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South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

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Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language barriers, timezones (their night is our day; it is flipped). Most skilled Korean software engineers end up in the Valley. Remote development only goes so far.

I don't see it any differently than companies with an office in India. While English is not a national language in RoK, Koreans are still taught English early. In my limited experience, being married to a Korean and having worked with Indians, Korean professionals speak English about as well as Indian professionals. The timezone is similar: India is 10 hours forward from America/New_York, RoK is 12 hours forward. Fli…

Are you interested in moving to RoK? Either way expect salaries at around 50-60k so not that cheap. And also the talent pool is rather small. The English proficiency is almost non existent.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it any differently than companies with an office in India. While English is not a national language in RoK, Koreans are still taught English early. In my limited experience, being married to a Korean and having worked with Indians, Korean professionals speak English about as well as Indian professionals. The timezone is similar: India is 10 hours forward from America/New_York, RoK is 12 hours forward. Fli…

Are you interested in moving to RoK? Either way expect salaries at around 50-60k so not that cheap. And also the talent pool is rather small. The English proficiency is almost non existent.

At the right time, for the right company, definitely.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#203
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enforcing home grown products to average customers, subsidizing one specific firm to take all domestic market share is how Samsung and Hyundai made its way to top global firms. I can see how this would ensure domestic success, but how does that translate to 'top global firm' status unless the products / features & pricing are significantly superior?

A key idea here is that, to keep this support, the firms were also obliged to export. Even small numbers, at a loss, at first, but they had to have paying customers in America. Firms that couldn't do this were allowed to go bankrupt / get swallowed up. At least in Korea. In less successful countries, domestic top dogs were simply protected, and were quite happy to keep making cars from the '50s. An excellent book on…

That 'force overseas sales' thing sounds like a notable differentiator, though I'm not well versed enough to know if there's (m)any contra examples for this practice.

And thank you - I've added How Asia Works to my reading stack.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german? You can but then it's a work to do for each language. That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals. > You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in stone. Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and compl…

> You can but then it's a work to do for each language. You make it sound like that's a bad thing. Once again, I'm not sure whether it is laziness or just learned helplessness. > That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals. That's not why. It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to…

> It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other.

True, it would not but the communication surface would be much smaller, we would depend on a few bilinguals.

> Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would program in french. You can still program in english if you want.

People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some English keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a generation that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.

> No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling languages in english?

No because they are built from the ground up to use English. So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate it into our own language?

> So translate it.

So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian. Or, more realistically, I need to depend on someone to do the translation for me. Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience I have. Just taking cppreference which translates automatically, most of the time it's non-sense.

> Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature right?

Yes but I miss on a lot of Russian literature.

I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals, that see English as a barrier, to get into programming. But the cons and the issues it brins largely outweight, in my opinion, this benefit.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#205
post #179
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsof…

On the OS not being critical, I think that might be the case in 10 years, but large companies still have loads of internal desktop applications that haven’t moved to the web yet. But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10 times if they were to replace all these excel based processes. And I must say that I have…

I wonder what a landscape would look like where the OS isn't critical but everyone's still on Excel.

Wine suddenly gets really really good, maybe?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#206

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a…

More on TMaxSoft. This software firm builds many 'hard' softwares like OS, DBMS or even MapReduce data processing cluster(like hadoop and spark). One might naturally ask 'why build a wheel while there are plenty already built by open source developers?' and economically aware person might also ask 'how are selling their products while competing against ubuntu, postgresql, spark?' Cloning something from scratch and le…

> I have no idea how they could 'train' a non CS major to write code for hard core stuffs like OS or DBMS.

There is probably someone better fit to describe this [hah!] but schools aren't really designed to teach something specific. It is more about creating hard working drones. Doing anything meaningful in [say] chemistry is harder than brainfuck.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can but then it's a work to do for each language. You make it sound like that's a bad thing. Once again, I'm not sure whether it is laziness or just learned helplessness. > That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals. That's not why. It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to…

> It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other. True, it would not but the communication surface would be much smaller, we would depend on a few bilinguals. > Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would pro…

> People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some English keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a generation that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.

So be it if it means more programmers in france, china, russia, etc.

> No because they are built from the ground up to use English.

Yeah, and you can do the same in other major languages. It should be easier since we already did most of the work for you.

> So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate it into our own language?

Yes. You'd be able to share the libraries and executables, but not the source unless you know the language.

> So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian.

No. The chinese, english, russian, etc has to be translated into french. Have you ever read a book by a non-french author?

> Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience I have.

That's my point. You are a worse programmer than you could be because you are coding in a foreign language. If you coded in french, you'd be a better programmer. After all, programming is an art, like literature.

> I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals

You completely missed my point. You could convert Java, C, Python, etc into french or any other language. It's simply updating the grammar where you could do a simple 1 to 1 conversion of the keywords. It's so simple that an ambitious and competent person could do it over a weekend. The hard part is translating the libraries and the executables - the actual code in the wild. But it's doable if given enough resources.

Like you said, people translate documents in many languages already. Why not take the extra step and translate the source as well?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#208
post #160

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsof…

Google Sheets has a History of your edits and if that's utilized well can make it well superior to MS.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#209
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsof…

Google Sheets has a History of your edits and if that's utilized well can make it well superior to MS.

I think using gsuite software would defeat the point of switching desktop operating system to avoid being dependant on a single company.
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