Whenever I see a story like this I wish the United States would provide students a far more flexible and natural learning curriculum. For example, the "mathematics" course trek in the US school system alone is one of the most dreadful:
The problem lies in several issues. As one of "those kids" that started college at 11, one issue I have recognized to be by far the strongest is the self-perpetuation of incompetence: high school teachers are usually direly incapable of providing students with the actual modern perspective on the subject they are teaching! Qualification wise, I could have been teaching high school classes three years ago, and I knew a lot of education majors back in my undergraduate days. Usually, it's the people that aren't smart enough to pursue the subject that they simply make do with teaching it instead. Most of the brighter math and physics majors I knew went on to graduate school or a scientific profession; the others usually minored in education. Perhaps it is an unfair generalization, but it does seem to be true from my experiences. Of course, you can all draw the implications that would have on the K-12 education system. To illustrate with a final example, some of the math major / education minor people told me "I hate proofs"! I thought I would cry.
I didn't mean to make this my life's story, but in any case, perhaps it could be argued the current quagmire that is our method of ensuring child "development" is in some way good, simply due to its inherent selectivity. Perhaps the innovative and intelligent and resourceful will escape the K-12 system much like Dmitri did. It's largely luck, though, as it heavily depends on their environment (parents, town, etc.). I considered undergrad to be like my high school. Although I skipped the latter, undergrad was fairly similar in structure (homework, participation, tests, etc.), except that the classes were taught by people who actually knew what they were talking about.
On a final note, what Dmitri or I or the 12-year-old Asian kids (sorry for the stereotype) "do" is not being "super intelligent." It's merely being lucky or fortuitous enough to see the light in a (imho) broken system. Really, when you think of it, nearly everything in an undergraduate curriculum is quite simple if you just read the damn textbooks and do your homework, and in the case of people like Dmitri, be a hacker and play around. In a perfect education schema, every kid would be like that. Every kid would be creative; not shackled and restrained.
I mean no disrespect, but as a computer science major at a well recognized school and an overall geek I had several concurrent gf's during university and went out about 4 nights a week on average.
Looking back, I was a fool, but I am glad I lived that way for a few years. It taught me many lessons.
edit: Re-reading I laugh at how I always throw in that 'good school' part. Perhaps it is because years later I still have stress-dreams about exams there, and the courses were like getting kicked in the balls daily.
I will worry about it once I am done with school ;) I see nothing wrong with having a girlfriend but I don't feel alarmed not to have one at the moment.
I think programming is a necessary skill for Computer Science students. However, that is not the only thing we are required to learn because it only complements knowledge in other areas ranging from theory of programming languages to computer architecture. Students might get to do the occasional programming project or two but usually they will not be involved in anything close to real life software development. I am not trying to discourage you but that is the reality I find myself in.
I find "Kubuntu" to help me be more productive but then it is a matter of personal preference also.
"Yakuake" is a Quake style terminal that Smoothly rolls down from the top of your screen after you press the shortcut key. This thing saves a lot of time to get quick access to the terminal without having to look for the shortcut icon in the Desktop or the Taskbar.
If you need a good python editor than I would reccomend "DrPython". Also "ipython" is a good replacement for the standard python shell.
For text editing in general I like "Cream" which is basically a nicely configured "gvim" : http://cream.sourceforge.net/
I started out using Kubuntu, but the only thing is that they're switching to KDE4 for the next release. If your system is just for general use, then that's not a big deal, but I'm waiting till KDE gets a little more stable before using it for dev.
