Ye Olde Chosun columnist Kim Ki-cheon blasts Koreans’ dependence on Microsoft Windoze and ActiveX (HT to Matt):
Whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system, such as Windows Vista, or a new version of Explorer, only in Korea is there a fuss about previous versions not working. The country’s closed and outdated computing environment is overly dependent on ActiveX.The following is from a post earlier this month on a blog maintained by British freelance IT experts: “Korea’s excellent Internet infrastructure may be useless as long as its software programs are adopting outdated technologies.” Korea is like an oxcart going along a highway.
And on that note, I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 yesterday, and I’m liking what I’m seeing. My only real bitch — and this isn’t Ubuntu’s fault — is that since Amarok went to 2.x, I can’t find a decent podcast management program. UPDATE: OK, now Rhythmbox is beginning to grow on me.
One bug with the Korean version of Ubuntu, however, is that the fonts on Open Office look like shit. This bug is easily corrected, however, using the instructions found here.
Oh, and if you haven’t tried the development version of Chrome for Linux, get it — it really does fly.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m running Ubuntu on my work computer and really wish I had Chrome running on it (though I don’t have root access, gotta ask the IT guy to install it). It’s an old computer so firefox goes SO slow. Glad to hear Chrome is a real choice now.
Wow, using the Korean version huh? Pretty gutsy, I use Korean Windows but haven’t ventured to installing a Korean version of Linux.
Yeah, I would download Chrome straight away — it’s frightening how fast it runs on Ubuntu. And like you, I use an old computer. Don’t even need root access — just download the .deb package and install it.
As for the Korean version of Ubuntu, it’s just the same as the English version… just in Korean. Nothing particular gutsy about that, and really quite necessary when you work a lot in Korean.
OT, but there’s an interesting writeup about “Minerva” in Wired Magazine.
‘Korea is like an oxcart going along a highway’ is so true.
A friend of mine who is a web developer back home is very jealous of my amazing internet connection, but Koreans don’t seem to be very good at code. I showed him a few Korean sites like Gmarket and Naver and he was disgusted by the incompetence of the coding and the pure ugliness on those sites.
Active X is also complete bollocks, it really serves no purpose these days. Even on my friends crappy UK broadband connection, well coded sites load far faster than Korean sites here tend to.
Korea needs the fast speed to deal with the sheer amount of crap that ‘web developers’ put into their clients’ pages.
Korean hardware engineering is strong… software engineering is downright primitive…
I agree with Keith. Sites like GMarket, Daum and Naver are appallingly designed and coded. They’re the web equivalent of a building covered in shitty signboards.
I don’t browse the korean web much, do they still actually use activeX controls?
ActiveX was somewhat useful (and dangerous) back in the 1990’s, when there wasn’t a boatload of other options. Any website that still uses them is doing it very wrong.
Also, adblock is a good way to cut down on ads if you use firefox: http://adblockplus.org/en/
Both Auction & GMarket are now owned by eBay. I suspect that the coding for these sites will slowly change.
Thanks for the links! I’ve seen the bug in OpenOffice on Ubuntu before, but I don’t normally use Ubuntu (or OpenOffice for that matter), so I didn’t bother correcting it. It’s sometimes handy to have a non-source-based distro available, though, and Ubuntu is really useful for evangelizing since it’s probably the best distro to start with…
There are a few other small glitches and annoyances I found with this latest release from Canonical. 떠돌이 covers some of them in the post you linked to, including problems with flash on amd64 machines.
I’m also glad to find the article on Korea’s monoculture. Was it actually published in the Korean version of 조선일보? I couldn’t find any Korean version of this article online.
And Keith and Nix, ActiveX is required to use SEED, which is used for encryption on Korean Internet sites. It’s a pity this isn’t mentioned in the Chosun Ilbo article.
Hey Rob, I just installed 9.10 with Korean too. Do you get weird fonts in your GNOME terminal? The English letters are extremely oddly spaced out for me.
Just a FYI, I guess it’s the ‘monospace’ font which it defaults to. I changed it to DejaVu Sans Mono Book and it looks fine.
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