General

The “charge” seems almost cartoonish. A wild-haired, loony old eccentric with a penchant for buxom female bodyguards — dishing out handfuls of blue pills to his troops with their morning orange juice. Their task: to pillage, plunder and rape. The evidence? Well, none so far. That’s if one doesn’t count the three little bottles of […]

By Amukelani Mayimele I often hear people complain about how there is no hope, how the world has many problems and can never change. The question is: has it ever occurred to them that they should do their part in changing the world? Could it be that people have chosen to settle for what is […]

By Gcobani Qambela Thursday the 16th June 2011 marks the 35th year since the historic series of student-led Soweto Uprisings which started on the 16th of June 1976. An estimated 20 000 students from most of Soweto’s schools started on this day to protest against Bantu Education and the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974. These […]

The digital marketplace offers abundant opportunity for disastrous mistakes. But it is within the power of the website or social page owner to turn those slip-ups around and even benefit from them. It can happen to you Making a content error is as easy as leaving a radio button unchecked in your online content-management system. […]

The “village” and your family are supposed to be the first school everyone is exposed to. They’re supposed to teach us the fundamentals of living harmoniously together and sharing this world with others. But both the school and family are fighting for their very survival in today’s so-called modern forms of social organisation. The township […]

The female model on the billboard promoting cosmetics stares back at me with an emptiness that edges my skin with goose pimples. She is not smiling, but gazing emptily, vaguely, at me – with that hollowness which says she is not staring at me, but at the cold frost of camera lenses taken somewhere else […]

By Gavin Moffat A week or three ago I read these words from Scott Martin, which meant little to me at the time. “To be a cyclist is to be a student of pain … at cycling’s core lies pain, hard and bitter as the pit inside a juicy peach. It doesn’t matter if you’re […]

Companies, no I should say the industry giants, are shaping the way we interact with the world. If you think about it for a moment, a good example is Apple, you can clearly see this curated world by the fact that the Apple App Store computing process is mostly closed. This obviously causes its own […]

SMSs went out yesterday informing MTN users who had subscribed to NokNok in the past and if you visit the NokNok website it simply says it’s shutting the service down at the end of this month. It’s hardly surprising. The product was ill-conceived, poorly rolled out and was hardly supported by the network operator. History […]

Cloud-based services are becoming more attractive for South African companies, even with our bandwidth limitations. There has been a great deal of hype recently around cloud computing, which promises to transform traditional contact centres into nimble, flexible and affordable systems geared to cope with a fragmented multimedia communication environment. Thus far, however, South African companies […]

The news that Gary Kirsten, the former South African opening batsman and coach that masterminded India to their second World Cup triumph, was to be appointed head coach of the Proteas was a poorly kept secret by the administrators but one which supporters of the national cricket team must have breathed a huge sigh of […]

The recent killing of a seven-year-old girl by a teenage online gaming “addict” in Vietnam raises important and disturbing questions. From reports it is apparent that Mong The Xuong, 15, tempted Anh Nhu to accompany him into the woods near their northern Vietnamese village of Yen Hoa with the lure that they could pick fruit […]