An Example of a Captive Market . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
As anyone interested in using an Operating System (OS) other than Micro$oft will testify, South Korea is like a desert. Everything here is designed virtually entirely for use with a Micro$oft OS. Even my own mp3 player, being Korean, cannot be used with anything other than XP right now. I find this extremely irritating, but it gets worse . . .
Wayyyy back when I was working as an analytical chemist for the British Ministry of Defence in Wales, tootling along quite happily with Windoze 98SE, I started to mess around with alternative OSes. One day, when I was thinking about yet more hardware for my rather versatile little network, I was looking at the software shelves at the local Staples in Cardiff when I saw a strange-looking object: a boxed set of Mandrake Linux 7.0 complete with manuals. The latest version, Mandrake 7.1, had just come out and so the older one was being offered at a reduced price and, being fairly well-paid at the time, I bought it.
Truth to tell, I never could get the thing to work. There was nothing wrong with either the software or the hardware (although it couldn't use Winmodems at that time), the problem was PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard) – to wit, one's own ignorance. Can you believe that I actually screwed up a 2Gb hard drive doing that? What a mess . . .
Now we fast-forward a bit to June 2004 . . . the Boss has asked me if I wanted to stay for another year and I said: "Yes". So I promptly went to the owner of a nearby PC room (as cybercafes are called in Korea) and arranged to pay him to get the parts of a complete new PC shipped in from Seoul at cut prices. I actually put the whole thing together in about two and a half hours on a Wednesday afternoon before I set off for work and yes, it was working, too . . . but no OS. Not yet; I had to go to the local Etland electrical outlet in Sangnam-dong and I was dismayed to discover that despite all of the things like games and office software they had only "upgrades" to XP Home from previous versions of Windoze. I had to pay for the thing and then wait for it to arrive. And Windoze ain't cheap!
All of this was time-critical because previously – also on the way to work – I had popped into the local Hanafos offices to arrange for their highest-speed cable connection – business quality – to be wired into my humble abode. I just managed to get the OS installed before the man came to do the dirty deed.
After a while, I had been reading about how Linux was developing, and because I had already had experience of successfully partitioning hard drives back in the UK, decided to get a copy of Disk Director and then used Shareaza to locate the latest version of Mandrake. At that time, the "Community" (Free) version came on three CD-ROMs so I downloaded the ISOs and cut them to disk under Windoze, then partitioned the drive using Disk Director, creating a new ext3 partition, and installed the new OS there. After installation, the boot disk creates a boot menu so that you can choose which OS to go into at boot. Perfect?
Well . . . not quite. The firewall software was very good but for some reason, the Internet under Mandrake 10.0 seemed to come and go. Ditto under 10.2, after which the next distro became 2005LE (after Mandrake had joined up with Conectiva of Brazil and Lycoris to transmogrify into Mandriva); still the same problem. Then in 2006.0, everything finally came together. As I sit here I am typing under 2007.0 on my desktop and on my laptop, this has now been superseded by the newest version, 2007.1.
Am I happy with Mandriva rather than Windoze XP Pro? Well, actually . . . yes I am. Now, I rarely if ever go into the Windoze partitions on my two machines and when I do it is usually for one of two reasons: either (a) I feel the periodic need to update all of the antivirus and anti-everything-else databases, or (b) I need to reload music (or the actual OS) onto my (Korean) Mobiblu mp3 player. Or there might be a pressing need for the use of my little stick webcam. And that's it. That really is all that I am using Windoze for these days; it is virtually redundant.
Given that despite "a little local difficulty" it was entirely possible to get the best version of Windoze available in Korea at that time (2004, XP Pro), why would I want to install a completely different OS at Micro$oft's expense? Well there are many reasons, so read on, dear reader, read on . . .
PC users in Korea are victims of a monopoly, a monopoly which has the people and the government (those in the know, at any rate) up in arms; this is why M$ has been prosecuted here just as in the US and Europe and for the same reasons, being forced to offer Media Player-free Windoze. Not that anyone here really understands or cares, of course. I was talking to a Korean co-worker here the other month and she was telling me that she couldn't use her PC because it had become infected with "something" . . . I suggested that I could sort this out for her but predictably, nothing ever came of it. Your experience counts for nothing when you are a foreigner in Korea.
Everything computing here revolves around Windoze, the place is therefore a death-trap of botnets, viruses and spam, a captive audience entirely ignorant of the consequences of what they do, unlike some of us who have wised up a bit . . . the botnets and other trash generated in South Korea reach literally around the world, and it is all because of Windoze and the ignorance of people who use it willy-nilly.
Take the place where I work. Everything has been run on Win98SE, believe it or not, until recently when the changing nature of the proprietary teaching software began to force the Boss to install first XP Pro, and now a furtive copy of Vista has actually materialised upon one of the classroom machines. I was even shocked to discover this week that one of these was actually connected to the outside world, when that silly little yellow shield popped up in the Systray – Windoze and networks, what a horror story (there's a picture of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" in my mind right now)!
And in case you were wondering, no, the software was not any more reliable under Vista than it was under either XP Pro or 98SE. It also cannot (as far as I can tell) be virtualised successfully under Mandriva, although of course, with appropriate advice, I would give it another try . . . those machines are not even defragged regularly. Imagine! ^_^
But everything you see here for computing is exclusively Windoze. PCs are flogged on TV and in the supermarkets, and as far as the retailers and marketers are concerned no other OS exists and if it did, they would ignore it because (a) they know nothing about it and (b) they would lose face in a most serious and public fashion by being seen to fail. And if what you see on the TV is anything to go by, it is entirely misleading – what they see on the display screens must surely be a video feed. I do have a Korean associate here (seen often at a foreigner pub, ahem) who was saying that he was considering getting a Mac, but then he has spent most of his life in Philadelphia (so he knows about Macs).
I have used Windoze since about 1995, starting with 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98SE, 2000 and finally XP Pro, and I have to be honest and say that while it was possible to do work with it, it was always a pig to use. As the security situation has deteriorated, I have ended up with usually some six or seven different bits of software to protect it and while some of them are free, after only a few years the annual cost of maintaining the AV and anti-everything-else-ware began to represent a worrying fraction of the purchase cost of the OS; and over the last two years the size of their "updates" has increased alarmingly – some of these filesets are now four times as big as they were then.
Most weekends see me delving temporarily into Windoze simply to update the AV and spyware etc. software and scan, scan, scan. If it weren't for the webcam (now rarely used) and the mp3 player, I would literally have got rid of it by now. The paradox of Windoze as it stands right now is that while it has become ever more stable, it has not been able to resist malware effectively and this more than anything else is its Achilles Heel from the point of view of an ordinary user.
Oh well, at least I can have streaming audio playing while it scans . . . but this all slows it down so much that there's little point in trying to do anything else with it.
So that's why I'm dual-booting instead of occupying the whole HD with Mandriva, much though I would like to. Almost 100% of Koreans with a PC choose to use the market-dominating OS despite its flaws – which is very revealing at the psychological level. They are afraid of being seen to be different from everyone else, a very powerful marketing tool, don't you think?
As I said over at OSNews recently, people keep dissing Mandriva for no apparent reason, like they are expecting perfection all the time; but the problem with this is that their paragon of perfection, against which the likes of Mandriva are judged, have cracks and flaws bordering on the tectonic; being a Mandriva Club Silver Member for the last couple of years may have cost me money but it's obvious all the time that it's money well spent on a product into which a hell of a lot of work has gone, and I appreciate that.
Mandriva boots up in no time at all (compared to Windoze, which now has the HD whizzing around for aaaaggggeeeesssss because of all the AV gubbins), seems to have no security issues (especially since I installed the wifi router) and is always reliable. I just boot it up and I'm working and effective literally within a minute. I can produce bilingual materials (in Korean and English – I'm still working on Japanese and Chinese), the printer always works and does exactly what I want, I have my own custom blocklist on both my machines and yes, before anyone asks, it _does_ look a bit like Win98SE . . . with transparent panels and menus. But I am happy and productive in this environment.
My own suggestion is that the benefits of having any decent Linux distro are much easier for a newcomer to appreciate once they have endured Windows for a long time. Then migrate as many others are doing today to a dual-boot environment and thence finally to virtualisation. This is what will be happening when my desktop (2007.0) box is upgraded.
Given that people tend to feel a bit of trepidation when confronted with a new OS, ease of installation and modification are a prime requirement because most purchasers of OEM Windows systems will probably never have done this before. I had some insight before proceeding because I had been playing around with MDK 7.0 back in 1999. The prospect of having an easily installed PC OS which is easy to use and has more free productivity and entertainment tools than they can shake a stick at, and over which they have complete control because proprietary blobs are minimal, should get a company like Mandriva killed in the rush.
Unfortunately, however, not everyone is pleased by this. My editor back in Stevenage, England, seems to be aghast at the prospect. It just doesn't seem to occur to him that almost all of the communications he receives from me these days originate in a non-Windoze box. He just doesn't get it. But then, he is deeply dependent upon Windoze-based software of varying vintages (which is the greatest problem with W., I kid you not, I reckon no-one needs virtualisation more than he does!). The notion that the ideal situation would be common standards of software compatibility which allow you to listen to music, play a video file or manipulate PDF files reliably across different platforms is something which he has yet to bump into. Yet the moment you start to straddle the dual-boot divide and begin to think in terms of what can be used in common across that divide, the way you see things changes.
So here I am sitting here with the latest version of Mandriva 2007.1 finally installed on my laptop. Installed entirely over the Internet using ftp. This time the only disk I cut was a single one with the only file on it a mini-linux distro intended solely for booting the system to allow installation and hey presto, everything came down the wire, no having to go to the local Etland or wherever even for a fresh pack of blank CDs, what a great way to install an OS!
And the difference this time? Well, I keep multiple copies of everything like graphic files I need to reconstitute the desktop as I like it and the big, big biiiiig-g-g plus this time is that Mandriva PowerPack+ comes with wifi completely sorted and operative right out of the box. That's right, you install the thing, then it tells you to remove the boot CD and reboot, and there it is; it detected my wifi network straight away and I have never been happier.
Let me conclude with a brief mention of what has been happening otherwise here in Korea. As the business has been expanding, the requirement for a third foreign teacher has become ever more pressing and now, after something like six months of trying, we are within a couple of weeks of him arriving and a (hopefully) complete rearrangement of the daily timetable into something more manageable. To pay for the added staff (which also includes two new Korean girls), we are getting loads of new kids in and this is a headache.
Despite all of the problems the Boss actually asked me (as I was setting up Skype for an interview with an American applicant) if I wanted to stay for another year! I thought: "You WHAT!!???"
"Do you want me to stay?" I asked and his answer was: "Yes."
"OK then, I'll stay." I said, and he seemed well pleased with this response.
Spring has arrived and predictably, perhaps, so have (a) the annual clouds of unwelcome "floating yellow sand" (hwang-sa) and pollution from China, and (b) mosquitoes. Anyone wanting to come here for an extended period must take some precautions against both of these things: the former will give you lung diseases and the latter will give you malaria, Japanese Encephalitis and a whole host of other things if you're not careful.
For a foreigner, life in Korea presents many challenges. I arrived here with almost nothing but books after a bittersweet experience teaching English to little kids in Taiwan; now I have a place with a computer network running a non-Micro$oft OS and a new contract for a fifth consecutive year working for my employer. By the end of this contract year (which ends in July), this will be longer than any continuous period of employment I ever knew back in England. And so, on yet another Korean Sunday afternoon, I look at how things are and realise that however bad the challenges thrown at me have been, clearly I have overcome them in one way or another; I have been more successful by hard work here than I ever was working back in the UK. Clearly there were "restrictions", either real or psychological, which held me back from achieving more. And that is the greatest lesson I will take home with me when I leave.
Andrew.
