MrHobbes

Hello ellyagg,

No, I was not waiting to jump on someone for that, and I would hope that my response was not agressive in tone. That really was not intentional, but I apologize to jmreid if that was the case.

I actually up-voted jmreid's post (before typing my response) because he raised an extremely important point.

If I may share something? I like to keep this in mind as I move around online. With the lack of faces and tone of voice to help, I find that it is helpful to remember: http://www.paulgraham.com/randomness.html

I understand why you may be confused, because this was pretty poorly reported recently and I was not completely specific in my post.

Some Miscellaneous References:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL+Key+Statistics

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/07/19Apple-Reports-Thir...

Apple does not have 76 billion in cash. It has 76 billion in cash, cash-equivalents, and long-term marketable securities. There is a significant difference.

For clarification, please see here:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/258268-debunking-the-myths-o...

This post does not constitute investment advice.

The most valuable publicly traded company anyway. I am quite sure that Saudi Aramco is more valuable than either Exxon or Apple.

With that said, it is perhaps unlikely that Apple will be able to maintain its current advantage in the smartphone and tablet markets over the long-term.

On the other hand, at a P/E ratio of roughly 14 Apple does not exactly seem to be overvalued at this point in time.

Something else to consider is their cash hoard. What exactly do they intend to do with that $28.4 Billion dollars in cash? That is a mystery that I would love to know the answer to.

Personally, if I were Apple, I would be supplying investors with a dividend at this point in time. The fact that they are not indicates that they are either stubborn or they believe they are still capable of significant growth.

Let's assume they believe they are still capable of significant growth. The cynic in me doubts that this is the case - just because of the significant amount of competitive pressure that they are facing. The optimist in me thinks that it just may be possible for Apple to still expand.

Apple's history encourages the optimist in me. Apple is one company that, historically, it has always been a serious mistake to count out. However, how much of this amazing resiliency depends on Apple having Steve Jobs. Well... That's another wildcard.

I just don't know. It should be a very interesting next decade for Apple customers, investors, and competitors.

This post does not constitute investment advice.

I haven't had the time to look at the numbers myself recently, but I have heard from some oil industry friends that I know that Exxon is currently in a state of slow-motion liquidation.

From what they are saying, exploration and expansion has not really taken a high priority within the company in recent years, and the emphasis seems to be more on maintenance.

I don't really know about the extent to which this is true, but if this is the case then it could possibly explain the low p/e ratio.

Personally, I think that the problem with Exxon is that it is an oil company and oil prices are connected with world economic outlook. (Most economic activity requires energy, which oil just happens to be a great source of.)

World economic outlook is a bit grim right now, so Exxon's outlook is as well. When economic activity heats up again then oil prices will rise, and, at that point, I am quite sure that Exxon will be doing quite well again.

This post does not constitute investment advice.

It seems to me that there are only so many ways to design a thin, tablet-like device. How different would Samsung have needed to make its tablet so as not to have been affected by this to begin with?

I don't really know much of the background surrounding "community design rights", but I really think that this is a slippery slope to head down.

Competitors should do battle in the free market - not in the court systems.

Let consumers sort out which is the better product. They have no problems doing this without the aid of an injunction.

This stifling of competition via the court system is just another avenue to stagnate progress within the electronics industry.

"Maybe it has to do with the problem domain, but I have a hard time accepting that."

Your profile says that you are a web application hacker. I think that explains why you may not feel that data structures or algorithms are important. I was the same way myself (started my programming life by building Perl cgi scripts, made a nice little cms, definitely didn't use any fancy stuff to do that).

You should take it from me though. You will suddenly develop a deep and profound appreciation for understanding algorithms when you have a problem that requires having to comb through over a hundred thousand records, perform some type of operation on them, and sort by the results of that operation - all within a fairly narrow time period.

I think that it actually is a question of problem domains. If you never encounter this type of problem, then not knowing about things like big o notation and the various sorting algorithms will never impact you. However, when you do, that knowledge quickly pays for the time invested in learning it.

I don't know. I think it is him.

I used http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php and copy pasted the grandparent comment in - got a reading ease score of 58.

Copy pasted some answers from http://www.anyasq.com/227-i-made-bingo-card-creator - got a reading ease score of 59.

Close enough for government work, I think. I never knew that patio11 played World of Worldcraft?

Edit: Oops, just read the response above me, learn something new every day. And no serious critiques of my methodology please, it was just for humor's sake. :-)

That is a really great list. I mean a really, really great list, but, and I may be quite wrong about this, I think that it is missing something very important.

While a well-rounded computer-science curriculum should enable someone to check off at least half of those bullet points, I do not think that list would actually make someone a great developer.

I think that in order for someone to become a great developer, they should have knowledge that enables them to solve really hard problems in efficient ways. They must understand algorithms. I don't mean a surface level understanding either. They must have a deep, familiar, and complete comprehension of algorithms in general.

I'm not one to lecture on this subject, because I'm not quite there yet myself, but I really do think that if someone has a mastery of algorithms then the rest of the items on that list become significantly more achievable.

They would have a nice, strong general purpose set of tools that they can not only use in their own projects but also (and perhaps more importantly) in examining third party code and libraries as well.

To answer you question directly, yes.

In a nutshell,

* The keywords meta tag is no longer used.

* The robots meta tag is extremely useful.

* The description tag may be used to display along with a page's title.

* Neither description nor keywords meta tag have much impact for SEO.

Personally, I don't use the keyword meta tag and I may or may not use the description meta tag.

Somewhere out there, there is a search engine that still uses keyword tags for something significant, but I doubt that search engine is Bing (which now powers itself and US/Canada Yahoo).

References:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-do...

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-no-longer-uses-meta...

I don't know, but I think that you are reading far too much into each party's alleged ideological stances. As far as I can tell, both modern political parties seem to agree that spending is the best way to go about governing.

Yes, I know that one party talks about cuts a lot and the other party talks about spending a lot, but what do they actually do?

Wars? Wars are expensive. Entitlements? Well, entitlement spending is also quite expensive. Neither party will be the first one to threaten social security. Neither party will be the one to threaten medicare. Sure, there will be lots of hand-waving and other forms of gesticulation, but no elected politician in their right mind will take a hatchet to the programs that benefit America's senior citizens. It's just not good politics in a nation with a rapid electoral cycle. (Who votes? Answer that question and you can usually go from there.)

Ideologies - they don't matter. Grandiose claims of some great idealogical divide are wonderful to hear (and great for motivating the base), but what is actually done in practice? Well, the answer is whatever gets you re-elected. Which tends to be lots of sound and lots of fury but very little in the way of action.