Author Archives: Raoul Pop

Reviews

Google Pages, re-launched

Justin Rosenstein, Product Manager and Google Page Creator, posted an entry to the Google Blog a few days ago where he detailed the reason for the application. If my memory serves me right, Google Pages launched a few months ago, but access to it was withdrawn or limited in some way. Perhaps the Google folks thought it needed some more work. Anyway, Justin has just re-launched it, so I assume it’s now ready for public consumption.

Just tried it out, and it does seem to be a really easy way to create web pages, much like the .Mac service – except this is free, and there don’t appear to be any bandwidth limitations, at least none I can find. Then again, there isn’t the tight integration here that one finds on the .Mac service, such as with GarageBand or iPhoto, to allow for one-click publishing of podcasts or photos. Still, it’s a pretty cool service.

Here’s the link to the Google Blog entry, and here’s a link to Google Pages.

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Reviews

Measuring the cost of corruption

The World Bank has put together a very informative collection of papers and websites on corruption at this web page. They define corruption as “theft of public resources for private gain”, and they define and evaluate the various costs associated with corruption.

They name two in the summary: one is redistributive, and is incurred when businesses with political power abuse that privilege to get a contract at the expense of their competitors, and the other is a welfare cost, which is to the overall economy, and thus makes everyone worse off.

The papers and websites are all free to access, and the language is surprisingly clear-cut and demonstrative. This is a really good resource, and I encourage you to take advantage of it. Here is the link to it.

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Reviews

Affordable travel

The NYT Travel section has assembled a fantastic collection of articles they’ve called “Affordable Travel”. They’ve got wonderful tips on how to save money when traveling through Europe on all the big cities such as: Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Geneva, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Rome and Venice. Here is the link to the collection of articles.

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How To

New clothes washer uses steam and no detergent

Gizmag has the details on a new electric-powered clotheswasher that uses no detergent, only steam. The steam cycle can be used alone, or in combination with the normal hot/warm water cycles. It’s made by LG.

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Thoughts

Congress readies new digital copyright bill

I find this unbelievable, yet Congress seems poised to pass another revision of the DMCA, expanding the reach of this already-controversial bill. It only goes to show the power that special-interest groups have in Washington.

For example, under this new law, if Sony’s rootkit malware were removed by anti-virus software, Sony would have the right to sue those companies! Sounds very silly, doesn’t it!

Just talking about or attempting to bypass copyright protection on anything can land you in jail for up to 10 years! This parallels a French law that their legislature wanted to pass late last year.

I am left to ponder whether lack of forethought and absence of logic have hopped on the back of the bird flu swans and have now infected our politicians… Maybe they’ve been here all along, ever since the 1st version of the DMCA was passed years ago.

Here’s a link to the CNET News article.

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