kottke.org — Yesterday developer Armin Heinrich posted an iPhone app to the App Store called I Am Rich. The program displays a red gem, has no function but to display your wealth to others through ownership, and costs $1000. I Am Rich isn't the most clever piece of art, but it's not bad either. For some, the iPhone is already an obvious display of wealth.
Aug 7, 2008 View in Crawl 4
wildsnakeAug 7, 2008
Lol. Someone should have put a picture of a BMW and sold the app for $60,000
campoAug 7, 2008
the person who wrote this is dumb
profweekdayAug 8, 2008
I never said that there shouldn't be free applications, nor that they had less worth than paid-for applications. Assuming that a free application is automatically better than a paid-for one is very narrow-minded.If you mean the SourceForge Community Choice Awards (this is just from a quick Google seach, so correct me if I'm wrong), it stands to reason that an Open Source community would vote for free applications. Not so much a coincidence as a very biased sample.I love programming, and would like to think I was good at it. I can tell you now that I'd be a whole lot worse at it if I didn't do it for 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week as part of my job. Were I producing only free applications for the pure love of it, I would be limited to a few hours over the evenings and weekends, leaving me with no social life or skills that developed at a drastically slower rate. I do have a few side projects that I hand out freely, and they wouldn't even be possible if I weren't a developer by trade.There is nothing wrong with open source, it serves a very valid purpose, allowing a wealth of ideas and skills to be shared. But it can lead to problems (the Debian openssl debacle, for one), as well as solving them. I personally find Subversion to be a huge pain in the ass, but that's a preference. Its certainly not the only way to produce software. I'm not saying that commercial development is perfect, but it doesn't by its very nature produce more or less buggy software than Open Source (still can't get wi-fi working on Linux, for one).The continuing Jailbreak war of attrition is not an example of free software development being better than commercial. I defy you to find a perfectly secure application or OS. The only true test would be if the roles were reversed, and the iPhone dev team had to lock down a device while a team from Apple attempted to crack it.
seankeeveyAug 8, 2008
@IPubliusSo an engagment ring has a purpose in representing something to the owner, then why not this?
jd7sevenAug 8, 2008
How was it a scam? It clearly stated No Functionality.
Closed AccountAug 8, 2008
Whoahoa...did you attempt to establish a link between iPhones and erradicating third world poverty?The iPhone is not a product that benefits anyone, despite the hype, it's a novelty item.If the money spent on iPhones was spent on research for clean water, there's a correlation.At no point in your comment did you come anywhere near a rational response. You have made everyone on this thread dumber.I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
surgictubeAug 22, 2008
Damn, I was going to reply to beerock, but you two nailed it. Give him time... it's hard to understand complex global economic issues when he's still living in mommy's basement. :D