret:)
And how many of these books are in Spanish? Or French, or Farsi, or what have you? And with pictures?
I used to work in a small, poor town in the developing world. My community had a library with about 10 linear feet of shelving. All the books were in Spanish, but . . .
None of them had pictures.
The "local interest" titles were these impenetrable desk-breakers of 19th century poetry by some aristocrat from the big city.
There were only two or three fiction titles. Dante's Inferno counts, right?
I never once saw a child pick a book off that shelf, not even after an hour's wait while Mom ran an errand. There was nothing there that would appeal to a beginning reader. Hell, given the historical literacy handicaps in the region, those titles would have defeated most of the adults I knew.
If you want to encourage literacy (in the developing world or elsewhere) you've got to start small. Pictures. Rhymes and silly sounds. It takes years to get most kids up to chapter book readiness. Canterbury Tales ain't where you start!
In all seriousness, I can report that I have seen a copy of Windows ME running on an office computer within the last three months. It was in Paraguay. Forty kilometers off the asphalt. In a school.
They mainly used it for a pirated copy of Microsoft Encarta (circa 1990-something), which is a priceless educational resource in a place with no newspapers and no public internet.
And come to it, it was about the only legally licensed copy of Windows in the town. Everybody else was running pirated copies of XP, although some of those had little imitation Vista desktop widgets.
You don't have to stick with the co-op mode forever in Halo 2, either. The multiplayer has a pretty effective handicap function. It's especially useful since the steepest part of the learning curve for most new gamers is mastering orientation and sorting through your options. But if she can kill you in four shots while it takes you seven, it won't matter if she's slower at making decisions and taking shots.
I have some undergrad computer science background, and work for a blind man. I've been trying to help make his computer more accessible to him.
By way of background, he uses his computer (a Windows box on a university network) for e-mail and writing scholarly articles. His screen reading program is JAWS. He would like to use the internet more, but he's frustrated by a combination of factors, some JAWS-related and some related to inaccessible design. The boss is highly intelligent and has been blind from birth. He's very used to other adaptive technologies like Braille or Open Book (a program that uses a scanner to translate print to speech), but he's a complete computing novice.
It's worth noting that the computing problems he has are completely different from those that I would face if I were blinded tomorrow. A lot of his trouble is just related to a poor grasp of fundamentals. It's very difficult to explain the difference between opening a folder on the desktop and browsing the contents of a folder through an application's Open dialog box. Compounding the problem is that the boss is ten years late to the party, and most of his sighted assistants take things like right clicking on objects for granted.
On the other hand, he has some advantages that a recently blinded person would not. The boss is used to taking in huge volumes of information through his ears, and can absorb synthesized speech at a dizzying rate. He also reads and types Braille grade 2, and gets a lot of use from his Braille Lite, which is like a PDA for Braille users, with a special Braille keyboard and a refreshable display of dots. It's great for him, but the chord- and abbreviation-based systems of Grade 2 Braille, take a long time to learn, and wouldn't be useful to your grandmother, who's losing her vision to diabetes.
So here are some of the problems I've encountered in my time with the boss:
Crappy mouse-only interfaces
Memorization. Using JAWS fluently requires that a blind person memorize dozens, if not hundreds, of keystrokes and interface layouts. Sighted users have tool tips and hot key indicators and a hundred other visual affordances to prod us along the path. If JAWS can provide an equivalent, I've yet to find it. Coming back to a program you haven't used in a year pretty much means starting from scratch with learning the interface.
Portability. JAWS is insanely expensive and can't be installed on just any computer on the network. It tethers the user to one station.
Compatability. The university uses Novell Netware in the boss's college. Since the log-in screen would load before JAWS, it's not accessible, which means that the boss can't use Novell. This in turn means that he can't use the public printers, the calendar tools, and other programs that are doled out through those gates. On the plus side, it means that he's the only guy in the college with administrator privileges and a more-or-less unencumbered net connection:)
Flash and Java-based menus and advertisements online that break JAWS
JAWS assumes a certain level of basic computer competence in its users. Its help menus will tell you everything you never wanted to know about setting the properties of a folder. But we forget that there are computing lessons even more basic like that. For example, the boss still doesn't really know why he would want to use folders, or what the difference is between the Word application and a Word document.
Last and certainly not the least are the education gaps between the boss and his assistants. The boss's scholarly field is not technical in nature, and his students reflect that. I'm the first assistant he's had who understood keystrokes as a way of navigating interfaces; everyone else bogs down saying "Well normally, I would just click that. I don't know any way to do
At $200k per year, they're probably underpaid. At least, it would take much more than that for me to start saying "Very good, sir."
What's more, being a butler (butlering? butlerhood?) would not be an ideal career for most slashdotters. It takes way too much tact. For example: picture yourself working a tech support job. Imagine the calls for broken cup holders and missing "any" keys. Now consider that the caller is there in person, and the calls are for broken cups and missing car keys. He calls at 6:00 AM. He calls at lunch time. He calls when he wants a midnight snack. You can't hide; you live in his house. And he doesn't ever ask to speak to your supervisor; he is your supervisor. If you tell him to RTFM or that he has an ID ten T error, you will be held accountable.
Now here's the question. Which happens first, your firing or your arrest for assault with a deadly weapon?
A safe firing starts with a smart contract. Put a clause in there penalizing him for any failure to turn over privileges when he leaves the company. You need to get him early, while he'll say anything to impress the hire-em-fire-em's, and then politely remind him of what he signed when it's pink slip time.
It's amazing how fast revenge (or just plain carelessness) starts to look childish when your bank balance is at stake.
I doubt we'll ever see FF's exclusively for the XBox. The Japanese market (which is a huge part of FF's base) would wail and gnash its collective teeth and generally put Square-Enix's stock price in the gutter. The S-E execs would be fools to alienate their most loyal fans.
Slashdot Mirror
This! I Asked Slashdot about cloud storage for our small office a while back, and we ended up getting a four-bay QNAP NAS. That's probably overkill for home use, but we've been completely satisfied, and I'm seriously considering a lighter-weight edition for personal use.
It's end-of-life, insofar as it's running Server 2003, out of warranty, and developed a persistent RAID error that has defied diagnosis and cure over about two days and four tech support calls of attempts.
Does your law office have any ambitions to grow?
Not exponentially, at least in terms of staff. I don't expect us to top 20 bodies at any time during the useful life of this hardware. But I do expect more and more courts to go the way of the federal system with PACER/ECF. In fact, one of our local jurisdictions is already e-Filing. And we are increasingly able to get, say, squad car video in digital formats. So I do expect our data volume to increase at a rapid clip. We're at ~100 GB now; I don't want anything less than 2 TB of storage room.
We've played with Amicus, which is server based, but not been thrilled. We do a lot of contingent work, so the hourly billing features aren't so important. We also do a lot of travel, so the ability to check the office calendar on a smart phone, or copy a client's file onto a USB stick, is indispensable.
Otherwise, we're too small for Sharepoint and one person handles our books with a local install of QuickBooks.
Call us cousins up here in tornado alley, and on the floodplain of a major river. I am very, very interested in using cloud-based services for offsite backup - the further from our next federal disaster declaration, the better.
That said, I'd rather get a dropbox or carbonite style service but work off of local copies for our hour-to-hour needs. We're on a DSL connection and I have not been delighted by any cloud-based word processor I've tried.
3. Legal documents are written using serious software, not trivial web apps. They have numerous technical requirements and typographical conventions that must be strictly adhered to, in some cases to the point where courts will specify the precise font you must use for all submissions, for example. You don't write this sort of thing in Google Docs, where the concept of a cross-reference has yet to appear and the numbering styles available are one small step past "numbered" and "not numbered".
This!
We have fifteen years worth of investment in carefully styled MS Word documents. Format matters, not just for courts, but for clients who expect a certain level of professionalism and consistency. Telling a client, "Yeah it looks all funny because we decided to start using iGoogleBook's TweetDocs and haven't got it all figured out yet," does not inspire confidence. Also, our best typists are 80 wpm and/or using keyboard shortcuts as a matter of spinal reflex. Cloud document services just aren't there yet.
It'd be fair to say we're underusing ADS. We have it, and we use it for our basic login credentials, but we don't really have any need to segregate our internal users into groups.
We have a very binary approach to data access. Everyone in our small office needs to be able to see all of the client files. No one outside of our office needs to see a blinking thing. So by one-size-fits-all, I mean that our receptionist has access to the same file set that our senior partner does - she has to, if she's going to be able to tell a client when his next court date is.
At this point, I've flushed about two days of what would otherwise be billable hours in trying to nurse our old server back to health, and now I'm here on Sunday trying to figure out where to go next. You're right that the process would have been worse if I hadn't been able to look up and quickly decipher a few key error messages online, but I regard a certain amount of time as the price of doing business.
With Windows, I'd call myself a power user, but I'm no full fledged network admin. I'm not intimidated by a CLI and a bit of a learning curve, but I don't have commands memorized, either. With *nix, I'm only slightly more skilled than a monkey banging on the keyboard at random.
We do have an Active Directory domain. We aren't using it for anything but one-size-fits-all login credentials.
Stipulated. You get what you pay for
:)
I'll readily concede that I cannot root-proof a NAS device on my own, or anything else for that matter. I'm pretty limited in my ability to troubleshoot a mis-configured firewall, too. But we have to have something, and I'm mainly wondering if a NAS device is inherently more vulnerable or more buggy than a full-on file server.
Clients emphatically do not have access to our file server. Quite a few of them are facing very serious criminal charges, and a certain number might even be guilty. Frequently a client will want to send us files; we accept those by e-mail or physical media. Occasionally a client will ask for a copy of his file; we're pleased to burn that to CD-ROM.
At present, we do not have an FTP server. We'd had a fairly hefty network (for a business of our size, at least) set up back in 2008, but I'm not married to anything so long as we can get access to our files at off hours and on the road.
Agreed that RAID is a must, as is independent backup. At present, we have a tape drive. Sometimes the secretary remembers to run it, sometimes she doesn't. But even when she does, she keeps the tapes on site and close by "so we don't lose them". One small fire, one small flood, one pissant vandal, and *shudder*. I know the cloud backup providers will surrender to subpoena power without a fight. But I also know how to get a protective order on attorney-client privileged files after the subpoena is issued. As I see it, there's no way to keep any kind of record, ever, without risking an outsider discovering it. But if cloud-based backups (especially automated, encrypted cloud-based backups) let us mitigate our disaster risk and cut out the oops-forgot-to-change-the-tape factor, they're the lesser of two evils.
Right now, we're a two attorney firm (me and my boss, who's very game but a little green when it comes to tech), looking to hire a third. We also have a pool of about five support staffers. We all have to be able to access one another's files - I'll write a memo to file, which Boss will review, the he'll dictate a letter for Paralegal A, who asks Paralegal B to help her find the recipient addresses and print off the enclosures, and then back to Paralegal A who scans and files the outgoing letter to our correspondence. The paralegals are high turnover, and prone to downloading scamware. I do what I can viz education and virus removal, but there are limits. We also travel cross-country with a specialty arbitration practice we have, and need to be able to access client files from the road.
As to what our server doesn't do, we POP into our e-mail, use Google Calendar for our scheduling, and have our simple little WordPress website hosted offsite. No real reason to change this at this point.
I'm not OK with former co-workers making backups and carrying them off; no attorney is. But I'm even less OK with trying to parcel out file access on a case-by-case and employee-by-employee basis
California already does defy federal law by allowing medical marijuana by prescription. Technically, all the producers and consumers could be busted on federal charges, state legal or no. But as a practical matter, the Feds rarely if ever prosecute "legal" users.
* IAN Your Lawyer. Do not take legal advice from strangers on the Internet.
Condolences, and best wishes for your project.
I lost a parent as a young teenager. My siblings were tweens. We have lots of peek-a-boo and Saturday morning couch fort memories, and don't get me wrong, we cherish them. But what I really miss now, as a grown woman, was getting to know my father as an adult. He was a great father for us as children, but we were too young and/or too sheltered for really open conversations on those thorny adult issues that most parents dread. The man I've gotten to know second-hand through his peers was a thoughtful, interesting, complicated guy. I wish I could have known him as a peer, too.
Whatever medium you and your wife use (and you should participate too, no parent is an island), don't neglect the shades of gray, and the things you'd only say to someone you trust after a couple of beers.
Ha, I know what you mean about the pictures. The movie's never quite as good as the book, and the illustrator never quite captures it, does she? And TV is better with the subtitles on. But that's how I feel now, as an adult with better reading comprehension than listening comprehension.
:)
Generalizing here, but poor kids in the developing world are not read to on their mothers' laps. Nor are they sprawled on the carpet with the Sunday comics, or even watching Sesame Street. We in the developed world really take for granted all the pre-literacy work it takes to get a first grader reading aloud in class. For small children (and under-served adults) just acquiring literacy, a page full of text is an overwhelming, discouraging sight. Even leaving aside the contextual clues you get from the images themselves, illustrations are valuable just as a way to break the written content into manageable chunks.
I'm all for wiring the developing world. Believe me I'm *exquisitely* sensitive to how expensive per title paper media is in a developing economy. I lived high on the hog by local standards on 300 USD a month while I was there, and did all my reading out of a free library in the capital city, 8 hours away. I couldn't have afforded books and newspapers in my town, even if there had been anyone selling them.
I do mail care packages of children's books back to my old stomping grounds. And I keep an Amazon wishlist of appropriate titles so that friends and family can chip in if they want. And I sent my old laptop down there recently for a school computer lab they want to start.
OLPC and Project Gutenburg and the rest are great steps forward, and perhaps it is small-minded of me to rain on their parade. But the German aid agency (GTZ) that donated my town library's books had the best of intentions, too. It's a little late for me to get heavily involved with any of these organizations, so don't mind me as I wring my hands here and fret
And how many of these books are in Spanish? Or French, or Farsi, or what have you? And with pictures?
I used to work in a small, poor town in the developing world. My community had a library with about 10 linear feet of shelving. All the books were in Spanish, but . . .
None of them had pictures.
The "local interest" titles were these impenetrable desk-breakers of 19th century poetry by some aristocrat from the big city.
There were only two or three fiction titles. Dante's Inferno counts, right?
I never once saw a child pick a book off that shelf, not even after an hour's wait while Mom ran an errand. There was nothing there that would appeal to a beginning reader. Hell, given the historical literacy handicaps in the region, those titles would have defeated most of the adults I knew.
If you want to encourage literacy (in the developing world or elsewhere) you've got to start small. Pictures. Rhymes and silly sounds. It takes years to get most kids up to chapter book readiness. Canterbury Tales ain't where you start!
In all seriousness, I can report that I have seen a copy of Windows ME running on an office computer within the last three months. It was in Paraguay. Forty kilometers off the asphalt. In a school.
They mainly used it for a pirated copy of Microsoft Encarta (circa 1990-something), which is a priceless educational resource in a place with no newspapers and no public internet.
And come to it, it was about the only legally licensed copy of Windows in the town. Everybody else was running pirated copies of XP, although some of those had little imitation Vista desktop widgets.
Not for the legal, socially acceptable stuff, no. But for the warez and the kiddie pr0n and the Nigerian schemes, it sounds awfully inviting.
An arrow pointing to my asshole neighbor's house with the caption "Unsecured wireless network here!!"
You don't have to stick with the co-op mode forever in Halo 2, either. The multiplayer has a pretty effective handicap function. It's especially useful since the steepest part of the learning curve for most new gamers is mastering orientation and sorting through your options. But if she can kill you in four shots while it takes you seven, it won't matter if she's slower at making decisions and taking shots.
By way of background, he uses his computer (a Windows box on a university network) for e-mail and writing scholarly articles. His screen reading program is JAWS. He would like to use the internet more, but he's frustrated by a combination of factors, some JAWS-related and some related to inaccessible design. The boss is highly intelligent and has been blind from birth. He's very used to other adaptive technologies like Braille or Open Book (a program that uses a scanner to translate print to speech), but he's a complete computing novice.
It's worth noting that the computing problems he has are completely different from those that I would face if I were blinded tomorrow. A lot of his trouble is just related to a poor grasp of fundamentals. It's very difficult to explain the difference between opening a folder on the desktop and browsing the contents of a folder through an application's Open dialog box. Compounding the problem is that the boss is ten years late to the party, and most of his sighted assistants take things like right clicking on objects for granted.
On the other hand, he has some advantages that a recently blinded person would not. The boss is used to taking in huge volumes of information through his ears, and can absorb synthesized speech at a dizzying rate. He also reads and types Braille grade 2, and gets a lot of use from his Braille Lite, which is like a PDA for Braille users, with a special Braille keyboard and a refreshable display of dots. It's great for him, but the chord- and abbreviation-based systems of Grade 2 Braille, take a long time to learn, and wouldn't be useful to your grandmother, who's losing her vision to diabetes.
So here are some of the problems I've encountered in my time with the boss:
At $200k per year, they're probably underpaid. At least, it would take much more than that for me to start saying "Very good, sir."
What's more, being a butler (butlering? butlerhood?) would not be an ideal career for most slashdotters. It takes way too much tact. For example: picture yourself working a tech support job. Imagine the calls for broken cup holders and missing "any" keys. Now consider that the caller is there in person, and the calls are for broken cups and missing car keys. He calls at 6:00 AM. He calls at lunch time. He calls when he wants a midnight snack. You can't hide; you live in his house. And he doesn't ever ask to speak to your supervisor; he is your supervisor. If you tell him to RTFM or that he has an ID ten T error, you will be held accountable.
Now here's the question. Which happens first, your firing or your arrest for assault with a deadly weapon?
A safe firing starts with a smart contract. Put a clause in there penalizing him for any failure to turn over privileges when he leaves the company. You need to get him early, while he'll say anything to impress the hire-em-fire-em's, and then politely remind him of what he signed when it's pink slip time.
It's amazing how fast revenge (or just plain carelessness) starts to look childish when your bank balance is at stake.
I doubt we'll ever see FF's exclusively for the XBox. The Japanese market (which is a huge part of FF's base) would wail and gnash its collective teeth and generally put Square-Enix's stock price in the gutter. The S-E execs would be fools to alienate their most loyal fans.