Re: [tlug] Looking for Summer Internship in Japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Noda Yoshikazu writes:

 > Do you mean the Japan's 5th Generation project?

Yes.

 > It didn't succeed but Japan was seeing a future in software at
 > least back then. Those were the good old days that would never come
 > back.

MEXT is betting 50万円／年 that I can help them come back, though.
PyCon 2015/Mailman Sprints, here I come!

Seriously, I really do think FLOSS can help.  Matz is something like a
genius, so I'm not going to claim that NaCl's success is replicable by
a million young Japanese software entrepreneurs.  But his company is
kicking serious butt, and that's in Shimane-KEN Matsue-SHI, my
friends, not in "the streets are paved with gold mekki" Tokyo.  I'm
sure with a little encouragement there are thousands of Japanese
software engineers who could do the same!

 > Japan had already realized they couldn't compete in software
 > field.

"Can't compete" is a huge exaggeration (although MEXT aka Monkey-show
might believe that kind of FUD).  Japan has the best (non-military)
robots and cyborgs there are, and that's not because of some wizened
old metal-monger in the backstreets of Osaka.  *Somebody* is writing
high-quality code in this country, and I bet it isn't 17-year-olds
fresh off the boat from Bangalore.  (In fact I can tell you that for
Cyberdyne, which designs assistive cyborg gear for nursing and the
like, it's the cream of Tsukuba grad students in CS.  Dunno about the
rest of the industry, but I'll bet most of it is the same.)

 > Thus no more money would be spent - not to mention on
 > education.

A self-fulfilling prophecy, indeed. :-(

 > Japan is controlled by some old people came from country. They
 > usually turn down the things they don't understand. I think what
 > Matz is saying is correct in all aspect.

Well, Matz doesn't approve of the current state of affairs, but he's
hardly despairing.

I'm-gonna-soak-up-some-sun-tell-everyone-to-lighten-up-on-their-country-ly y'rs,

P.S. Come to think of it, I just did soak up some sun.  From
FOSSAsia@SG:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSKBM6H1qIM&list=PLECEw2eFfW7hYMucZmsrryV_9nIc485P1&index=14

and there are a number of good talks indexed at http://engineers@sg.
The first 18 as of now are from FOSSAsia.  More should be coming, the
best was by "Bunny", watch for it!

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/toyota/prius/2015