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> With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face r

by bertil 13y ago

> With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. The harsh truth about any development project: building a building, agricultural equipment, that is easy; guaranteeing its upkeep, even the gas to run it… that’s rare, if not unheard of.

moron4hire 13y ago
I've often wondered about that, myself, especially after reading stories about missionaries building schools in war-torn areas of Africa. "That's great and all, but what happens to that school after all the white people with the international press watching them leave?" This is a terrible analogy, but it reminds me of playing PC real-time strategy games. I've never really gotten into them that much, but I always thought it would be a genre I would like. So every two years or so I pick up the latest and greatest game and play it for a little while. It almost invariably goes that I'll have a lot of fun in the first two levels before getting completely crushed in the third. After 15 years of this, it's only been in the last couple of years that I've learned that I've been playing the games "wrong". I used to take a strategy of incremental building, of amassing an offensive for a massive push against the enemy. This works in the early levels because the early levels are easy and the enemies are usually programmed not to attack you head on. But it doesn't work in the later levels because they are constantly harassing you while they are also discovering key control points on the board and building at a much faster pace. I've never learned how to play at that pace. It requires a certain macro-level awareness of the play to be able to juggle all of the resource gathering and building queues so that nothing is sitting idle. I've tried, and I usually end up getting trounced even worse, because I've left my rear unguarded and my resource gatherers get wiped out, cutting off my supplies. Point being, I get the feeling that international aid works a lot like how I play strategy games. They over extend into enemy territory and don't protect their supply lines. And their efforts end up getting pretty well and good destroyed because of it. There doesn't seem to be any macro-level awareness of the whole scene. It's just a lot of little efforts, all scattered around, and none of them are watching each others backs. Sorry, that was a completely inappropriate analogy, but it's all I've got in me after only one cup of coffee today #firstworldproblems.

by bertil 13y ago

moron4hire 13y ago

I've often wondered about that, myself, especially after reading stories about missionaries building schools in war-torn areas of Africa. "That's great and all, but what happens to that school after all the white people with the international press watching them leave?" This is a terrible analogy, but it reminds me of playing PC real-time strategy games. I've never really gotten into them that much, but I always thought it would be a genre I would like. So every two years or so I pick up the latest and greatest game and play it for a little while. It almost invariably goes that I'll have a lot of fun in the first two levels before getting completely crushed in the third. After 15 years of this, it's only been in the last couple of years that I've learned that I've been playing the games "wrong". I used to take a strategy of incremental building, of amassing an offensive for a massive push against the enemy. This works in the early levels because the early levels are easy and the enemies are usually programmed not to attack you head on. But it doesn't work in the later levels because they are constantly harassing you while they are also discovering key control points on the board and building at a much faster pace. I've never learned how to play at that pace. It requires a certain macro-level awareness of the play to be able to juggle all of the resource gathering and building queues so that nothing is sitting idle. I've tried, and I usually end up getting trounced even worse, because I've left my rear unguarded and my resource gatherers get wiped out, cutting off my supplies. Point being, I get the feeling that international aid works a lot like how I play strategy games. They over extend into enemy territory and don't protect their supply lines. And their efforts end up getting pretty well and good destroyed because of it. There doesn't seem to be any macro-level awareness of the whole scene. It's just a lot of little efforts, all scattered around, and none of them are watching each others backs. Sorry, that was a completely inappropriate analogy, but it's all I've got in me after only one cup of coffee today #firstworldproblems.