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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."
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you shouldn't use Slashdot as your source of news? Just a thought.
A company in the midwest I do some consulting for just did a 1,200 desktop test rollout to one of their divisions. They didn't have any legacy problems and were upgrading to Office 2007 anyway, plus they had fairly new machines.
Like XP vs W2K before, Vista uptake will necessarily be slow, but eventually it will be installed everywhere. In fact, I'm guessing it will be even a bit more successful than XP because all those Windows 2000 holdouts are probably overdue for a machine upgrade as well.
I'm surprised to find a windows consultant claiming that a new version of windows will be successful. It's almost as if his business depends on people paying him to install this kludgy piece of crap, but that just makes no sense.
Okay, sorry for the sarcasm and the cheap shot.
I think perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Vista will not be a complete flop, but it will sell well under what Microsoft expects.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Cross browser/OS compatibility isn't important at all?
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?
blah blah blah
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".
Corporations don't buy used computers. And Joe Windows doesn't normally hop on eBay to buy used computers.
Why not just make it a Windows app then? I'm sure any company that has a Intranet also has VPN, so offsite computing isn't a problem. Also, a Windows app would work even if Apache/IIS went down, but the DB backend stayed up.
It's disengenuous to ignore that ActiveX is a technology that is meant to use MS's dominant presence on computing to balkanize the web.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but CRTs are superior to LCDs for gaming in every way but the usual reasons to buy LCD, size and weight. LCDs have one resolution, CRTs can do many resolutions (and true multisync CRTs, which are admittedly a rarity these days, can do all KINDS of things.) The best LCD has a refresh rate and is chunky compared to a CRT, which has persistence due to phosphors.
SED is supposed to address the issue of persistence, but won't solve any of the other issues.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I go to University Surplus Equipment auctions where the small businessmen who sell to 'Joe Windows' buy the used machines cheap. Believe me, there is a thriving business for used PCs. So much so that now Dell is trying, in the false name of 'recycling', to suck all the old gear back to Dell Central so they can make sure it's dismantled and (most likely) shipped to China for disposal.
A lot of the buyers of the used PC gear at auction now are people of color, who recycle/rebuild for their local communities. Lotsa good stuff gets out to people who can make good use of it that way. It's only a matter of time before these people discover they can continue on using the inexpensive machines much better and even use current software by not letting anything Redmond touch the hard drives.
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.
...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.
No. Slashdot is always truthful.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.