Apple no longer banning third-party iOS development tools - Page 5

Chapter III of On the Origin of Species is entitled "Struggle for Existence". Darwin says 'I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including the dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important), not only the life of the individual, but the success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, but more properly it should be said that it is dependent on the moisture.'

The goal of the individual is to have progeny, but that does not translate to maximum propagation of the species. Note that struggle is competition, but competition with what? I think Anonymouse is correct in that it is a description of the condition, but it has no goal of its own. It is not an intelligent force. But we should all be careful in reading too much into Darwin's work. Hitler did and wrote "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle).


Well, now you are bordering on strawman argument, that is putting words in the mouth of your opponent and arguing against that. Of course Apple wants to see its products succeed wrt marketshare. You don't create great products just to keep them locked away in a room. You must survive to create the next round.


Well, customers "select" products for a whole range of reasons. Quality is there, but maybe down on others like availability, "all my friends have it", etc. In that selection, there is a conscious choice, but natural selection implies no conscious choice.

Hi Dick,

You can link to many Burroughs people at:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=135833

I also have a Burroughs page:

http://www.ianjoyner.name/Ian_Joyner/Burroughs.html

There are many links between Burroughs and Apple - not the least of which is that Alan Kay was a student of Bob Barton (did you ever meet him?):

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/con...HistoryST.html

Of course Wozniak worked for HP who were "champions" of reverse polish notation. But that was via Barton who read the paper on polish and adapted it for the B5000, which HP then took up in their designs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton

I even worked with an ex-Burroughs guy who did a version of ALGOL on the Apple II, which is how I got into Apple:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_ALGOL

Following on the natural selection theme... it's called adaptation. You try different paths but adapt to external conditions. Once a company stops adapting, it dies. IBM?

It don't have a duty to anything, except truth. And I'm still exploring as to what truth is. So I may have to adapt.

Correct. But sadly, the more tools available (making it easier to create apps), the more junk we may see in the App store.
Hopefully, expect Apple to be advertising soon for App store software reviewers to stem the tide of even more crapola.

Wrong. They believe that their current strategy will yield the highest amount of profit over time.

Why is that hard for you to believe? Do you think that maximizing total profits is somehow a bad thing?

Can you give some big-deal examples of where cooperation clearly yielded better results than competition? Like stuff on the scale of the wealth of nations, and not little hippie co-ops?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_treaty

Good example.

Notably, however, you identify an event, and not a system.

Do you really need specific peace treaties to understand how cooperation could [yield] better results than competition on a national scale?

Your earlier post said "And they have only one: to maximize total profits. Everything and anything else is just a means to that end. This is true of every publicly traded company in the world."

I'm answering your false conjecture that their only raison d'etre is to maximize total profits. That is simply simplistic and wrong. There is much more to Apple and many companies than that. If that was all they were about, you'd see a mass exodus of talent.

Maybe they believe now their current strategy will yield the highest profit over time, but that was not always the case and they persevered through the times when that wasn't obvious at all.

You are looking like you have a very small-minded cynical view of the world of people who only act out of the basest motives. There are many examples where without cooperation nothing would have been achieved. What has been said is that competition is just there. However, where cooperation does not triumph over competition, nothing happens.

Take for example the atomic bomb (of course born out of the worst competition). Even in the group the competition between Oppenheimer and Szillard was poisonous (and other factors that eventually destroyed Oppenheimer), but there was enough cooperation in the group to achieve their goal.

Scientists can usually resolve their differences to advance science. That is cooperation, but of course they compete and they bring different views and challenge existing thought. That is why we have many of society's structures to aid cooperation. It's not all the wild west.

An orchestra playing great music must have cooperation triumphing over petty tensions within the group. Not every one gets on. But egos must be put aside in the name of achievement. There are so many examples of where cooperation must succeed over competition. Competition just results in catastrophe. But I don't look at the world through rose-coloured glasses - of course competition exists, but it must be controlled.

So competition is just a base motive triggered from the lowest part of the reptilian brain. Cooperation is what human spirit is about. Not everyone is motivated by competition. Many are motivated by the spirit of imagination, and altogether higher motivation.

It's only those who have never had higher-level motivations that only move because of base competition that argue that everything is only motivated by competition. They weren't challenged at school and never experienced the high of real achievement. They become managers and marketers and their competitive nature tells them they have the most important jobs in companies, not those who create the products in the first place. These people are dangerous. They then try to fool us in groups like this that competition is the prime motivator and deny that there are many people who do things out of higher motives - those people they label "hippies".

Sure. The USA. 50 states have to cooperate to make a federation.

States as individuals must compete for resources. When they cooperate, resources are better utilized and contribute to the higher overall wealth of all.

But the US as a whole competes with other nations.

It is like saying members of a sports team cooperate. Yes they do, but they do so because as a team they can better compete against other teams and it is that competition against other teams that motivates them. Every team tries to become better so they win. Without that competition, where would the motivation be? If winning or losing didn't matter, why even bother turning up?

Without the cooperation of the states you would hardly be in a position to compete. And the US also cooperates with a lot of other countries.

The sporting analogy makes sport look pretty pointless, which it is - just a way of keeping people busy without actually accomplishing anything. The opium of the masses.

The orchestral analogy is better. Maybe the players are competing with the difficulty of being able to play an entire difficult piece of music. When they succeed, this gives the audience a thrill. Are they competing with the audience. No.

There are lots of examples of synergistic systems. Competition is not the only motivation in life and is often negative. Competition must be controlled and regulated, even if competition itself is to survive. Thus the Sherman act.

Yes, we can play games for enjoyable competition, but that too is controlling competition. We cooperate on the rules.

Uncontrolled, competition just becomes a negative force. It combines with emotions such as jealousy and hate. This is then used (particularly by politicians) as fear, fear of the different and unknown. These are aspects of the lower nature. Cooperation arises from the higher nature of man stimulated by higher understanding and motivations.

Sure some people, as I have said are only motivated by competition, but don't think that applies to all, or that it even applies all the time to those who are, or that those who largely aren't are never affected by competition. As has been said again and again here, it is not the only factor in life.

That's a bit of a bold claim. Personally I hate developing in flash but other people have created really amazing things with it. As the general user won't be able to tell if an app is made using flash or not, how will anyone ever be able to tell?

The following excerpt is from The Philosopher's Zone:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopher...07/1923237.htm

Alan Saunders: John, let's turn to the modern case for the free market, and this turns on an intellectual construct called the ideal market. What is that, and why is it ideal?

John Wright: Well, it's a rather complex notion, but it's composed of a number of different elements. Roughly the idea is that in an ideal market all producers are competing against each other, they're trying to produce the best quality products as efficiently as possible, and in an ideal market there are no obstacles to them doing this, or nothing preventing this process of companies finding the best, the most efficient way of producing goods that the public wants. So that for example, in an ideal market, there would be no monopolies. If you've got a monopoly, that is, just one company producing all the goods of a particular type, say televisions or something like that, and there's no competition, then if there's no competition there's sort of not really that much stopping the company from offering the televisions for sale at a higher price. And so if you want to maximise the overall benefits to the community, that is getting high quality televisions at a lower cost, then there'll need to be no monopolies.

Some other aspects of the ideal market is that there are no public goods. Now what does that mean? Well, the notion of a public good is a fairly complex notion but it contains two components. One component is the idea of it being, in the terminology of economists, non-excludable. Well what does that mean? Well it means that something is non-excludable if you can't stop a person gaining the benefit from it. Now an example of this would be a lighthouse. Suppose there's a lighthouse up on a cliff somewhere, and it's shining out, telling boats there's rocks around here so stay away, there's no way you can stop a passing ship from seeing the lighthouse. This means it would be very difficult for example, for a private company to make a profit building lighthouses and offering the service for sale, because anybody can see the light whether they've paid the fee or not.

Now goods that have this feature that you can't stop a person from gaining the benefit of them, are called non-excludable.

There's also another feature: public goods are non-rival. Now what does that mean? Well, suppose I go into a canteen or something at lunchtime and there's only one hamburger left, and there's two people in the shop, me and someone else. Only one of us can have the hamburger. If I buy the hamburger and eat it, that stops the other person from eating that same hamburger. A hamburger is a rival good. One person's consuming it does stop another person from consuming it, but a lighthouse is not like that. Lighthouses are an example of a non-rival good. So are things like for example works of art, one person looking at a painting doesn't stop another person from looking at a painting.

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There is also an interesting session on the illusion of choice (which is a by-product of competition):

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopher...10/2991617.htm

A couple of "Thoughts of the Day" from a guru in Rishikesh (where the Beatles went) have come to me in the last two days which are relevant:

"EFFICIENCY MEANS, MORE OUTPUT WITH LESS INPUT, IN TERMS OF TIME, ENERGY AND MONEY."

and

"JUST AS MOTH GNAWS A GARMENT, SO DO ENVY AND JEALOUSY CONSUME THE PERSON. IT IS MOST ANTISOCIAL PASSION OF THE HUMAN NATURE."

Evaluate competition wrt these thoughts.