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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."
Not always. Not if this is a closed solution. Being a true executable Activex is more powerful than any other solution could ever be, so many companies just use it as a first hand solution for internal use. Why do they need cross browser support? To be politically correct? Well, fuck that!
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Short version: they use Active-X because of US export policy.
Long version: Before Clinton allowed export of strong encryption, web browsers outside US only supported 40-bit encryption. So instead of using ssl with 40-bit keys, the Korean government adopted something called SEED, a homegrown algorithm with support for longer keys. So all the online banking stuff was done with it. This was around when IE was taking over the browser market, so banks used Active X to implement SEED. People liked it because it allowed them very nice and frequently updated widgets, and most people were running windows anyway.
Fast forward 10 years, the whole country is dependent on Active-X and therefore MS, with *zero* support for alternatives. As everyone is using IE, most web sites (including Korean Government sites) are designed only for IE+Acitve-X. All banking, shopping, stock trading, is done through Active-X, with no alternatives. This discourages people from using anything but Windows, perpetuating the monopoly. Korea is the only country where the stock market and most financial system shutdown because of the MS-SQL slammer worm (back in Jan '05). With help from rampant software piracy, MS is *the* dominant player in *all* software markets, and Korea's culture of homogeneity has simply perpetuated the monopoly.
I'm hoping people learned their lesson and will shift to more standards compliance and alternative implementations, but somehow I don't think so. In fact, the Korean Government will demand MS "fix" "their" problem, as obviously it is MS's fault for breaking "the Internet".
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
That and all the health and environmental hazards associated with CRTs.
Cathode= Very high voltage at the back of your computer
Ray= Stream of electrons hitting the phosphor, producing visible light and also ultraviolet and higher light that is shielded from french frying your face by the three or so kilos of lead inside your monitor
Tube= Vacuum Tube that is just itching to implode
Not that these are things to absolutely alarmist about, but if CRTs were being developed as a new technology, with our health, safety and environmental concerns we have now, noone would ever go for it.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Uhhh... you really cannot offload security to a client. Trust me. I work for a fortune 500 with more than 150,000 employees. We have converted most of our apps to be web apps. All security was brought to the server side because we had so many issues with clients systems. Any one that offloads security to a client is a dolt IMO. It will come back to bite you big time. :-)
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Yes, there is, and from my experience it's at least as common there as MSWord. The Koreans I work with were actually surprised that I couldn't open the *.hwp files they kept sending me.
Yup. There is a word processor called "Hangul".
t _info/office/hangul2007_info.php
http://www.haansoft.com/hnc5_0/haansoft_en/produc
i worked on windows vista and spent quite a bit of time investigating application compatibility issues with the hangul office suite. i am pretty sure we fixed many blocking issues and delivered shims for more specific problems.
i doubt it is as bad as they are saying.
Maybe where you live it is the case. In France, it is opened 7AM to 10PM IIRC. At least it was at the time, I spent enough time trying to call them at at 1AM to know.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I'm 99% certain that they'll repeat their mistake.
ActiveX controls and IE-isms are pervasive across the Korean web. Almost every major Korean web site relies either on custom ActiveX controls or some feature of IE that is non-standard. My wife is Korean, and we keep a copy of Virtual PC on our Mac just so that she can access her bank.
There are some indicators that this is changing, but progress is very slow. One example of this is a shift in displaying video clips - 18 months ago these were universally displayed using custom ActiveX controls and so wouldn't work on our Mac - these days most are using Flash players, and are now visible.
The reason for the dominance of MS is price. The reason why there are slow moves away from MS technologies is price.
It must be remembered that Korea was an early adopter of Internet technologies with government policies put in place to subsidise the development of a pervasive broadband network. Back then the choices for running serious web sites were either Apache on Solaris or IIS on NT, with IIS being the cheaper option - Linux was far too new to be taken seriously. Most of the back-end web infrastructure in Korea is MS, as well as client-end.
In the short and medium term in most cases it will be much cheaper and faster to fix on-line banking (and other web sites) in Korea by making the required ActiveX controls Vista compatible. This is therefore the route that will be taken.