The Law of the Handicap of a Head Start

Posted on March 9, 2010
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Flipping through Shine, I ran across an interesting mention (in the introduction to Lavie Tidhar’s contribution) of Jan Romein’s notion of Wet van de remmende voorsprong, or, in English, the “Law of the Handicap of a Head Start.”

It struck me that the Korean internet (a subject about which I recently posted) is a wonderful demonstration of both sides of this notion: the benefit of a late start, and the handicaps that a head start can introduce into a system.

The link above details several of the handicaps: the dependency on Windows, ActiveX, and even Internet Explorer 6.0, as well as the general institutional resistance to retooling Korean net commerce and web design to modern, global standards, multi-platform functionality, and so on. All of this results from the early adoption of a locally-developed system for security that the Korean government developed, dependent on ActiveX controls, so that ecommerce could begin earlier, instead of waiting for American encryption technology to be exported. That is to say, Korea innovated its own software, got into the game early, and for that initiative — and, one must add, the resistance ever since to adopting the later-agreed-upon global standard for the task — it is now paying a technological price.

That is, if you consider being stuck with only one OS/software combo, and being stuck with dated standards a bad thing. But not keeping your software up-to-date, and having an unnaturally homogenous digital ecosystem, are both likely to leave the country vulnerable. You’d think that was learned on January 25th, 2003, but I suppose not. Though the prediction is that that Koreans will have insanely fast broadband (1Gbps) by 2012, one cannot help but wonder whether they’ll still be using Internet Explorer 6.0 as their main window onto the world… as well as how exportable those “new companies” will be, given their necessary focus on obsolete software and platforms.

(And though this may sound absurd, one finds it slightly more difficult to imagine that Korean IT community will suddenly wake up and recognize the problem: Internet Explorer 6.0 — a browser first released in 2001, close to a decade ago — actually got more users last month, bringing the total very close to 50% of Korean internet users. Apparently they used to blame Microsoft for the problems in ActiveX, going so far as to talk about suing the company in 2003 — even though Microsoft had indeed issued a patch for the vulnerability: one wonders who would get blamed if something like the Slammer virus hit Korea today. Maybe they’d do as the cops did in 2003, and blame China? Sorry, guys, but the Chinese didn’t force Korean ISPs not to patch their systems.)

But the ironic thing is, Korea was probably propelled into this situation by the advantage of a late start. It was easier for Korea to set up a wired broadband Internet infrastructure not just because of South Korea is small and densely-packed with people; there are a whole host of reasons, from the conscious promotion of the internet to housewives, the explosion of PC-Bangs (a “gateway drug” to the experience of using the Net, making it more desirable to do so at home), deregulation allowing competition to emerge, a nationwide impetus to change things up after the 1997 economic crisis, and even the desire to keep up with the Joneses. (More details on these and more causes are available in this report.)

Another reason, certainly, is that Korea didn’t have to go through the massive experimental period when everyone was faffing around, trying to figure out what was the best way to provide or receive internet service. There was competition, but the job of building a high-speed internet infrastructure on any real scale came years after the dust settled on the messy question of which types of hardware and wiring would work best (at least, for now… new cabling always becomes necessary eventually, but laying cable early on means replacing it if you make a wrong choice — which is easier since early choices are also more often relatively uninformed choices — always the curse of early adopters). By then, it was easy enough to choose a basic infrastructure model as the standard, and to even award construction companies for building structures (homes and offices alike) specifically to fit with the national standards for internet connectivity.

All this raises a couple of interesting questions, very pertinent to the next work of long fiction I plan to write:

Interesting questions to play with. Feel free to comment, or not. I’m already thinking a lot of this through in terms of the novel I’m writing with the working titlle A Killing in Burma.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2010/02/123_61463.html

Shiny!

Posted on March 7, 2010
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shine_cover_2
shine_cover_2
oh my word,
these pages, full of stars:
how they Shine!

The stars to which I refer are, of course, bright and shiny ideas about this future we’re tumbling toward, and not the authors, of which I am one.

Just got my contributors’ copies of Shine, the new anthology of optimistic SF edited by Jetse de Vries that Amazon says is coming out on March 30th. I’ve only read a little of it, but it looks like a hell of a ride!

If you want on, you can preorder it at a bunch of places: Jetse has links for all of ‘em in the 3rd column on the Shine weblog.

Essays on Pop Culture

Posted on March 6, 2010
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Some interesting essays, available for a limited time, are available here. I liked the one by Nick Mamatas on Hurley, the character in Lost. Missed one by Kristine Kathryn Rusch which I wish I’d caught. Worth going back and looking every once in a while!

Outsider Writing

Posted on March 6, 2010
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Now that I’m back in Korea, and have a free morning, I’m just catching up on some blogs and fiction online and so on. I ran across a very interesting post at Aliette de Bodard’s blog, titled, Writing cultures: insider vs. outsider, about the various advantages and pitfalls faced by authors writing about a specific culture either as an insider, or as an outsider, for a Western audience (as in the dominant SF-reading audience, for example). It’s worth a read, including the comments, especially if you’re interested in my thoughts on the subject.

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Launch Pad Open to Applications

Posted on March 5, 2010
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I blogged about my experience at Launch Pad here before, and most recently discussed it with a group of other participants here, but I just want to highly, highly recommend that anyone working in science-popularization, in SF media or literature, who would like to have her or his mind blown a bunch of times in a week, getting not just an intensive course in astronomy but also in communicating science to nonscientists, learning about how to approach research, and hanging out with what will be, if you’re as lucky as I was, a stunningly wonderful group of people, you should apply for the Launch Pad Workshop.

This year is the last year of guaranteed funding, so it could well be your last chance. (Hopefully not: a new funding application is pending, but you never know.) The guest lecturer this year is Kevin Grazier, and of course the inimitable Mike Brotherton is leading the proceedings.

(And by the way, it’s held in Laramie, Wyoming, home to amazing numbers of wonderful microbreweries. Even the beer out there, though you won’t drink much unless you’re already used to the altitude, is wonderful and mind-blowing all at once.)

Apply! Apply! You know you want to!

Happy Birthday to… me.

Posted on March 4, 2010
Filed Under personal | 11 Comments

This year is the year of the tiger, which is my sign in the Asian zodiac. That means, of course, my age is a multiple of 12 — in fact, 36.

This isn’t quite midway for average male life expectancy in the developed world, but on the other hand, for the men in my family, this might well be the average of halfway, or even farther along.

So I guess I should be reflecting on where I’ve been, and where I want to go. Except, well, I did that a lot last year, and I feel like I’m on track, and I have a meeting tonight, with good beer in the plans, and good food, and not much commuting. Sounds like a plan.

Birthday greetings, admonishments, advice, or whatever are welcome. The comments section is there for a reason, folks…

The Hub of… Outmoded Software Shackles?

Posted on March 3, 2010
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In one of her essays, Ursula K. Le Guin described a Native American culture (I think it was) in which the metaphor for moving in the future was of people walking backwards — looking into the past, which can at least be seen, if not always so clearly, and walking blindly into the unforeseeable future.

This metaphor came to mind today as I logged onto my Gmail account on one of the computers at my department office. At the top of the screen was a note informing anyone using the PC that Google was discontinuing support for the browser I was using — which, like on a vast number of computers in Korea, is Internet Explorer 6.0.

Yes, 6.0. The browser that came out in 2001. The browser that most of the Korean internet requires you to use if you want to do banking, buy something, or view most of their websites. The browser that most of my readers outside Korea probably haven’t had any reason to use since, well… a long time ago.

In a very recent article in the Korea Times, the problem was outlined as follows (ironically — but unsurprisingly — on a page not easily viewable in Firefox on Linux, as per the graphic below):

Screenshot-Korea Sticking to Aging Browser - Mozilla Firefox
Korea Times Unviewable Page

Click on the image to see a larger version of the screenshot, and the ironically unviewable content.

Cutting the cord to IE6 isn’t expected to cause too much noise in most countries when it is clearly on its way out, accounting for less than 15 percent of the world’s browser market as of January, according to market researcher, StatCounter.

However, there could be disruption in Korea, where about half of the country’s computer users still insist that IE6 should be their gateway to the Internet.

In what would be seen as incredible elsewhere, IE6 seems to have actually gained ground here in the past few months ― the browser’s share dipped below 40 percent for the first time last September, but has now recovered to a healthy 49 percent.

Make that unhealthy. That is. if being less able to access more of the web, and being less accessible to more of the world, is what is in Korea’s best interests. But since we’re talking about South Korea, I don’t think even the government can cogently argue that, at least not when it comes to web services! (Though sometimes, looking at the established government’s sense of how free information should be, I wonder sometimes.)

There’s a wonderful article out called “The Costs of Monoculture” describing the situation circa 2007 which you should check out. It’s depressing that I still can highly recommend reading it today, but, unfortunately, despite what are undoubtedly a few new changes and developments, it’s mostly still pretty reflective of the situation here as I understand it. And the picture is one of a lack of freedom and choice emerging from an early, all-out commitment to protocols that were once shiny and new, but now are basically extinct everywhere else on planet Earth. This is why the quote above is misleading: it’s not that “half of the country’s computer users still insist that IE6 should be their gateway to the Internet” but that half of the country’s computer users insist that they should be able to access financial, banking, and consumer systems while using their home computers. It’s the country’s administrative bodies, and IT community, in their resistance to catching up to global standards, who insist that those end-users rely solely on Internet Explorer 6.0 if they want to do banking or web shopping.

ActiveX — used only in Windows, really — is still king here, which is why most Koreans are stuck using older Microsoft browsing software. As one of the assistants-to-the-assistants put it to me one day, “Mac computers are SO hard to use in Korea.” And Linux? Well… all I can say is that a dual boot setup with Windows on your spare partition isn’t enough: you need to dual boot with a Korean-language version of Windows, because all kinds of data that comes up in commercial transactions will appear as little blank boxes in a dialog box on your screen if you’re using a standard English installation of Windows. (I don’t know if adding more Korean fonts fixes the problem, but normal English-languages Windows installations always, in my experience, seem to get foiled sooner or later!)

The weird thing reading this old article is that, having come back from Indonesia, I am a bit shocked — not that I had forgotten this situation, but because the contrast is so stark. Sure, connectivity was always a problem there. It was relatively hard to find wifi zones, especially free ones, and when I did find them, connectivity was still often so slow that basic websites took a while to load, or refused to function. But the Indonesian websites I visited, on the other hand, worked fine in Firefox. Not a problem in any of the sites I visited. It looked basically like the modern internet, compliant with global standards and all that. Then I came back to Korea and suddenly half the local Web began to like crap in Firefox again. It’s… well, shocking. What’s most shocking is how deeply accustomed to this utter dysfunction one can finally become.

Anyway, that post linked above is really interesting, more so because of a comment (also from 2007) signed by “zzang”, who claimed to work for the Ministry of Information and Communication. I’ll quote (and respond to) that comment and conclude in the extended section of this post, as I’m likely to get a bit sarcastic.

The situation doesn’t seem to be changing significantly, at least from where I stand. Korea, instead, has got a bunch of proprietary systems and outmoded architecture and I don’t know if the IT community here is just daunted by the change that’s increasingly necessary, or underqualified to make that change happen, or just collectively too lazy to actually do the work involved. I can say that IT professionals I’ve met — such as those running the campus network where I am working — are, despite being relatively nice guys, completely in the dark when it comes to anything beyond the Windows OS and Windows servers. It’s like a huge enigma to them, to the point where one of them exasperatedly said to me, “Why don’t you just use Windows?” when the campus network started refusing me a connection. (Which, by the way, it does periodically, usually about once a year, when the (really, really ostensible) “security software” has been upgraded.)

In any case, the cracks are starting to show, but as far as I can tell, it’s only in the spots where Korean internet users are using their current software setup to extensively access websites abroad. When Koreans do internet banking with banks outside Korea, when they buy things online at foreign websites, the reaction is so often the same: wow. That was easy. Wait, why is it so much easier than Korean websites? But the number of people doing that remains, I suspect, too small for any real pressure for a change to build up for now.

When it does come, though, there’s going to be a lot of catching-up to do.

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