You probably heard couple of weeks ago how our Telecommunications Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui brought the future to our students (according to him), by planning to provide them with computer tablets. A deal, done with Intel Corporation Vice President for Sales and Marketing Group, comprised supplying the Intel product which could be powered by an operating system called MANDRIVA (you probably haven’t heard of it).
Nevermind we don’t have descent public schools, the deal is really a rip off to the public purse. To explain why the deal is bad, I refer you to this post Throwing Money at Shiny and Worthless Technology by Mustapha.
Moving on from what seems to be a non-feasible Intel scam – usually in Lebanon, ministers like to have their own cut, anyone remember the car fire extinguishers regulations? – to what seems to be a descent, tidy, progressive, inventive, friendly, generous and promising deal:
Intel announced its intention to invest five million dollars into scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical education in Israeli high schools over the next four years [...] The initiative, which was announced by Intel’s CEO Paul Ottelini as he visited the country last week.[...] “Israel has long been at the forefront of technological innovation worldwide,” Otellini said, “Some of our most sophisticated engineering is made in Israel.”
Although I don’t discredit their efforts, but I know the BDS guys have previously taken the time to scrutinise the past of every drunk artist who planed to come to Lebanon or even just sent his photo to Lebanon, so are they going to have a go at Sehnaoui? I have to be careful what I ask for, I could end up throwing my iPad away.
But, what does Hezbollah think of their ally dealing with a funder of Israel? Isn’t Sehnaoui powerless enough to be attacked? Does Iran have a similar shitty tablet we could have bought instead? At least, we would have paid less… with some bonus missiles apps.
Intel sent their CEO to Israel, but they sent us their sales guy. They take our money and invest it in Israel. It can’t get any worse to Nicola Sehnaoui; not only he syphoned our money off, but he did it to Israel.
Nice article. Intel has a factory in Israel and it supports them. The factory wad built on a destroyed Arabic village. Also I wonder why he wants to a deal with Intel while it still a small player in tablets market? ARM CPUs are dominating tablets market and Intel is known as not manufacturing these CPUs.
Dude, Seriously????!!!! Intel’s share of the X86 processor market is 80%. So, I am 80% sure that the PC/MAC you used to write this article has an Intel processor. You also might be siphoning your money to Israel…
Yes, dude, serious. We are talking about tablets markets here (http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/intel-lost-the-tablet-war-the-desktop-next-177234).
You comment is funny… I don’t do multimillion dollars deals with anyone.
Also the point here is not the deal itself because I said I use similar US technology, but rather the point is that someone else (not close to Hezbollah) would not have got away with it, but this one does, coz he is Sehnaoui.
Mandriva is not some obscure operating system. It’s a flavor of Linux, the OS powering your blog.