All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it. Great work, guys. It is really tragic. With...

Gossip site Gawker has experienced a large data breach whose scale fully came to light Sunday. 1,958 Gawker users’ password was ‘password’. 681 users used ‘qwerty’ or qwerty and a minor variation (qwerty followed by two digits or letters). In an article by the New York Times: Hackers indicated that they had found more than 1.3 million user names and passwords. Really, if this isn’t...

I can’t recommend this piece by Michael Mace strongly enough. It’s a detailed, cogent analysis of what’s wrong with RIM, based on a close reading of the details of their financial disclosures. It’s a strong case for how a company with growing revenue and growing profits could in fact be in big trouble. One small example: Five years ago, RIM was getting .7 new subscribers for every BlackBerry...

As China tightens its grip on dissidents at home, dignitaries in Norway celebrate this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, imprisoned Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, with solemn ceremony - and an empty chair. Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad said Liu will be represented ‘by an empty chair … the strongest possible argument’ for awarding it to him. Here’s...

This week, trying to counter-balance the Nobel Peace Prize, China hastily organized a first-ever “Confucius Peace Award,” holding a news conference with fanfare to announce the winner was retired Taiwanese politician Lien Chan. But word arrived from Lien’s Taipei office Thursday that Lien had never heard of the award and had no intention of accepting it. Lien’s response is awesome.

It isn’t new for the Communist Party to take a tough line on internal dissent, but it is new for China’s rulers to use their economic clout to bludgeon other countries into changing their behaviour. The irresponsible menace known as the People’s Republic of China is bringing up Cold War 2.0 and undoing the world’s peace process once again. With North Korea sabre rattling in its...

I have always been fascinated by pavlovian conditioning because it shows how little control animals really have over their own behavior. The most famous example of this is the experiment Ivan Pavlov performed on his dogs in the 1890’s. Dogs normally salivate at the smell and sight of meat, but Pavlov noticed his dogs began to salivate when they noticed the lab technician who fed them would...

In a statement, a HTC spokesman said, “Quality in industrial design is of key importance to HTC. To ensure the best possible signal strength, antennas are placed in the area least likely to be covered by a person’s face or hands while the phone is in use. However, it is inevitable that a phone’s signal strength will weaken a little when covered in its entirety by a user’s palm or...

When the head of engineering was hired, he felt out of place firing the existing people on his team, so he didn’t review their abilities. Had he been hired first, The Bad Day would never have happened and the team would have been made up of more talented programmers. Let the experts do what they are expert in.

My body is incompatible with Earth. It has a daily sleep-wake cycle that lasts about 28 hours instead of 24 hours, which means each day I stay awake about four hours longer than most people. In the middle of the week, I sometimes find myself waking up at 11PM and going to bed in the early afternoon the next day. A useful article on sleep management.

AA fired Mr. X because he cared. They fired him because he cared enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could. Such distasteful companies are abound! Even my former school suffers severely from it. The best way to fix it is to change the management and corporate culture of mediocrity.

WHEN DISNEY WORLD OPENED IN 1971, it was the first theme park to have continuously playing ambient music on pathways between attractions. … Ambient music made the park truly become an experience in itself. The passion of people solving unnoticeable “problems”.

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA. Great insights to the world of mental health, viruses and genetics.

THE current contentious issue on the affordability of public housing was given another airing by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew who cautioned Singaporeans not to cast a protest vote against the ruling party over this. If this isn’t a threat, I don’t know what is.

I was asked about PM Lee’s mention of issues for next GE, particularly immigration, housing, helping low-wage workers and a sense of disorientation among Singaporean due to rapid changes in the society. I would say that all these are just “symptoms” of the KEY PROBLEM/illness of PAP’s policies. The KEY PROBLEM is SUSTAINABILITY. Let’s listen to what he has to say.

In an ideal world, your Android phone would run like a dream forever. This being real life, we can’t always expect that sort of robust performance out of our devices. Things can happen that slow your phone and damage the experience. Maybe you install a lot of apps, and some of them are acting a little mischievous, or maybe something has just gone wrong deep down in the system where you have...