Slashdot Mirror
Koreans Advised to "Avoid Vista" for Now
An anonymous reader writes "The Chosonilbo reports that several government ministries in South Korea are advising users not to install Windows Vista, at least until popular online services can be made compatible. The problem is that ActiveX is pervasive in the Korean webspace, employed by everyone from web games to online banking. Upgrading to Vista is expected to render many of these services unusable. Portions of the popular "Hangul" word processor, a major competitor to Office in that country, are also not functioning under Vista. The Ministry of Information is planning to publish compatibility information for popular websites, and urging users to carefully research the implications of upgrading."
The Chinese Purification has alrady begun in Asia!!!
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
I thought all businesses were avoiding Vista...I doubt that Korea needed to issue an advisory to get people to stay away.
Many people ask me why I insist on server side web apps unless there is absolutely positively no way around it. Now they know why. Client side processing means client side requirements. Server side processing means the client can be using anything from a PC with Firefox to an iPhone with... oh wait :P
I hate printers.
ActiveX is pervasive in the Korean webspace.
They should move to something that work in linux, mac os, and windows.
Drink Microsoft's proprietary koolaid more heavily. Oh yea...
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
The more promising the view, the steeper the cliff...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I think we're going to see Vista be the most slowly adopted OS Microsoft has ever released.
I thought all businesses were avoiding Vista...
Perhaps they are. While businesses are computer users, not all users are businesses.
Did someone forget to install the memory and update Korea's firmware again?
...and more to do with Ragnarok and Lineage. :D
I never upgrade when there is a new release. This is responsible thinking and planning on the Korean government's part. Now, if we could only convince our government and other consumers to follow suit.
my mom posts on slashdot.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Wait, Battle.net isn't compatible with Vista?
In Korea only old people use ActiveX.
I thought only old people in Korea used ActiveX components.
"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!"
So says the Ministry of Information? Like, the Ministry of Truth? "Don't install Vista. Drink Victory coffee."
Install Vista? In Korea? Heaven forbid! They might get...get [whispers] security. OMG!!! Repent, repent, ye lost souls! Let ActiveX be thy savior!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Why would anyone upgrade yet anyway? Doesn't everyone remember all of the many problems XP had when it was first released? I didn't upgrade my PC to XP until SP1 was avaible and probably won't upgrade to vista any time soon either.
I thought the whole point of ActiveX was to be incompatible with anything but Microsoft products. Apparently their Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy worked a bit too well.
Anyone know what this is all about - they must still be aiming to support old ActiveX stuff, right?
The real reason is that Windows Vista does not yet offer in-built protection against attacks by giant North Korean rabbits.
What the heck are they using now?!?!?
headline should read: 'Korea advises that NO ONE install Vista'
Ran into this with my partner, who is Korean. Her online banking uses incredibly invasive, poorly conceived and programmed software called nProtect. Which installs a bloody device driver to function. It actually blue screened Vista randomly. It does not install without Administrator level access to the machine (obviously). In addition, it required that you run IE7 in Administrator mode when attempting to log in. Also, many many websites did not function reliably with Vista and IE7, their ActiveX controls expecting to have administrator level access to the machine. Advanced technologically? Hardly. Just proprietary and locked in, and not very security conscious. The amount of times I had to click "Allow this website to install an ActiveX control" is just insane, I don't want to think of the amount of remote code execution vulnerabilities present on a machine with all these controls installed. They're pretty much conditioned to allow the website to install any old thing, really, since so many of their websites require it.
If the execs running Red Hat or another Linux distro had the killer instinct that Gates and other Microsoft execs have always had, then every single obstacle to "upgrading" Windows to Vista would be greeted as an offramp to Linux. Packages that reinstalled Linux would be marketed as "Windows recovery tools" to people evaluating Vista. Bundled with Office workalikes and training videos, and clickable data conversion tools.
It's easy to blame MS for being bad. It's harder to blame Linux distros for being bad at being as good at being bad.
--
make install -not war
They create ActiveX; it's has its uses but the security flaws are far too large to ignore.
...
People criticize MS for ActiveX, so...
They remove ActiveX; now there's less of a push for it but existing ActiveX systems are screwed.
People criticize MS for removing ActiveX, so...
PROFIT?
It is quite amazing that almost every computer you see there has windows XP with the dreaded Luna theme. Apple is unheard of, and so is firefox. Yet at the same time there seems to be quite a big linux community but very behind the scenes. Like here they have public terminals that run Linux, the computers in the library have openoffice.org installed but there is none of that in Korea. I went into a big computer shop in Pusan and didn't see a single mac or anything remotely to do with linux. Then there are all the dreaded PC clubs, where people play to the death, literally. Most of them still using CRT's yet high spec computers for gaming. Almost every bar you walk into subscribes to some "maxmp3" or similar service - all based out of the browser (IE6) flash-based web players, maybe ActiveX who knows I was more concerned with drinking Hite
One would think that the PHB's in Redmond would have considered the ramifications of being sooooo special that it disconnects a whole high tech country from your product. I'm am so glad I dumped all my MS stock 3 weeks ago.
How can anybody, i mean anybody, use ActiveX for anything? (apart maybe from Intranet stuff). I mean, this is vendor lock-in at it's best, doesn't anybody learn from the past?
But Hangul's developers are even more stupid than that. Heck, Vista was available for Months via msdn, how can anyone not have adapted their Software to run on Vista by now?
Oh wait it isn't as though they had a frickin year to test their stuff with Vista. Not that MS and Vista aren't without there faults, but come on, Vista has been available for a year for evaulation and to test stuff out and make sure it runs before it came out of beta/rc status. This isn't the fault of MS or Vista, this is the fault of lazy people who didn't bother to obtain a copy to test with.
When i listened to national public radio the other day they were advising the same thing. To wait on Vista until all the bugs are worked out. I really fail to see why the fact that Koreans were advised the same thing makes that big a difference. The title should have been "Users warned to wait until upgrading to Vista".
... until Hangul don't run! (there goes my karma!)
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Some sites even insist on using VB, in place of Javascript - ugh!
Don't I know it!!! I assume you mean client-side VBScript, which only works in IE. Server-side VBScript (in ASP, or VB.NET in ASP.NET) works just fine, since plain HTML is sent to the browser.
Recently, while troubleshooting an error in one of our customer's server-side code, I came across a web-form with a client-side VBScript validator. Underscoring the fact that the "developer" didn't understand what was going on, there was a disclaimer on the page that the form only works on "Internet Explorer and other browsers that support ASP". Of course, ASP had nothing to do with the incompatibility, it was the client-side VBScript.
It almost goes without saying, but the code had FrontPage written all over it!!
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
Portions of the popular "Hangul" word processor, a major competitor to Office in that country, are also not functioning under Vista.
... and nothing at all to do with Microsoft wanting to increase Office uptake in these territories.
Yeah, I'm sure it's because of upgrade issues
As for the rest of it, FFS stop tying yourself into proprietary systems. What's with the ActiveX obsession?
No, the problem is that incompetently created websites use delicate nonportable nonstandard proprietary software that is only interoperative with one single obsolete platform.
Don't blame Vista; blame people who aren't responsible, experienced, or forward-looking enough to see why complying with standards is so necessary.
Now let's see how people will fix their glaring mistake. Will they "fix" it by repeating it (i.e. rewriting ActiveX controls to be compatible with Vista, so that they can get paid to screw their customers again in 5 years when the next version of Windows comes out) or will they fix it by removing the irresponsible dependencies?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This assumes that one of two things will eventually happen:
As for the first, it's possible that MS can decide later that it "degraded the user experience" with Vista with regard to ActiveX and loosen the restrictions on it with SP1 (thus, degrading the user experience when the next generation of ActiveX exploits get into the wild).
For the second, it would take a lot of time for these things to get ported to non-MS (not necessarily Open) solutions such as Flash.
Which will come first?
Seems MS has created quite a dilemma for themselves. No doubt Korea isn't the only country where this will happen.
Ah gee, like there will be 8 billion cool new pcs shipping with, what?, oh, Vista installed over the next few years. Ugh...cannnn'tttt --- sssstopppppp --- Visssstaaa (horrifying scream followed by dull thud).
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
There is one right way to enable active-x on a website that pervasively needs it. That is to add the website to your trusted sites list and change the settings only for trusted sites to allow active-x. I'm sure a lot of people just edit their settings for all websites though after getting tired of clicking allow 20 time in one banking session.
"wake me up when..."
That's just plain silly. Some people value other things, you know. Your "wants" are not the standard. I could just as easily say and it would be just as valid with: Wake me up when your software vendor quits trying to lock me in, gives me a decent EULA and gives me choices that I want. Which, of course, means nothing to you just as your check list means nothing to me.
"I'm actually a MS user and I don't have a rabid irrational hatred of them like many around here."
Au contraire, mon ami. Many, if not most, of us are M$ users and we have developed a thoroughly rational hatred of the company, based on our experiences of bloated, bug ridden, excessively expensive software, their constant undermining of standards, and their elevation of their opportunities to make money above user convenience. (My favorite was the Win98SE installer that asked if you wanted on-line services, and installed them anyway if you checked no.)
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
No, I'm New Here
See the title.
Bingo, exactly correct. This is not a Vista problem, it's a problem that various suckers used ActiveX and other non-standard features in the first place. And me without mod points, too.
Brett
Hmmm, making web stuff with proprietary MS crap like "ActiveX" is now bad? That is not the story that MS would say. This is exactly what the companies of Korea that used MS-only crap deserve. Using MS-Only crap will only bite you in the end. Using _any_ proprietary MS-crap has always wound up being a bad choice IME. To bad most business shills give in to the MS marketing machine and continue to use MS-only junk.
.Net would have put all the VB-only "programmers" out of a job. However, MS gave in and brought VB to the .Net platform. What a shame.
Using standards is the _only_ way to go. Every time anyone buys into MS-only crap, they _will_ get burned in the end. As a programmer with more than a decade of experience, I never recommend MS-only junk. I always push for standards, regardless of platform. Too bad the programming market is flooded with a bunch of MS-only, VB-only "programmers". In the past decade, the biggest problems I have seen with systems have all come from "programmers" that only know MS stuff.
All of the programmers I have met that know Linux or Solaris or Mac in addition to MS have all been top notch. All the MS-only, VB-only "programmers" I have met have been _rocks_ and do not deserve a job. Sometimes I am ashamed to be a programmer because of how the market is flooded with all these MS-only, VB-only "programmers". I was hoping that Microsoft's move to
Please spare me the "VB is a 'real' programming language now" bunk. It is still a _basic_, overly verbose, child-like language for bottom of the barrel, dime-a-dozen, "programmers".
Mark me troll if you want. However, anyone with any real programming abilities out there would agree.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Vista will be Microsoft's best seller ever. You wait and see.
I don't have to wait - the Vista upsell has already generated record interest in my desktop Linux class. As the bad reviews continue to pour out, Vista is going to sell the competition like no Windoze before.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I am not a "windows consultant", whatever that might mean. ... prophecies of doom and gloom about this "kludgy piece of crap" become true ...
It means that part of your income is derived from selling people on the Windoze monopoly. I'm not sure what kind of income you get off some $20 program, but it's all the more surprising that you would advocate an upsell to Vista. If your software resembles your comments, it too is a kludgy piece of crap dependent on specific versions of Windoze.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Avoid Vista" forever!
So smart... yet so ActiveX...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Her online banking uses incredibly invasive, poorly conceived and programmed software called nProtect. Which installs a bloody device driver to function. It actually blue screened Vista randomly.
Right, so they are going to be buying yet more stuff that does not work? Be on the look out for LAMP jobs.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Time was only Old North Koreans needed to avoid Vista.
The Korean governmnent isn't telling the people to wait until Vista's security policy changes.
It's the other way around - the Korean government is telling them to wait until third party vendors (including the Korean governmnent itself) adopt to the new Vista security model.
I actually hope Vista adopts a REALLY harsh security model, so that the ill-designed, ActiveX-cluttered website designers have no choice but to design their site so that they have no administrator privilege.
Vista salesman to Chevy Chase...
Tell you what, you give me half the money you were going to pay for Vista and Office 2007, we go out back, I kick you in the nuts and we'll call it a day!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
...and if there is only one browser used, well, you're compatiblity woes were just eased quite a bit.
.Mac? .English And those are just half the examples from clicking one single click down on their topmost interface.
Microsoft has made significant efforts to make Windows/Office/etc responsive to the needs of Korean developers and users, just like they do everywhere else. I don't know many of the specifics about the Korean effort, but the Office Japan team did some serious surgery because typical Japanese documents are structured differently than typical American documents (to make a long story short, think tables. LOTS of tables), and as a result Office is a big player in Japan (along with a few Japanese competitors) and many foreign developed programs like, oh, that "OpenWhatever" thingee are not. (My boss, who is in charge of OSS promotion at my technology incubator, calls it OpenWhatever. He tried it once, and uninstalled it within 15 minutes because he couldn't coerce it into writing a travel report in the form our employer requires.)
What have the other browsers/OSes decided to do for Korea, other than saying "Well, we'll provide the tools and the Koreans can build themselves usable software to compete with the Microsoft ones that already work"? Browse on over to Apple Korea's website and you can tell that they really value that market... click on "Switch" and you're taken to a wonderful presentation on the benefits of Mac, written entirely in English. Whoopsie! Well, at least you can use all the wonderful Made4Mac software... oh, English again.
Well, maybe OSS is doing a better job? Depends a lot on the distribution. I prefer Ubuntu personally, but good luck using it with an Asian language. After you've installed it you've got about 15 minutes worth of configuration to do (using a command line, naturally) to enable non-critical features like, oh, typing in non-Western scripts. I rather doubt you'll have to hexedit any config files in Vista Home Premium (Korean edition) to be able to type in hangul.
Korea might not be compatible with Mac/OSS... what has Mac/OSS done to be compatible with Korea?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Snicker all you want, Slashdot, this is certainly the way to bet. The number of installed computers in the world is increasing far faster than Mac and Linux's market share is. If it isn't Mac and it isn't Linux in 6 years it will run Vista.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
You know, I could have sworn Hangul was a writing system used for the Korean langauge, and that various word processors supported it. I seem to recall knowing a guy in college who had the Hangul version of Word Perfect, for instance.
Is there really also a word processor _called_ "Hangul", or is the article writer just deeply confused?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You must be new here.
well, microsoft really won't care if they install it or not. about 80 koreans will actually PAY for the software legally, the rest will just get a discounted version from Mr Kim down the street.
participate [...] in a professional manner...
avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims...
a thoughtful, well-reasoned response...
If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
Respect the use of other operating systems.
If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
Score:-1, Troll
Only on Slashdot.
Propellerhead Software is the name of the company which makes the software package called Reason, a complete software music studio package for the PC running Windows, among other music software.
Please, do try and keep up and at least make a minimal effort to stay informed before making ignorant comments. I realize this is Slashdot, and ignorance rarely restrains people from commenting, but still...
in soviet russia, active x runs you!
The only reason that Microsoft has messed around with ActiveX is so they can defend against a possible future court penalty for intentional infringement in the Eolas case. China should just buy Eolas, and then force Microsoft to revert to having ActiveX work the way it was originally designed to work.
I am using Vista and Office 2007 on my primary workstation. Apart from minor incompatibilities with some existing applications which are getting fixed by software vendors very quickly (e.g. Reason's ReWire was broken for Vista and got a fix within a few days) there is nothing to fear about upgrading to Vista. The hardware compatibility and performance issues are negligible (if any). Aero Glass is very smooth and network performance is great. Most of my hardware got detected by Vista setup, and some of the more exotic stuff (like pro audio recording devices and guitar expression pedals) which wasn't detected, worked fine with XP drivers on Vista.
About Linux, wake me up when:
1. It runs all popular games I can run on Windows.
2. It gets low latency audio stack.
3. It gets anything comparable to audio/video production software I use. No Adobe Premiere? No Steinberg Cubase? No Propellerhead Reason? No Linux for me!
4. The installation doesn't suck as much as it does. The best experience I had with running Linux was under Virtual PC in Windows XP.
5. It streams media to my Xbox 360 in the living room.
6. It gets an IDE like Visual Studio.
7. And a lot more.
PS: Proudly posted through IE 7 from a machine running Windows Vista and Office 2007!
Great writeup! (Although you kind of strayed away from the script we gave you, but that's ok.)
Your new Acer Ferrari laptop is now on it's way
Kindest regards,
Steve Ba... no, wait... Palmer
Now it could be that I am crazy and don't understand the absolute dependence that koreans have for activex, but surely it would be benifical for everyone to change to vista while activex isn't functional so that internet developers HAVE to create programs that use other technologies, even if they aren't open they have to be better than activex.
Of course he's modded -1 Troll. That's twitter's personal stalker. I think this is the third time I've seen this guy post that after twitter said something...
You know, there are probably a few of these Twitter "stalkers". I used to reply to Twitter's posts because he is such a douche bag, and I always found it amusing to read about how he thinks Bill Gates pays people to post trash about him. What a fucking retard. I still find it funny when I see posts like "How to advocate free software". There are still plenty of people who harass (or try to) Twitter, and it makes me happy.
All are advised to "Avoid Vista" for Now!
It's what all of us have been saying for ages now...
I want to wake up from this nightmare.
On the other hand, the irony that heavy reliance on a proprietary Microsoft standard is now preventing people from buying the latest Microsoft product is delicious.
... that "I hate Microsoft" syndromeFunny how pretty much all defense of Microsoft products is based on name calling like that. Even organized defense like the astroturfers, both announced and unannounced, on Wikipedia. If MS products could stand up to competition on technical merits, then the solution in that case would have been to publish a white paper and let the facts stand for themselves. However, everyone, including the politburo in Redmond know that any white paper would get ripped to shreds and leave no doubt as to the problems with their technologies, thus the name calling route.
You forget or want to forget that brand recognition works both ways. Microsoft has an established and well-documented history of shit-poor quality, high prices and illegal, anti-competitive business methods. Lack of quality you can see for yourself by evaluating any of the technologies and comparing them. Or you see how licenses and other maneuvers prevent reviews, inferring that the product can't stand on its own. You can see the high prices by looking at the company's SEC fillings, or by reading the findings of fact from the multitude of States and nations that had filed lawsuits for overcharging. Likewise, the courts' findings of facts and even decisions and decisions after appeal point to strong dependence on illegal, anti-competitive business methods.
Then you can add other shining moments like the then CEO's perjury on the stand and forged video evidence during trials. That goes beyond bad judgment far into disrespect. A group that has so little respect for US laws, US courts and the US people appears by its behavior to be both anti-American and a threat to the nation. So you could say that the company and it's management have worked very hard for decades to earn and keep the all-around poor reputation.
Brand recognition hurts if you product and your company suck: It's not about an arbitrary like / dislike, despite however much you want it to be that way. It's about sucks / doesn't suck and from that people tend to dislike things that suck. Like / dislike is earned.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Vista is not done until Hangul won't run.
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
Just in case you needed a confirmation on that Seoul is on of the World's most intelligent cities, here it is. :)
I don't know Twitter, but we have learned in the last few days that Bill Gates does indeed pay people to post trash. How big of a jump is it to think that Microsoft is paying people to astroturf this place?
Hell, man, the Worldwide Islamocommunofascist Conspiracy sends me a few bucks now and then to say "George W. Bush is a Dope". I think they're paying a lot of us, huh?
Cha-ching.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sounds like the rich thieving korean companies are afraid that people will no longer be able to receive their spam, spybots, and trojan viruses.
Well, Microsoft pays people to post in places where there is huge exposure (i.e. Wikipedia). I agree, someone might be posting on Slashdot, but to specifically follow around some nutjob like Twitter and respond to his posts? Very unlikely.
Now where will I download my hacked copy of Vista?
There are only two steps in the gathering of ultimate knowledge. Open your eyes and, RTFM!
Sounds like the Koreans had no concern for security, and went bonkers on worst security practices.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I think this is good advice for anyone, not just Koreans. ^^
Is that why Korea can't upgrade to Vista... it doesn't play Starcraft correctly?
Oh well, I guess that means they have to wait for the Vista enabling patch.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011