So I just viewed this segment, mostly an interview of Negroponte with Leslie Stahl: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/07/09/60minutes/main13546.shtml , but with lots of footage from Cambodia, plus significant footage of (a) Negroponte telling lecture hall that Intel was bad (b) Intel defending itself in the person of its CEO.
For an intro to a big topic, I thought this was good overview, and 60 Minutes always needs a twisted plot i.e. a bad guy, so I don't begrudge dwelling on the private industry threat. My Project Renaissance model builds in the idea of test pilot nonprofit idealists like Negroponte paving the way for commercial imitators -- surely this pattern is repeated over and over (used to be the military was the biggest guinea pig, for health care innovations especially). Negroponte himself comes across as a class act, handsome, well spoken, an idealist we can love. So the XO uses AMD chips, so what? I'm glad the idea of massive computer power spreading to the world's underprivileged is being presented as pretty much a fait accompli. Even if Intel is getting in the way, it's doing so by embracing the vision. I hope the XO really flies big time though. Wouldn't bother me to see it fattening a bottom line or two -- the investors could be XO-using entrepreneurs in the developing world, doing the hard work of keeping the pipeline moving. Kirby
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