It could. If you are unhappy with something in particular maybe it can be fixed. I just think each and every one here is very valuable and if they must leave, they are also taking away their contribution (submitted links, comments). So if there is something that can be done to avoid it, then why not?
Now on the flip side, if you are firm, then I totally respect your decision and you should be able to delete your account as well as all your links and comments.
Precocity is overrated. To me, believing that genius is decided at age 0/5/10 whatever means that you are just rationalizing not working hard enough with "I am not a genius. I will not make it. Therefore no point in working hard".
The primary test really is :
a) Are you having fun (with maths in this case)?
b) Are you willing to put time and effort into it?
Note that the amount of time available may be one hurdle if you are starting at mid-age since its likely that you are pursuing it as a side hobby instead of a full time profession.
See Hamming's lecture on PG's site. Search particularly for "hard work is compounded" and "why is he so much smarter than me" or roughly along those lines.
If you are self-learning, then wikipedia is not a good way to do learn computer science. Its way better to actually read a good book, think a great deal and read/write code when appropriate. Computer science is not history where you learn just by reading. Thinking and problem solving are very critical too.
I have read a bit about stackless. Neat implementation but it still suffers from GIL? You can launch thousands of microthreads but apparently they still run on single core?
Well there are more problems than pointed out in the blog. Many of the "problems" cited are actually just effects of the real problems. Corporates not upgrading and OEMs offering XP are not causes themselves.
One problem is that the UI changed quite a bit from XP but without any added value. Why rename My Documents to Documents? Just for the heck of it? Why change the network connections dialog? For the first time in my life, I had to spend more time setting up a wireless connection in windows than Linux. Change in UI can be good but only if the changed UI offers something new. Just renaming things or moving options around without any reason is plainly annoying.
Second problem is bloat. Why is the OS eating up so much RAM. Isnt the OS meant to run applications on top? Or is the OS just meant to run(or in this case limp) itself somehow. Again I dont see what Vista is doing with all that RAM. Is it doing something useful which XP didnt do? Then go ahead and use the RAM. But if it isnt, then why is it eating RAM?
I havent faced much problem with hardware incompatibility thankfully and as pointed out thats an issue with any OS upgrade. UAC is annoying but can be useful.
edit : I feel the blog only raised strawmen and then beat them up but did not tackle with the real issues.
"Corporates not upgrading and OEMs offering XP are not causes themselves."
Agreed, which is why I explained why they exist. I just take issue with the tech industry assuming that the cause of them is Vista sucking, when in fact if Vista were a good operating system, those issues would still exist.
Nothing folksy about left/right brain distinction. Check out this tour de force TED video with a Harvard neuroscientist talking about the differences in brain halves http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229
