I was on the other side of the war when Lokta Volterra was swept away and saw the carefully placed agents disrupt and cripple the defense and organization. Those events pretty much killed EVE for me as I lost everything in the game and had no desire to rebuild.
Looking back 6 years later, it's fascinating how we touch each others lives through these communities. While I never knew VR, I can't help but to feel connected to this State Dept official in Libya. RIP.
I'm curious what problems you ran into with Python on Windows. I develop with Python on both a Windows desktop and a Macbook. I found moving between the two platforms pretty easy with the exception of certain database python packages like psycopg2.
The command line and a file editor is all you really need. If you want to keep your file editor consistent, you can work off vim on both. Granted, I prefer Visual Studios if I'm on a Windows machine.
I am sure that a lot of it is specific to me and what I am used to, so many other people probably have a good experience working with Python on Windows. The main thing is that I am just not comfortable using Powershell and the directory structure on Windows. While I am still somewhat new to using the command line on a unix environment, I feel that a lot of commands are almost muscle memory, so I was quickly frustrated when things didn't work correctly using Powershell.
I know there are a ton of arguments for Visual Studio, and I actually use it at work on a daily basis (I am a front-end designer and am usually split 50/50 between VS and Photoshop/Illustrator), but I honestly just don't like it. It always feels too bloated and the stuff I do code, I usually do by hand anyways so I don't rely on intellisense or any code-completion. I do use Sublime Text cross-platform as well - but like I said in my article, I prefer using vim on a linux box via ssh from my iPad. It is familiar and portable, which is what I want at this point.
For me, I found it a pain to get easy_install and pip working, which made installing packages frustrating. After figuring that out, though, it's fine, with a command prompt and Notepad++.
It's fairly clear when games are designed for console first or for PC first. For example, Battlefield 3 on the console didn't have some of the fundamentals of a AAA first person shooter title, such as making sure it runs at 60 frames a second. Details like those were reflected in their Metacritic score, where the PC version stood significantly above its console counterparts.
Ironically, Battlefield 3 has sold roughly 2M PC copies, 6M Xbox copies, and 5M PS3 copies. [1,2,3] It was numbers like these that caused most of the game franchises to switch to console if they weren't already focused on them. A lot started out being PC-focused such as Ghost Recon, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell and The Elder Scrolls come to mind, but all of their latest franchise titles are heavily designed as console games first.
I would argue that first person shooters are a dying genre on PCs through just looking from the competitive scene with gaming. While there is still may be a lasting Counter Strike scene, the focus has gone to the latest Halo or Call of Duty being played on a console for competitive FPSs.
It just happens to be that some game genres really don't work well on the console no matter how hard you try. Halo Wars was well done as a console designed RTS, but just doesn't have the same depth as its PC counterparts such as Starcraft or Warcraft due to the restrictions on the interface and controls.
Even if you do manage to design for the platform, a lot of games just don't work.
"The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished."
I grew up in that culture in America having a Chinese mother and belonging to the local Chinese community. The interesting aspect to it, is that it represents a curve as everyone gets a 97+ on their tests. It felt like 97 was the median in the class. It just happened to be instead of having scores from 50-100, you had them compressed from 90-100. Scoring below a 90 is equivalent to getting an F in the local Chinese community as only a few ever scored that low.
I personally appreciate having gone through that and all the brainwashing that occurred with that mindset. I know one of my strengths is the ability to work well under pressure, where often my motivation is correlated with pressure. While I never made the connection in college, I innately understood the curve and how to play the game due to being curved at a young age.
The worry I have at times with correlating motivation with difficulty is whether I am creating an invalid proxy for value. Sometimes the work leads to something of value, but they are not directly linked as there are plenty of difficult things out there that generate little value to society and oneself.
That said, bringing it back to the OP's concern about his children's education, I don't know what it's like to go through a full Chinese system as I highly appreciate the mixture of Western education in my upbringing. I had a nervous breakdown in high school after realizing the falseness of my quest I had around accomplishments and achievements. If it weren't for the liberal arts of Western culture (arts, music, and literature), I don't know how I would have came out of that mental breakdown. I began to value the Renaissance man who was balanced in a variety of topics and sought the balance of academics, the arts and social skills. I wonder if it weren't for those concepts, if I would have trained myself to seek higher and higher goals in mastery over academics as I saw with some of my childhood friends who had a stricter Chinese upbringing.
In talking to my female colleagues and female friends in the engineering profession, I would say that there are a lot more forces at work that make it difficult for females and some minorities to realize their potential. Most that are successful have found ways to get through them, but it doesn't mean that it's an ideal situation.
As the author points out, it's largely due to the perception of the events at school or in a workplace than the true motivations behind them, which you might argue that a successful women engineer needs more mental strength to get through these barriers.
As you mention, there is a lack of quality talent and it would be in our best interest to bring out the potential in as many people as possible. It may be that society happened to turn off countless competent engineers due to these perceptions and social forces.
I believe the question is less on how do you balance the workplace, but rather how do you bring out the best out of people so that the pool of strong engineers becomes bigger.
Likely the solution starts from parenting as author points out at the beginning of the post. Programs that start at age 13-14 have those early years to fight with in order to create an interest in software and instill self-confidence. It reminds me of an old article on gender imbalances from 1970, where it argues that while we say people have free will when they choose their careers, they combat 20 years of social molding that's difficult to break. [1]
It'd be interesting to see the differences in upbringing that allowed for the Soviet Union back in the 60s to have a stat where "one-third of the engineers and 75 percent of the physicians are women." [1]
Having been in the role of a guy in a computer science class at a large public university with roughly similar ratios, I wouldn't say that the motivation that people don't work with women is mostly due to the stereotype. It's likely due to the social ineptitude of engineering students. I definitely could relate to Max Levchin talk about how PayPal had difficulty in hiring women because they were nerds that didn't know how to relate to women. [2] Granted, as the author points out, the stereotype threat exists due to the outcome being perceived as social bias.
Perhaps a solution as well is to help nerdy guys interact with girls in high school while the gender balance is fairly balanced. Perhaps projects with "random" (assigned) partners. Looking back at some of the things I did, I can't believe I was that socially awkward.
While I agree with your point, I believe "projects with 'random' (assigned) partners" to be a bad idea as far as encouraging social interactions. From my experience, no one enjoys being randomly assigned a partner (at least in high school) and starting your social contact with an unpleasant experience might ruin the chances of proper interaction.
I think you make an excellent point that a lot is at play during high school though. It seems like most kids are fine and don't notice gender differences before their teens and that the social issues manifest and strengthen from the start to the end of puberty. Teenagers are mean and that period of life is when people judge the most based on looks and social aptitude. Solving this situation (which probably can't be solved readily) would most likely raise everyone's social interaction skills, smooth the social differences across the board and solve a lot of gender stereotypes (and even other problems).
They've had same day delivery (local delivery) for quite a few product categories in the Seattle area for some time with Amazon Fresh trucks. I've bought a book recently with same day shipping for an additional 3.99 (Prime) that was on my door step when I arrived at home.
Looking back 6 years later, it's fascinating how we touch each others lives through these communities. While I never knew VR, I can't help but to feel connected to this State Dept official in Libya. RIP.