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It is glaring how under-represented both Japan and Korea are in the rsync.net user population. We get signups from mainland China. From Saudi Arabia. From Gh
by rsync 3y ago
It is glaring how under-represented both Japan and Korea are in the rsync.net user population.
We get signups from mainland China. From Saudi Arabia. From Ghana. Even attempted signups from Iran.
But it's very, very rare someone from Japan signs up.
Why is this ?
- wrp 3y agoI'm not familiar with that community or even ones closely related, but I've worked several years in Japan and Korea, so I'll take a stab at it. For Japan, I'm pretty confident it's the language barrier. As in most countries, tech people in Japan are mostly males, and mostly are not very strong in the humanities and in social skills. This group tends to be extremely self-conscious about their limited English ability and generally avoids interaction with foreigners. For Korea, I see a trend, but I'm not confident about the explanation. I see lots of bright kids at university, see them get hired at big tech firms, and see them enthuse about their work over beers. I don't see them interacting a lot with foreigners. My impression is there is so much going on within Korea that they don't feel strongly motivated to look outside.
- fomine3 3y agoThat's true in general for Japan, but trained Japanese engineers who want a rsync-able cloud storage service are fine to register English web services. There are reasons I come up with: Little known in Japanese community; there are many people don't watch English community even if they are fine to read English docs and send PR. There are almost zero article introduces rsync.net. Yen is weak for Dollar at this time. Overseas storage service tend to be slow from Japan. It's harder to be adopted by enterprises without Japanese reseller. In my experience, rsync+ssh with higher latency is slow and price isn't attracting, so I haven't tried it yet.
- mordechai9000 3y agoMy question would be, how are they solving this problem if they are not using this service?
- fomine3 3y agoMy current backup is done by "unlimited" Google Drive (will be dead sometime) + Duplicacy because my RTO/RPO requirement is loose and data is bigger. There are other options like Rclone + S3/B2/etc or just Dropbox/OneDrive like worldwide people use. BTW, Backblaze is great about PR thanks to HDD stats. News websites frequently advertise their name for free. They also have local reseller.
- hardwaresofton 3y agoWould you mind noting their local reseller?
- fomine3 3y agohttps://www.sourcenext.com/product/0000000618/ https://www.sourcenext.com/product/0000000618/ Relatively famous software reseller (repackager) but focused on individuals
- hardwaresofton 3y agoAhhh thanks, this isn’t quite what I was looking for but TIL! Wonder if it’s seeing much adoption, this company looks to be kind of like Carbonite for Japan
- numpad0 3y agoIt's never fine to read English docs and send PR for Japanese engineers. You're probably familiar with Japanese audiences on the Web with a strong, how should I call it, a very unnatural grammatical "accent" almost as heavy as a stereotypical Indian accent but in literal form. That "accent" is due to our standard English teaching method that builds up an on-the-fly bidirectional translation layer on top of pure Japanese internal monologue. We're trained all the way from middle schools to college/University to do this complex rule-based word transposition and word-for-word substitution technique and that is unnatural as anything and slow as, like real QEMU. This is also why many dumb-faced Japanese people with some English skills are rather quick to issue and respond to fewer-words commands with highly technical expressions("don't lubricate [that] receptacle") but are far slower at returning verbal responses with higher word counts("I'm already 5 minutes into the future from the point I was to be there"), because they're doing it and it's not just a complex multi-parallel but also kind of an exponential time process. I'm done with that method for better or worse, and I suspect my "tone" in literal English should not even be convincingly Japanese. But it's still way harder to do English, and for the vast majority of us who aren't demonstrably English speaking, it's just their precise translation skills coming with massive overhead.
- WBrentWilliams 3y agoYour explanation of a bidirectional translation layer analogs a lot to where I am in my study of Japanese. Three years in, there are quite a lot of kanji where I see it and think the English word; the Japanese pronunciation takes a noticeable amount of processing time to surface. My word count is fairly low (maybe 500 - 1000 words) and my grammar is on-par with a three-year-old. However, I'm getting better. Not bad, I suppose, for someone who started study at the age of 46 and only devotes about an hour a day to the task.
- RicoElectrico 3y agoIsn't it that Japan is REALLY inward-focused society? I've read multiple times that watching their TV as a foreigner is a weird experience, for the most part they talk about stuff going on in Japan more so than anywhere else.
- pezezin 3y agoI am a foreigner living in Japan, and I can confirm it. Watching the news is weird, they will focus on random, totally unimportant internal events (like a dude stealing a bike in an unnamed village in nowhere Hokkaido), while ignoring major world events.
- sharedptr 3y agoWell I think I have some experience to talk about Japan. Not so much about Korea. My experience is that English in Japan isn’t really spoken outside of big tech firms and even there the quality isn’t great. I have tried organizing an event on the same topic in Japanese and in English, almost no one showed up in English but it was full in Japanese. They have their own alternatives to some services and stack overflow, qiita. The thing is that they don’t really need to speak English and for the cases they need English they bite a foreigner.
- manxman 3y agoSo there’s clearly stuff being done to train a younger generation to speak English better than was the case previously. The problem is that even with that, the mindset still appears to preserve the notion of Japanese supremacy over everything irrespective of data to the contrary. So improvement isn’t happening. Take the Shinkansen as anotherq example. Impressive if you look at the train specs and reliability/punctuality. What isn’t seen so readily is the manual process of booking seats at stations with limited options for booking online. That manual process is often so inefficient that you might as well travel by a slower train given the loss of time involved. Similar inefficiencies are observable throughout Japan. The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things. True of the younger English speakers as well from what I’ve seen. Not entirely sure if that’s blind deference, fear of conflict/group judgement or the result of brainwashing into a collaboration over competition mindset. Maybe it’s a mix of all of the above. So I see very narrow examples of personal excellences where that obsession and perseverance doesn’t involve getting others on board. But innovation or improvement involving groups is more dysfunctional than anything I’ve seen elsewhere by a wide margin.
- throwaway2037 3y agoYou can book Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen tickets online now. The lines owned by JR Central all have online booking now. You can also connect your IC card to your ticket, so no paper ticket is required. The people are typically oblivious because they are indoctrinated into following the process without questioning things. If you speak with Japanese people in a private, psychologically safe setting, they will open up about all sorts of things, including continuing to use fax machines!
- shmde 3y agoWhy is using a particular backup software solution related to it. Maybe they are using tarsnap or blackblaze ?
- vidarh 3y agoIt's not that there aren't alternatives, but that it's an interesting question why that specific market is under-represented. It could well be just luck of the draw, but there might be other reasons as well.
- alephnan 3y agoNot sure about Korea, but Japan also has one of the fewest tech unicorns when you adjust for socioeconomics and population size. Compare with Singapore, Taiwan.
- throwaway2037 3y agoExcept TSMC, what unicorns does Taiwan have?