Well, the pattern that you point out seems reasonable and make sense...:) Japan is one of the countries with the greatest portion of elderly people... South Korea is putting more than 300 thousand sentrymen to watch out for their heavily fortified border with that crazy North Korea, and replacing those sentrymen with the "guard robots" will have a huge positive economic effect.
Unlike North America (and Western Europe), many websites in East Asia use grizzillions of ActiveX controls and popups, ranging from simple news sites to banking to online games. You know, one of the main benefits of XP SP2 is blocking those "unwanted" popups and ActiveX sh*ts, but that is detrimental to those crappy nonstandard website runners - so often they provide some "get-around" for users with XP SP2, or even encourage them NOT to install SP2, contrary to M$'s recommendation. Piracy and low bandwidth shouldn't be the major reasons, because there are already tons of update-eligible serial numbers (even I am holding at least 5 of them, for just a testing purpose) and they are quite well equipped with high-speed broadband internet (particularly in S. Korea and urban China, as well as HK & Singapore).
Well, I've heard that MS plans to stop supporting ActiveX from IE7 - those nobrainer websites may need to do something to survive. Personally, I don't feel sorry at all for the demise of these crappy websites.
When I see the original post saying "Learn Korean" at first I thought "What the fu**?"; but it may make sense because of the tricky keyboard layout of the Japanese release version of VAIO (several SONY manias told me this thing; personally I've never used SONY laptops), whereas the Korean version of VAIO shall have similar keyboard layout and therefore much more reasonable choice for American buyers.
Well, I am actually a South Korean studying in US for 5 years. Although the broadband infrastructure there is surely impressive, I am well aware of the limitations and problems associated with the net-frenzyness in South Korea.
(1) Why so crazy for net? First, as most of you already know, South Korea is about 20 times as densely populated as in the US. Even worse, more than half of the whole population live around Seoul, in a region that only counts one tenth of the country. I'm not mentioning the economy matters. Rather, I am pointing out that chances for sound outdoor activities are really scarce! For scuva diving, bike hiking, yacht and wind-surfing,..., well, that's only for some manias; it's really hard to grab a decent place for such things. The result is that more and more people are just relaxing at on-line rather than outdoors. Well, not very good for health.:(
(2) So what do they do with net? Next, because of that, most of the netizen activities of South Koreans are not very productive. Downloading pirated movies and musics, playing online games, creating and enjoying weird online communities,..., most of them are just consuming digital merchandise having nothing to do with real life. For instance, I can hardly see handful of Koreans in any major open source project.
(3) What's wrong with the digital consumerism? Why don't I like it? These "digital consumerism" originated from the Asian economy crisis that hit South Korea at the end of 1997. To revive the economy, South Korean government encouraged IT industries and infrastructures, and lots of online contents providers are founded. One of the biggest investors were Micro$oft, and they provided support for developing M$-specific webpages; a screenful of images and ActiveX shits. That awful culture continues growing and growing, and now it's really a pain in the... posterior... to see major South Korean webpage with non-WinIE browser. I really wonder if Korean web develoopers have ever heard of W3C. A handful of my friends and myself continue to protest and struggle, but things are never improving.
In summary, I would say that although South Korean broadband infrastructure is decent, it's far from heaven in terms of what to do with that.
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Well, the pattern that you point out seems reasonable and make sense... :) Japan is one of the countries with the greatest portion of elderly people... South Korea is putting more than 300 thousand sentrymen to watch out for their heavily fortified border with that crazy North Korea, and replacing those sentrymen with the "guard robots" will have a huge positive economic effect.
Unlike North America (and Western Europe), many websites in East Asia use grizzillions of ActiveX controls and popups, ranging from simple news sites to banking to online games. You know, one of the main benefits of XP SP2 is blocking those "unwanted" popups and ActiveX sh*ts, but that is detrimental to those crappy nonstandard website runners - so often they provide some "get-around" for users with XP SP2, or even encourage them NOT to install SP2, contrary to M$'s recommendation. Piracy and low bandwidth shouldn't be the major reasons, because there are already tons of update-eligible serial numbers (even I am holding at least 5 of them, for just a testing purpose) and they are quite well equipped with high-speed broadband internet (particularly in S. Korea and urban China, as well as HK & Singapore). Well, I've heard that MS plans to stop supporting ActiveX from IE7 - those nobrainer websites may need to do something to survive. Personally, I don't feel sorry at all for the demise of these crappy websites.
When I see the original post saying "Learn Korean" at first I thought "What the fu**?"; but it may make sense because of the tricky keyboard layout of the Japanese release version of VAIO (several SONY manias told me this thing; personally I've never used SONY laptops), whereas the Korean version of VAIO shall have similar keyboard layout and therefore much more reasonable choice for American buyers.
Let's just use metric (SI) units from today on!
Well, I am actually a South Korean studying in US for 5 years. Although the broadband infrastructure there is surely impressive, I am well aware of the limitations and problems associated with the net-frenzyness in South Korea.
..., well, that's only for some manias; it's really hard to grab a decent place for such things. The result is that more and more people are just relaxing at on-line rather than outdoors. Well, not very good for health. :(
..., most of them are just consuming digital merchandise having nothing to do with real life. For instance, I can hardly see handful of Koreans in any major open source project.
... posterior ... to see major South Korean webpage with non-WinIE browser. I really wonder if Korean web develoopers have ever heard of W3C. A handful of my friends and myself continue to protest and struggle, but things are never improving.
(1) Why so crazy for net?
First, as most of you already know, South Korea is about 20 times as densely populated as in the US. Even worse, more than half of the whole population live around Seoul, in a region that only counts one tenth of the country. I'm not mentioning the economy matters. Rather, I am pointing out that chances for sound outdoor activities are really scarce! For scuva diving, bike hiking, yacht and wind-surfing,
(2) So what do they do with net?
Next, because of that, most of the netizen activities of South Koreans are not very productive. Downloading pirated movies and musics, playing online games, creating and enjoying weird online communities,
(3) What's wrong with the digital consumerism? Why don't I like it?
These "digital consumerism" originated from the Asian economy crisis that hit South Korea at the end of 1997. To revive the economy, South Korean government encouraged IT industries and infrastructures, and lots of online contents providers are founded. One of the biggest investors were Micro$oft, and they provided support for developing M$-specific webpages; a screenful of images and ActiveX shits. That awful culture continues growing and growing, and now it's really a pain in the
In summary, I would say that although South Korean broadband infrastructure is decent, it's far from heaven in terms of what to do with that.