Does It Compute?

iPads, Sweatshops and American Capitalism

Two recent massive articles in the New York Times (Jan 22 and 26) have documented the sweatshop conditions in the Chinese factories manufacturing Apple’s iPad and iPhone. To be fair, the article notes that similar conditions apply in factories run for Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

This should really come as no surprise. American industry has been outsourcing manufacturing as a way of increasing profits by lowering the cost of labor for years. Sweatshops and deadly conditions are merely the logical consequence of this trend. That this goes into great detail is clearly demonstrated by the article. In one case over a hundred employees were injured by being forced to use a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis to clean iPhone screens. Why?  Because it evaporated three times as fast as regular alcohol, so workers could process more screens in the same amount of time. In fact, “outsourcing” is beginning to happen even within Asia, with companies moving from previously low-wage countries to ones with even lower wages.

Nor could Apple fix this, even if it wanted to. Apple is tied to its largest supplier, Foxconn, which is one of the few companies big enough to build enough iPads and iPhones (with 1.2 million workers, it makes an estimated 40% of the world’s consumer electronics). Apple has virtually no leverage to make Foxconn fix conditions once contracts are signed. As Steve Jobs retorted to President Obama when asked about bringing jobs back to the US, “those jobs are not coming back.”

The fact of the matter is that outsourced sweatshop manufacturing conditions, like the use of illegal immigrants in the US, are integral to the profitability of American capitalism. Alabama found that out last summer when it passed its anti-immigrant law and then no one could be found to pick crops, which rotted on the vine. Certainly, it is no longer politically possible in the US to return to the conditions that caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire just over 100 years ago, in which 146 garment workers, mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died because managers locked the exits to stairwells so workers could not leave. However, recent union-busting “right to work” efforts in states like Wisconsin and Indiana certainly demonstrate that American industry would like to move backwards in that direction.

And after all, it takes a special kind of chutzpah for people in Mitt Romney’s income bracket to claim that American workers are paid too much money!

.doc and .docx - It's a Dual-Format World

I recently downloaded an extremely informative and useful white paper by Ross Kodner’s microsystems entitled “.doc & .docx – It’s a Dual-Format World.”

The white paper details the issues involved in converting from one format to the other, including the loss of numbering schemes and formatting and pagination changes. Further, the “compatibility tool” that lets people still using Word 2003 access documents from 2007 and 2010 has a number of known issues.

But most firms just plowed blindly ahead, converting or not converting with no real plan. Many users got little or no training in the new versions, not even a minimal instruction in customizing the labor-saving Quick Access Toolbar. (See my February 2010 blog entry)

Firms owe it to themselves to systematize their practices in this area. Ross’s white paper is really a must read.

iPad Revisited

We went out to visit my 91-year-old father-in-law in Phoenix in early January. I decided to take my iPad instead of a computer, since all I planned to do was check e-mail and Google.

The basic principle, not to have to schlepp a full-size laptop around, worked great. After that it was all down-hill.  My web-based e-mail didn’t work with the iPad (or vice-versa). I could look at the e-mail, but could not reply to it because I couldn’t type a message. So in order to reply to an e-mail I had to forward it to my gmail account and then reply from there. And of course trying to type on the iPad is still an adventure. Fortunately it was just a long weekend, so it was not too bad.

Since the iPad has no “back” function, using Google or Google maps was also a pain. I constantly had to exit out and start over.  Very clumsy to manipulate.  And for directions I could just as easily use the navigation app on my Droid phone.

So was it better than a laptop?  For this very limited purpose, yes. This iPad was a gift. Would I ever actually buy an iPad?  No.

If I needed certain legal-specific apps for the iPad, such as the Worldox app that lets you access the document store in your office from the iPad, it might be different. But without those add-ons, the iPad is little more than a convenient toy.

Biggest Cloud Outages in 2011

I recently saw an article on the biggest Cloud outages in 2011. Since outages (loss of connectivity) are typically one of the reservations that many people have about moving to the cloud, I was curious.

The biggie of course was the 5+ day Amazon outage in April that affected a large number of major companies.  Microsoft cloud services – Office 365 and the Business Productivity Suite – suffered 5 outages (4 in the month of May), perhaps enough to raise doubts about the reliability of those offerings.

Other than that, there were two outages caused by a major lightning storm in Ireland. Google Docs and related apps went down for about an hour in September, and Gmail lost some 150,000 mailboxes in February. Other of the “10 biggest” were in fact pretty minor – half hour to an hour, or simply multi-hour delays in delivering email.

What this all means is that cloud-based services are pretty reliable, almost certainly more reliable than the systems in the average law firm (or Comcast cable). The lightning-storm outage is noteworthy because the backup power systems failed to kick in.

This of course is no consolation if you DO get hit with an outage.  Which raises the question of what sort of reimbursement do you get from the cloud service if you get hit with an outage? Most contracts provide for reimbursement as a percentage of the monthly fee – if you are out for 1 day, you get 1/30th of your monthly fee returned. This is essentially worthless to a firm.

Software vendors long ago faced this issue and most agreements limit liability to the price of the software.  However, cloud-based services are in a slightly different category. One could reasonably make the argument that if a 10-attorney firm suffers a 1-hour outage, and half the attorneys might have been unable to do billable work during that time, then at $300 an hour the firm has lost $1,500 in billables. Obviously no vendor is going to give this sort of guarantee, but you might be able to improve your agreement over the standard chump change for outages.

Making the Most of Adobe Acrobat

As scanning has increased, so too has the use of Acrobat. Many firms are starting to scan old files into Acrobat PDF files. Much of this is uncontrolled – I have seen PDF files as big as 5GB or even more!  This is just a disaster waiting to happen.  Here are some simple things you can do to make the use of your Acrobat files more efficient.

1.  Scan in smaller batches and assemble. Instead of scanning thousands of pages, scan in groups of (say) several hundred. (You may want to experiment on the best number) Then select “Create” then “Merge files into a single PDF.” Drag and drop all the files you want to include into the resultant screen (I have dragged over 600 files at one time). This will create a single PDF. Each file is listed on the Bookmarks Panel which makes the resulting document easier to navigate. To get the Bookmarks Panel to display when the document is opened, go to File | Properties | Initial View and select “Bookmarks Panel and Page.”

2.  Make sure your scans are OCR’d. What good does it do to have 5,000 pages of documents in a file if you can’t search for anything in it? Although Acrobat will do this, it is a slow process. If you plan to scan large amounts of documents, you need to invest in an OCR program. Some large printer/copiers claim to be able to OCR, but check carefully – I recently came across a relatively new Xerox copier that was “OCR’ing” using Acrobat 5!!  Check to see what version your scanner is using. If you are using Worldox, check out Symphony OCR from Trumpet, Inc. which OCR’s in the background and can save tremendous time and effort (and hence money).

3.  Embed an index.  If you have a very long document, searching can be quite slow. If you embed an index, it is very fast. In Acrobat 9, this is under Advanced | Document Processing | Manage Embedded Index. Select “embed index.” In Acrobat X, it is under Tools | Document Processing | Manage Embedded Index. Warning: for some totally illogical and counter-intuitive reason, if you save the file after you embed the index, it wipes out the embedded index.

4.  Use the Search function, not the Find function. “Find” simply finds the next instance of what you are looking for. “Search” lists all the instances, which makes it much faster to navigate through.

Other resources:  Rick Borstein’s “Acrobat for Legal Professionals” features a lot of “how to” columns as well as a wealth of other material. 

In addition, Ernie Svenson’s “PDF for Lawyers” can be very useful. He also writes the “Ernie the Attorney” blog. 

Happy Winter Solstice!

It’s Winter Solstice – er, Holiday – time again.

The Winter Solstice has traditionally been celebrated by homo sapiens in the northern hemisphere for at least 5,000 years as marking the point where the days start getting longer. Maes Howe in Orkney (north of Scotland) is a very large chambered cairn (about 100 feet in diameter and 22 feet high on the outside: the interior chamber is about 14 feet square and about the same height). The 45 foot long entrance way is constructed so that the setting sun shines directly through the passageway onto the back wall of the cairn on the shortest day of the year, setting directly over a stone (the Barnhouse Stone) placed a half-mile or so from the entrance. And of course a similar setup at Stonehenge is even more well-known.

Pre-historic/neolithic peoples were of necessity acute astronomers – their existence depended on crops and seasons. The Mayan long calender is more accurate than our current calender with its leap years every four years and “super leap years” at the turn of the century once every 400 years. Other calendars (in India and Mesopotamia – Omar Khayyam was a much better mathematician and astronomer than he was a poet) were also more accurate than our current one.

The early Puritans in New England outlawed the celebration of Christmas between 1659 and 1681 due to its pagan roots, as well as the fact that the lower classes used it as an excuse for “rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the thread of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes.” (Stephen Nissenbaum, “The Battle for Christmas”).

Subsequent religious year-end myths were manifestly modeled on the celebration of the Winter Solstice.  So during this winter holiday season, I wish you all a Happy Winter Solstice. Spring is coming.

Technical Considerations for Worldox

I don’t usually do posts on technical issues that are of interest mainly to IT people. However, firms interested in Worldox seem to be saying increasingly “my IT guy has some questions.”  The following is intended to answer basic technical questions about Worldox.

Many firms are accustomed to defining hardware requirements on the assumption of SQL-based software. Worldox is a totally different animal and does not use SQL. The bottom line is that Worldox is not very hardware intensive and will probably run on an existing file server assuming it is reasonably up to date. See the Worldox site for a more detailed description of technical requirements. If you are running MS Server 2008R2, you must disable SMB2 (known to corrupt databases) and re-enable 8.3 support prior to installing Worldox.

Worldox can be integrated with Active Directory to meet security requirements. Security settings in Worldox are ported to Active Directory and vice-versa.

Worldox uses what is known as a “distributed database.” It creates stub files containing profile information in every directory it touches. The indexer (based on the ISYS indexing program) parses those files and creates an index. It also full-text indexes all possible documents (passworded documents and non-OCR’d PDF’s are not indexed for obvious reasons). Emails and email attachments are also indexed. Searches are based on the ISYS indexes.  The indexes by default are rebuilt from scratch once a week so that they are always “clean.”

In operation, the indexer checks for change records every 10 seconds. So in terms of activity, ask yourself: how many files can be opened, saved, created, etc. by X users in 10 seconds? The Worldox client intercepts all file I/O commands for supported programs and pops up the Worldox interface (instead of using Windows Explorer). Again, not very CPU-intensive.

Worldox recommends that the indexer run on a stand-alone PC. The indexer does NOT run as a service. The indexer includes a number of options (such as limited records management options; deleting files from the Salvage Bin after a given period; deleting empty directories, etc.).  For a more detailed description of requirements and optimal settings see the “Indexer” section of the “Installing and Configuring Worldox” document on my web site.

In short, of all the software programs I have ever supported over the years, Worldox is by far the most rock-solid.

Agilewords Integrates with Box.net for Document Review

I was recently contacted by the makers of Agilewords, saying that their product integrates with Box.net to enable online reviewing and even editing of documents stored on Box.net.

I use Box.net for storage and transfer of files with clients. So I store a lot of software patches, help files, configuration settings, etc. in Box.net folders.  Most similar programs such as Dropbox offer an upload/download model to keep files in synch. The idea of being able to review and edit online was intriguing.

When you install Agilewords to your Box.net account, it takes over some functionality. When you upload a document, you can invite someone to review it. The reviewer is issued an invitation, logs into Box.net/Agilewords and marks up the document online. This is similar to Word’s track changes, but Agilewords uses its own feature set. If the would-be reviewer does not respond to the invite (you can set a due date for review), they are reminded (nagged?) by Agilewords until they do. There is also an approve/reject function. Agilewords lets the owner of the document review and track various reviewer comments and reply to them through a convenient review panel or via a “track changes” view of the document.

This is particularly useful for example if you want a client to review/approve a document but you don’t want to give them the ability to edit or change it – you want to keep control of the document.

There is also an “editor” function in which you can give someone rights to edit the document online, replacing the upload/download scenario. Agilewords charges about $15-19/mo./user for anyone with editor rights (reviewing is free). You would have to examine how you work and collaborate with various people in order to evaluate whether this functionality would be worthwhile.

All in all, Agilewords provides a potentially very useful expansion to Box.net functionality.

Sarcasm Makes You Smarter

I read with interest and amusement an article in the Smithsonian Magazine on “The Science of Sarcasm.”

The core of the article is that:

“Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.”

This is intuitively self-evident. To deal with sarcasm, you have to perform a series of mental shifts to “translate” what is being said. This (a) exercises your brain more; and (b) makes you more aware of multiple levels of meaning.

Some of the details were particularly interesting, however.  Thus college students in Israel were better able to solve problems on a cellphone company’s help desk if the complaints were sarcastic rather than just plan angry.

Sarcasm permeates society. Thus a study of telephone conversations shows that the phrase “yeah, right” is used sarcastically 23% of the time. New York City subway riders and airplane users have long since stopped taking messages in the form “We’re sorry for the delay and any inconvenience. Thank you for your patience and understanding” at face value. Sarcasm is also regional within the US. Thus:

“Northerners also were more likely to think sarcasm was funny: 56 percent of Northerners found sarcasm humorous while only 35 percent of Southerners did. The New Yorkers and male students from either location were more likely to describe themselves as sarcastic.” 

Does this mean that Northerners are smarter than Southerners?  Obviously not, but it probably does mean that they are used to dealing with the world in different ways.

So let’s hear it for sarcasm.

Cleaning Up the Blog

As a matter of principle I have never censored any posts to “Does It Compute?” Recently, however, I have noticed what I can only term “spam posts”  – posts with content totally unrelated to the blog (generally meaningless homilies) from posters/addresses that appear to be some kind of shopping site (shoes, outlets).

So I went through recent posts (many to very old articles) and removed the most spam-like ones.