Might be significantly more than 1/3 or 1/4 of that market. They capture over 70% of the Blade Infrastructure market in quite a few countries, to mention one thing.

Actually, the front end device (laptop, tablet, phone) is not something that a Computing company would produce.

Apple, Samsung and Lenovo are Consumer Electronics companies. They make commodity products for the masses that serve as an input device and content reader. Now Apple is the odd one out, because they also provide Data Center (Cloud), Storage and Content Retail services. Which makes them a Consumer Electronics and an Internet company.

Computing, in my opinion, is still done in the Data Center with the server, network and storage infrastructure we all use but most of us never think about. And the key players in that market are still IBM and HP for Servers, Software and Consulting, Cisco, Juniper and still HP for Networking, EMC, Hitachi, Netapp, Dell and HP for Storage.

In terms of infrastructure, HP is definitely a computing company and Apple really is not. We're comparing apples (no pun intended) and pears here.

Actually,

HP employs roughly 320.000 people. Apple is somewhat smaller than that. Secondly, the current CEO of Apple is an HP man. It was funny to see him present the iPhone 4S recently, because he reminds me of people like Lew Platt.

Whether Apple has the money to acquire HP isn't really even the discussion. It's whether they have the clout and manpower. HP is a huge organization with quite a few people that are used to a particular culture. If Apple were to ever acquire HP and merge with it, at the end of the day you'd have... HP. This is a matter of politics and psychology, not of money or stock prices.

Reading the title of this one, and not knowing who or what OnStar are, I completely thought this was about The Original Series.

Bummer. Dude. Seriously? No Shatner?

Wow. I wish the EU was as concerned about the income gap at the end of the life of the average brick-layer or coal-miner from Croydon or Manchester.

Really.... Do you think we ought to be worried about Elton John's, Bono's and Mick fucking Jagger's income gap? If they have an income gap, given all the money they made, they shouldn't have snorted all that cocaine for all those years, is what I say.

My mother has had an income gap for most of her life the size of which could have been fixed by the sale of one of Jamiroquai's sports cars, and we're expected to bend over for these people?

Even so, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Bono and (from a Dutch perspective) the guys from the Golden Earring would be entitled to the legally mandated normal retirement benefits everyone else on this continent has to scrape by on. But you don't see 'm closing my income gap.

Anyone in the States with a 401K should be livid about this piece of news if it came from the US.

I hate to say this, but I'm 36 years old now, and when I look at movies from the 80's, I am sooooo happy it's 2011. A mediocre movie from 2011 tends to be more entertaining than cult movies of that decade. Even stuff like Citizen Kane, usually proclaimed to be the best thing since sliced bread, is excruciatingly slow on the uptake and generally unwatchable unless you zip through it at three times the speed.

There are certain movies that are timeless to me. The Shining is still interesting to this day. As is Casablanca, and I'm sure I can come up with a list, like Brando's On the Waterfront, the Godfather and other cult films that are deservedly up there. But the amount of trite shit that has emanated from the movie and music business is staggering. But even respectable titles like Blade Runner don't stand the test of time completely. IMHO, The Fifth Element is far less passé.

I think the people that look at all the stuff that comes out now and compare it to one or two great movies from three decades ago just suffer from selective memory usage. Seriously. Have you looked at Back to the Future with adult eyes? It's insufferable.

To be quite frank, I had a blast in the US. Recently I took my third trip over there. The first two trips were to Atlanta and Roseville, they were business trips where I had the opportunity to spend some extra leisure time in between weeks. This trip was the mother of all road trips, 4000 miles across NC, SC, GA, FL, LA, AL, MS and back to GA.

The thing that struck my wife and I on this trip was the enormous discrepancy between rich and poor. New Orleans, Birmingham and many places on the road were desperately poor while over in Atlanta you'll find neighborhoods that are bursting with money. Also, the difference between FL versus MS, AL, LA was quite shocking. Furthermore, you could just see and smell where the money was within a given state. The point is that the US is segregated. Segregated based on wealth, which in some cases but not all, means segregated along racial lines. The cleaners and waiters are much more often black or hispanic than white, and quite frankly it is a bit disgusting to see.

For the life of me I do not understand how a civilized human being can live in the lap of luxury while his or her neighbor is living in squalor and filth.

Having said that, I was unimpressed with the state of the infrastructure. Roads are simply not as they are in Europe. The French péage, the Dutch highways, the German autobahn, the Swiss road network and the Scandinavian roads are just a lot better for various reasons.

Furthermore I was unimpressed with the level of education. The amount of people I ran into that believe dinosaurs roamed the earth 6000 years ago and who thought "Holland" was a town in Michigan, not to mention the amount of people who thought they traveled a lot because they saw 10 US States or more, is staggeringly high.

All this while we met a frightful amount of good, nice people. People who deserve a better educational system, a re-built home, a prospect for a future and most of all: Better food. The food in the US is horribly expensive if you want fresh produce. Stuff that is boxed and processed can be bought for no money what so ever. So it's really not difficult to see how overweight is a class issue, really.

This brings us to three subjects:

1) Why is it so hard to not let the Texas board of education decide what is said about evolution and history in schools across the nation? Don't you people realize those idiots are insane fundamentalists?

2) Why is it so hard to realize the premise of universal health care is quite civilized? It's not Stalinistic, it's not Satanic, it's the Civilized Option. Someone gets sick, the country makes sure there is adequate help and insurance for them. Common sense.

3) Why is it so hard to realize the Bush tax cuts are completely uncivilized? Your working class is paying the bills for three wars you shouldn't even be in to begin with, and you are hell bent on letting the richest people in the country screw you out of billions of dollars of tax money?

I cannot believe that you're letting a black mother of three children in Poplarville, MS work three jobs in order to be able to put said kids through a mediocre school, while the fat cats are getting bonuses, tax breaks and all the choice in the world.

Uncivilized. Plain and simple.

My wife is Israeli, and she had never been to the States. She also had a blast. But this is what she had to say:

"It's not the land of opportunity. It's the land of taking advantage of whomever you can."

Listen, the amount of terrorist plots involving planes in the last forty years is breathtakingly small. So small in fact that Israel would be wise to focus on traffic safety and driving courses rather than terrorism. The amount of traffic deaths in the last 40 years in Israel is larger than the amount of MDK during war and terrorism. Given the one in a million risk factor of plane bombings, I'd say you can just do the physical checks and luggage checks without climbing into people's asses and violate their integrity as a person.

Specifically since if I had a long term plan not to get my luggage checked, all it would take is to move to Israel and befriend some Israelis. Because whenever I showed up with an Israeli friend or girlfriend at Ben Gurion or any El Al check in desk on the planet, they whizzed me through security no questions asked. This punches large holes into the notion of a 100% accurate, intelligent verification.

On top of that, if you subject one passenger to certain treatment, you need to subject the rest to the same treatment. I do not have a sense of humour when the "Gelijkheidsprincipe" is violated. Right now we have a fascist political movement in Holland that wants to violate the first article in our Constitution. All the way down from 1579, we've had clauses in constitution-like documents that guarantee the equal treatment of people of various religious and philosophical views.

Funny how neither you nor I are American.

I really wonder about current demographics on this site.

By the way, KLM just does the regular security checks, and somehow they've managed to not get any of their planes blown up ever.

I think a different attitude towards the world does more to curb terrorism than all the profilers in the world.

I got that argument from an El Al security officer too once. He said "but we are the safest airline on the planet". This was in Schiphol Airport. I politely pointed out to him that El Al was the *only* air-line to lay waste to a residential area by crashing a cargo Boeing into an apartment building in Amsterdam, so his comment was mildly inappropriate. I lived across the road when it happened, 500 denizens of Amsterdam got killed, it was not terrorism.

Now I'm white as a lily, an EU citizen, Dutch to boot. I had a million credentials on me to prove that I was a tax paying Israeli denizen, and on top of that I have never heard of Dutch terrorists since the Dutch Revolt. Which ended in 1648, mind you. And we won, so we were called freedom fighters. As far as "doing your job" is concerned, I don't mind being asked who I am and being asked to produce documentation to prove it. I also don't mind answering questions about my purpose or circumstances. But when ham-handed attempts are made to infringe on my privacy, the intellectual property of my employer or when the people in question are just being rude and racist, I do start objecting.

When behaviour then isn't improved, I might start swearing at them. And yes, swearing at an Israeli while waving your arms wildly will get you results when polite discourse fails. It is wired into them, you can observe this on any street corner.

Now I moved to Israel in the middle of the second Lebanon war, and I moved out during the Gaza invasions at the end of 2008, and I've seen blood on the streets. I lived in Haifa during the shelling. Still, I would rather run the risk of being blown up myself than being responsible for the aggregation of a complete population in Townships under the heel of an army boot. If I have to choose between xenophobic paranoia or non-existence, I choose non-existence.

As a matter of fact, we have a racism problem in Holland right now. Our right wing politicians are Islamophobic, and personal friends of Lieberman and Co. They all seem to think the best way to end the Palestinian Problem is deportation of all of Gaza and the West Bank to Jordan. They also think the best way to deal with European Muslims is by deporting them or interning them into camps. And I am telling you that on the day that Geert Wilders becomes the PM of the Netherlands, I will burn my passport and become a Swede or Canadian.

My mother has seen racism. She was born in 1937. She's been through WWII as a kid, and she knows the face of Apartheid, if you will. A terrorist threat does not merit such an attitude. The Israelis of all people ought to know the dangers of racism.

So if you want to make this discussion political, fair enough. Let's start with two questions:

1) Why doesn't Israel have a constitution?
2) How does it feel to live in a theocratic Apartheids-regime?

I actually went to an elementary school that made me study the world map and learn countries and capitals by heart. Still, time is a screwy thing.

A few years ago I made a similar comment to an American friend and he quizzed me on Africa, Asia and South America. I decided to brush up on Africa, is all I'm saying. ;) :)

Granted. Absolutely. There are astoundingly ignorant jackasses in most corners of the world, including Holland.

All you need to do is go to a camping site in the South of France or Spain, and you'll witness plenty of Holland's finest. Including the potatoes they seem to insist on lugging around to foreign countries.

Ah, you're one of these folks who are saying that:

1) The US had nothing to do with the creation of the socio-economic circumstances of post-WWI Germany, thus leading to WWII
2) The UK, Norway, Australia, Canada and the resistance movements all across Europe had nothing to do with the demise of the third Reich.

Nice. Very nice.

Although it would have been a funny comeback. ;)

Well, the history of English is such that local tribesmen got their arses invaded by Romans, Scandinavians and Germanic folk, so English is actually a cross breed of the Roman, Germanic and Nordic languages with some Gaelic thrown in for good measure.

Sort of.

Not that Dutch is "pure" because there's plenty of Roman/Hellenistic influences, as well as Arabic. Our hard "G" sound comes from the Spanish (think José). The Spanish got that "G" from the Moors who ruled the peninsula for close to 700 years. So the Dutch G is ultimately Arabic. Then there's influences from Yiddish and god knows what else.

I guess there's no such thing as a "pure" language. ;)

Mein Darwin im Himmel, you make me wish I had MOD points. +Funny.