Comments on Trump lawyer Alina Habba's use of "gaming laptop"

cheese_greater@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 94 points –

First of all, this is not criticising or taking a cheap shot or really political at all. I am fascinated that a lawyer uses/brings a gaming laptop to trial and I can't help but think it was contrived as another distraction.

What do y'all think? BTW, how expensive are they generally?

You think she plays League?

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Well, it's a ROG laptop, and they can go for north of $1000 USD fairly easily.

What I'm curious about is why does her law firm do byod? You'd want client files locked down with whole disk encryption - and probably domain joined. It's much more likely that you get a Thinkpad or Dell something.

Almost zero chance she is with a serious firm right now. No large firm wants Trump as a client. She’s most likely operating a little boutique firm. This happens all the time when a lawyer wants the client and the firm doesn’t due to a conflict, negative attention, etc. A handful of people and maybe an office manager with no other admin staff. There’s no IT. She needed a laptop with HDMI out for presentations in court and wanted it to be fast too. She probably went to Best Buy asking for that and walked out with a gaming laptop.

Now I'm curious why a law person would need a fast computer for their job :-)

I mean isn't they mostly operating spreadsheets and presentations? Not like rendering 3D worlds or Spirting or something?

I mean I totally get someone want a beefy laptop and to be fair, I don't even know what the "controversy" is about.

Trial lawyers often work with fairly large datasets and some specialized applications. There’s a ton of discovery materials for a case like this one and it’s all indexed and searchable. They will have deposition transcripts that need to be searchable so they can check them while a witness is on the stand. They will also be running presentations and playing weird video formats. They usually need a good CPU and a nice chunk of RAM because the last thing they need is a laggy computer in court when everyone is watching.

not to mention she might just have any sort of computer related hobby which requires some amount of power. not just gaming but any kind of demanding software or locally hosted AI or something of the sort. Saw someone elsewhere in the thread suggest she just asked the guy at best buy or listened to a gamer nephew's advice as if a woman can't decide to get a high-spec computer for her own reasons

Or can't understand anything about computers.

It's thinly veiled misogyny

If you’re in IT, you know most people don’t know anything about computers.

But then again, if you’re not in IT, you “know” how “incelar” (haha get it?) most IT people can be.

Like the case with blue origins recently, I remember something like a trial being postpone because the PDFs they sent were so big that the court system would crash.

It doesn't have to be BYOD. The firm might willing to procure a specific machine for her. Or she might have enough clout to make them get her what she wants.

Maybe. It's also weird because ROG has their led control app, Aura which will auto adjust your RGB based on apps/profiles. She either had a profile set up to do the flashy-lid or it was triggered by an application.

Regardless, you would think a lawyer who requested such a device would know how to disable that profile and/or how to disable the light show without literally shutting the lid and covering it.

Or she doesn't care

Probably should care a little, since lawyers work hard to look "presentable" and "professional" in court. While it shouldn't affect anything, it does have an effect on the outcome of a trial.

So it comes back to if she didn't know how, or if it was intentional

Since when does Trump have a history of hiring "presentable" and "professional" lawyers?

Considering how much full disk encryption can slow down a machine in daily use, she might have used that as a justification for asking for a "beefier" PC that would slowed down less by encryption.

The impact is negligible. It’s a few extra seconds during boot. You won’t even notice during use except maybe for specific IO-intensive workloads. FDE on a modern computer isn’t like the junk from 15 years ago with third party security apps. There’s no reason not to use it.

Indeed, it's mostly hardware-accelerated nowadays.

What I’m curious about is why does her law firm do byod?

Trump is no longer able to hire attorneys from large firms. He’s toxic to their other clients and also tends to not pay. You have to be an ideologue without any other big clients in order to work for him. From their website, she seems to be the head of a four-attorney firm.

Exactly. Attorneys leave their big firms and start their own for clients like him. No serious firm is going to take him. She doesn’t have any IT people. She went to Best Buy looking for a laptop with HDMI out and they sold her that thing.

This. I have two laptops that I use daily; they're both 15", but the main difference is that one is for work, while the other is for personal stuff (Columbian fart porn, obviously).

The work laptop is not only of a much more practical weight for when I'm out and about for work-related purposes, but it's also encrypted, on a domain where everything is SSO, and if it gets lost/stolen I can phone up a coworker to have him wipe it. It's a dell latitude 4something.

Of course, my other laptop could have the same setup, but the fact that it's a gaming laptop makes it considerably heavier, more power hungry, and not even close to practical to haul around all the time.

Is Columbian different from Brazilian? Asking for a friend.

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All you need for DJ and Bitlocker is a pro version of Windows. It's a 99$ upgrade if you have the home version. The laptop may have come with pro anyway because it supports more ram than the home version.

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