Wanted: S'poreans to develop the next YouTube or Skype

Yes, it's definitely possible. In fact, it's possible in every nation. The only difference is how likely it is to occur in Singapore. It's the culture, and the government policies that're actually restricting such things from happening. Who'd know that by providing free internet tele-phony will provide enough revenue to sustain in this harsh world. Which venture capitalist, esp in sg, will give money for such a high-risk venture? YouTube is worse. Yes, free videos sound attractive to everyone, especially the younger generation. But what about copyright issues? I can bet, out of a hundred thousand individuals, probably not even one of them would dare to take that risk. And the problem is aggravated by the lack of venture capitalists in sg. The first question that'd ask is, what happens if you run into copyright issues. Even those guys who founded YouTube didn't have a solution to that. Which is why, they'd want to sell it to Google.

So yeah, talking is really easy compared to actually doing it. You've gotta change the mindset and habits of the new generation coming up first.

Another example comes from what I've learnt in class - Micro processors and computers. Why is America able to develop faster and faster computers even with the same set of tools? Sometimes, it comes not from technology, but from how you use the technology that you have to achieve speedier results.

Anyway, here's the story. Computer instructions were traditionally executed sequentially, which is really slow. So what those people in Intel did was to execute several segments of a whole chunk of instructions at the same time - a process called pipelining, eg, the computer will now process like the 1st instruction, 5th instruction, 10th instruction... at the same time. And if a conditional (yes/no thingy) branch is involved, they'll just take it as a "yes". So if it really is a "yes", they'd have saved time, else they'd have wasted the time. But statistics shows that it is 96% "yes", so as you can guess, that really sped up the computer speed a lot.

Anyway, the point is, why the Americans can do such stuf, and yet most Singaporeans won't ever dream of it? One can easily find the answer from the American culture. The way they write their essays/reports are really different from how we write. They write them in segments, that is, they jump around, instead of doing it sequentially from the introduction to the conclusion. Yes, I do that sometimes too, but not very often, and I often don't have a really good feeling if I have done it that way. We've been indoctrinated to do it the "right" way. But for the Americans, it's totally different. They do it pretty often and are really cool about that, which is why, it's natural for them to come up with such an alogorithm. Moreover, they're much much much more risk-takers than Singaporean. Which singaporean would come up to you and say" Let's make it a "yes". If it's not, then we'll discard the results." Conservative singaporeans are just going to say:" Is it even going to work?"

Even in scientific research, to get a really thundering breakthrough, it takes more than mere diligence to achieve it. It takes immense analytical power and risk-taking to discover something that is truly out of the world. It takes an out-of-the-world mindset to achieve out-of-the-world results. Otherwise, what you're looking at, is merely the next step which some other scientist in another part of the world would probably discover, if given enough time and efforts. Alright, shouldn't denigrate our scientists now. I think they're really smart and amazing people, much smarter than myself in the least. But still, one gets the point right?


Well, not saying that being conservative is a really bad thing. It's just in the culture that we want to play safe, which is why we don't have as high a failure rate as the Americans. But the flipped side of the coin would suggest that we won't have as high a success rate either. Oh well. So be it. I'm not really interested in working towards a multi-billionaire dream... probably just couple of millions will do. hee~ Then, I'll call it quits. wahahhaha~

*Looks forward to life when I can just do my own stuff and be happy.*