The cognitive gymnastics are a bit easier to master if you start early, as with language acquisition and mathematics literacy. The skill is also relatively location-agnostic; even crud-level freelancing jobs correspond to a comfortable living in many places.
But there's a lot of value to cheap computing beyond "become a programmer," I don't think that's even the primary value of this trend. For example, Stephen Vick gave a talk recently <http://hcde.uw.edu/521/win12/jan6> on work they're doing to improve quality and traceability for coffee farmers. Just dropping a laptop into the process to record and track data had a big impact, but the cost is infeasible if the program wasn't providing it. $25(ish) computer which can do the same tasks? Yes please! James -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/private/change/attachments/20120127/25f9cebd/attachment.html>
