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Online Porn - The Technology Testbed?
DaveAtFraud writes "USA Today is running a only slightly tongue-in-cheek article pointing out that the on-line porn industry has become the technology testbed for innovative content delivery. On-line delivery of 'adult' content has been wrestling with issues such as digital rights management, video on-demand billing, wireless services, and geo-location software since long before these became issues for 'mainstream' content providers. Maybe having an adult content provider listed on your geek resume isn't so bad after all."
As much as some people would like to deny it Porn built the internet. Before that it fed the BBSes. It seems kind of obvious to me that despite what we have been told the first network was actually built because one geek called the other up and said, "Hey I got this great picture of a naked chick. You wanna see?" Porn, e-mail, and Wolf ET. Life can't get much better than that.
Online Porn is lending a hand to the rest of the industry...
Unlike viewers of corporate or media websites, these people won't complain if something doesn't work properly. No one's going to make a stink if their favorite porn website's flash animation isn't working properly, at least not publically.
The VCR, the camcorder, and now the Internet. Heck, I bet the second thing Gutenberg did after printing a Bible was to make a book with naughty woodcuts.
a only slightly tongue-in-cheek article
...ewww
I always hear about how amazingly profitable the porn industry is. My question is who pays for all this porn when there is more than enough free stuff out there to meet anyone's needs. Just my observation...
Damn...I wish I was a writer...
Yes, they are definitely ahead of the times compared to most others when it comes to technology, but they are also ahead of the times in the nextgen marketing/spam department.
Pop-ups? They did it first. Pop-unders? Did it first. The messenger exploit? Guess who.
God knows what else is brewing in the labs as we speak..
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
If you want to test a particular platform for scalability, have a porn outfit try it out.
It only makes sense, considering how rooted in sex we human beings really are. I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of, and if as a race we could be more open with our sexuality, it wouldn't cause so many other problems.
Saw an interesting feature on a Dateline-type TV news show for my Cyberlaw class. It said that pornography has driven not only the Internet (streaming video, credit card verification, broadband, etc.), but also technologies like the VCR (instead of going to the sleazy adult theatre, you can watch skin flicks in your own home) and even cable television. It was said that the number of adult movie screens in this country (indeed, around the world) has gone up exponentially since the introduction of the VCR, and it hasn't decreased since. It takes away the need for people to go out and buy porn in a semi-public fashion.
Just think, if it weren't for our baser instincts, we'd never have advanced as far technologically as we have. Who knows what the future holds...
www.tealeaves.org "All you need is love." -
...in college who did his doctoral o this exact subject. He later went on to work for ABC television. His basic gist was that it's the porn industry that actually works out the practical logistics of any new medium. At the time he was talking about the porn industry building the VHS video industry. A lot of movie studios were reluctant to put movies on VHS since they feared it would destroy their industry. But the porno business had nothing to lose as they were relegated to booths and shady theaters. So... they put ALL of their movies out on VHS. All those people out there who would NEVER be caught dead in a porno movie house or booth suddenly had access in their own living rooms and [BAM!!!] a new empire was born. Too bad porno movies soundtracks are so bad, otherwise the porno industry would probably have the online music distribution down pat in a short time.
Un-news
I wish all industries were so dedicated to testing.
- percieved anonymity
- convienence...content delivered on demand
- privacy of enjoying content in own home
I wonder how many people would pay a porn site to download content, but will not be willing to go to an "adult bookstore" to buy the same content?
Will people still visit porn sites if their employers knew what sites they visit?
When the web started, these were the folks who mostly implemented the whole credit card/password access thing. They "stretched" graphics, streaming (uh huh huh) video, audio, and any other multimedia applications out there.
They've gone after the broadband crowd long before everyone else relied on it, and in a sense, continue to push the whole Internet-based "entertainment" stuff. Yeah, they innovate, can't deny that. They've always been in the fringe -- and everyone else just kinda looks on to see what does and doesn't work.
Hmmm, maybe they're the "military" of the Internet -- the technology gets designed for their purposes first, then once it's tested, goes on to find applications for the general public.
This means that the adult entertainment industry and other fast-paced private industries have supplanted the military as a driver for leading-edge tech. The long procurement cycles for weapons and government programs mean that they use older tech. In fact, it is a real problem for vendors because the government wants specs on stuff to be delivered in 18-24 months (its hard to spec a PC 2 years in advance).
Although the military will always be the driver for some technologies, commerical enterprise, with its much faster innovation cycle time, seems to be taking over as the key driver for innovation.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Yeah. Gail Harris was fucking rad.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I doubt I'd find it if I tried but I remember reading an article about a year or more ago from a big porn site operator taking about the advantages of using J2EE technologies in their high traffic sites. There were also comments about companies using them to fine tune their frameworks because of the real world load they had. I found this article when I wanted to find out more about competing technologies. I specifically wanted to find what the porn industry was using for their websites knowing how much traffic they get. So I stuck with jsp/servlet programming. If it's good enough for half naked women with fake boobs, it's good enough for me!
Unfortunately, people might not go to well for the slogan "Java & J2EE, we help you get sticky."
Porn has helped innovate many industries. It's a shame there's too much of a stigma associated with it and they don't get the recognition they deserve.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
The company I work for hosts some of the largest porn sites on the web - we have 4 gigs - Internet, and all the latest Cisco toys: iSCSI SANs, 6500's with load balancing, IDS, and firewall modules, gig E everywhere, real-time geographical load distribution, you name it.
My last two gigs were Universal and Sony (I'm in LA) and both were tiny Internet environments compared to this.
Our SAN has 7TB of content so far & we're adding 1/2 a TB a month...
It is a great market for testing many things because it is such a commoditized and competitive market. The material is all the same boring stuff, so they need to explore new ways to market it. Is there a porn version of Netflix yet? Who is going to be the first in wireless porn?
--------
Create a WAP server
I'd also like to note that a couple of DVD features, such as multiple angels, were pretty much implemented thanks to the porn industry.
Think that's BS?
How many movies have multiple angles that DON'T involve storyboards?
How many PORN movies have multiple angles? (not that I personally know or anything...)
Yeah, thought so.
Still wondering why I can stream Debbie Does Dallas (the original) to my Zaurus over 802.11b faster than to my PC with a 1GB ethernet adaptor.
:)
Something the article fails to mention is the money behind porn. The porn industry is the *only* industry that has never suffered financially. There have never been layoffs. And while mostly privately held (after all, who wants their investment portfolio filled with smut companies), its one of the best funded industries out there. The porn industry has the $$$ to make things work, but they don't always share their technologies. The majority also use some form of *nix in their infrastructure... very little M$ found in the porn industry. And from a dot-bomb perspective, I made a killing as a 21-year-old making over $150K a year in the dot-com era. When I finally got laid off, I went to Vivid Video. While all my other over $100K a year friends and co-workers are now averaging $80K to $90K, I'm now making over $200K. There's something to be said for working in an industry with money. And, no, I'm not an actor, but I do get to watch whatever I want... and occasionally some of the girls need a little relief.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Okay, I'm also being touch-and-cheek but I think the Rule of Porn mostly works. Can you use Google for porn? Yep, must be a good technology. Can you use faster Internet access for porn? Yep... and so on.
Porn is that perfect equilibrium point on the chart that economic theorists dream about - the ultimate cash nexus, where the supply demand curves collide in ecstatic harmony.
Consider - there is enough technical info on the internet to perform nuclear fusion, harness solar energy to power your homes, run your car on biofuel from corn instead of gasoline, create immense wealth from freely available portfolio management techniques, crack the genetic code, break RSA crypto, find the next largest Mersenne prime, or maybe just find a new home, repair your microwave, hawk your old CDs.....or even build yourself an H-bomb & blow up this planet to bits.
Yet, what is the most sought after commodity on the net ? Porn !
Why is that ?
In "The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith explains the "Diamond-Water paradox". The most useful, valuable, life-sustaining entity on the planet is water - yet, it has practically no price, since supply is free ( it rains ! ). The least useful frivilous commodity is the diamond, but it has enormous, immense value in the eyes of man.
So, Smith says, an economist must never attempt to tie value with price, since they don't have much of a relationship. Porn on the net is much more valuable than all the useful techie manuals & MIT courseware put together, because Porn is the ultimate diamond.
It's all in how you write your resume. "Commercial internet based multi-media provideer" sounds much better than "systems administrator for Sluts-R-Us.com."
I can get it for you wholesale.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
People don't develop better video codecs so they can email their moms home movies.
Depends on where you grew up and how freaky your mom is.
I remember my daddy telling me when I was a child "go ahead, look at porn as much as you'd like, but I better not catch you paying for it!"
To this day, his stance is that the two things in life you don't pay for are porn and fire extinguishers*.
*Long story
True story...
We were developing (back in the dot-com days, a moment of silence please) a desktop collaboration software (think NetMeeting, WebEx, etc.) but we had a way-supeior codec and way of doing things.
Along came a company, that wanted to use our server technology to stream video. Interestingly not a porn company, but none other than those fine friers of chicken, KFC. They wanted to wire up all their stores and stream their security monitoring cameras back to HQ security. We called the project ChickenCam...
Coincidentally, a few weeks later we were approached by a company out of the LA area (where else) who wanted a surprisingly similar implementation. They were a little sketchy about the details in their first call, but eventually they let on that they wanted various video channels to stream to their users. It was then that we decided to rename the ChickenCam project to PoultryCam to match this PussyCam project. We didn't think CatCam and ChickenCam was nearly as much fun.
In the end, the PussyCam ended up going operational, but the thick client install and configuration made it less than successful (as I had originally predicted). We did sell the PoultryCam, but they only ever implemented it in one store and then gave up on the whole idea.
Those were the days...
--D
p.s. Any porn companies currently hiring?
They could have done much better if they had introduced master beta.
Oh come on, you laughed...
There's actually truth in this. They refused to lisence the Beta technology to Porn Producers. So they industry went to VHS. The rest is history.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Originally posted at http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/linkage/pr0n _leads_the_way.php:
I found a pretty insightful rant (safe for work) copied from the business guy at the altporn site Suicide Girls. I wish the RIAA would start tracking how people hear about the albums that they buy, so that they could stop freaking out.
Porn has a long history of figuring out how to use new media to their advantage. Perhaps because porn is driven by our basest instinct we understand it on far deeper levels than widget building, and can apply that understanding to things that we don't fully comprehend intellectually. Maybe it's just because there's such intense competition in the industry that forces companies to innovate. I'm sure there's a "free hand of the market" joke in there, but I'll be damned if I can find it.
The VCR was largely decried by the MPAA because they saw it as cutting into their profits. When the VCR was still new, MPAA president Jack Valenti said the VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. (which of course means that he wasn't opposed to the VCR). A driver of early VCR purchases was being able to watch porn movies without having to go to theaters filled with creepier people than you. Fast forward 20 years and that Boston strangler makes up a huge portion of movie studio profits.
While I'm skeptical that porn can drive any technology - who really needs porn on their cellphone at blazing speeds - the porn industry typically ahead of the curve. Let's hope the RIAA realizes this and stops suing 12 year old girls.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
"Watson, I need you."
"Watson, tell me what you're wearing."
How does one become an adult webmaster
There are a couple of ways to do it. The first method involves having a very willing girlfriend that has a lot of friends who aren't afraid to take their clothes off. If you date a stripper or a wanna-be porn starlet, you're set.
The second method is more difficult now, but basically, find a niche and fill it. Unfortunately, most of the common fetishes (big breasts, asians, lesbian, blonds, etc.) are already represented by some very well-established sites, so what you're left with is catering to the Fat Asian Foot-Fetishists out there. Not very enjoyable work, and hard-as-hell to get content.
Personally, I worked with a photographer for a few years, and we did a number of shoots for strippers who wanted to become models. The problem is, most strippers simply don't have the right looks or height to be a model. But we would shoot them regardless, since they paid our bills.
We decided to offer free publicity shots (since we kept the publishing rights), and word got around. Mind you, Joe Photo won't be able to pull this off. The key to being a successful photographer is looking like a successful photographer: plenty of strobes, lots of tripods hanging on the walls, a proper studio, tearsheets casually tossed about, etc.. The photog I worked with probably had a hundred grand invested in equipment.
The nice thing about strippers is that they tend to be a bit crazy to begin with, and if you're reasonably cool they won't have a problem doing crazy shit in front of a camera. In their minds, it beats having to ass-grind some fat slob at a club any day of the week.
This can get expensive, however, depending on location. Which is the next point: go where the talent is. We worked on the East Coast, and there's just not a lot of girls going into porn over here. And the strippers? Well, your standards tend to drop when you have a real-flesh-and-blood girl dancing for you, but for an online audience the bar is raised considerably. Your girls either better be extremely attractive, have enormous breasts, or be willing to do some pretty extreme stuff if you're going to keep up with the competition.
So, if you really want to be a PornGod, here's my advice. First, move to L.A. -- there's a lot more "talent" (ha!) to be had for a lot less dough. Learn some basic studio photography, then shell out a couple grand for a prosumer digital camera and some strobes. Rent a studio someplace that's easy to get to by public transportation (bus, train, whatever). Or, make friends with a photographer that's already established and shares your enthusiasm for naked chicks and doesn't mind ruining his professional career (i.e., his day job). That's not to say that your name will get dragged through the mud if you go into porn, but it's a risk.
Once you've got that, set up a website with a host that won't boot you for hosting porn. Set up your site, plan what kind of market you're aiming at, and start filling it with stuff you find on USENET. Yes, it's not really legal, but if there's no (c) on the picture, and you're still small-time, you can consider it fair game. Now comes the fun part...
Head down to your local strip club. You're not going for a lap dance, so try and be professional and curteous. Really look at the girls -- don't just oggle their nakedness. If you don't see anyone that catches your eye, move on to the next place. Try to remain as objective as you can (it gets easier the more you do it). If you find a couple of girls you like, approach them after a routine when they're walking around the club. Tell them your name, what you would like to use them for, and hand them a business card. Look at her eyes, not her tits, and you're more likely to be taken seriously. Tell them how much you're paying for a shoot, and ask them to pass along the information to anyone they think might be interested.
Don't engage them in a long conversation, since they're technically on the clock and y
I have a number of fairly normal desktop machines (mostly Athlon64s) that happen to have around 900GB of disk space. It's not a big deal. A terabyte of disk space costs about $1000. I've acquired around 2TB of space just in the last year. All told I'm a hair over 5TB among my various machines (some of that space is redundant storage in arrays).
No. I don't invest very much actual time on downloads. I wrote some scripts to grab content from various places on the web. I look at a few "favorite" sites daily, but that's not a large investment in time. Maybe 15 minutes. I usually find new sites serendipitously, and they if they appear to update content with any frequency, I add 'em to the script.
It's pretty typical for me to pick up 300MB of stuff in a night from scripts. Sometimes I'll subscribe to a pay site and grab the whole thing.
I'm a general-purpose media collector. I own maybe 3200 CDs (all classical music), about 1000 (video, non-adult) DVDs and collections of paperback novels, magazines, sheet music and comic books. I have a complete-except-for-three-issues collection of Playboy magazines, for example.
I got interested in video capture hardware seven or eight years ago, when my Pentium Pro machine was a fantastic powerhouse, just to see what I could do with it. I started doing my home movies, then tried commercial tapes... which didn't work, because of macrovision. But a porn tape did, so I started duping the oldest tapes my local video store had (the ones I liked best). Not long after I picked up an affordable CD-R drive and I started making VCDs that I sold on ebay. From there I started getting requests, and then the hunt was on for stuff I couldn't get locally and... wham. I had a collection.
So I'm a media geek of some kind. I re-wired my whole house for media access about three weeks after I bought it. I can watch my DVDs or listen to my music in any room. If I have some kind of OCD, it's probably deeper than just downloading/collecting porno. I *do* take 200mg of Zoloft a day, which I know is used to treat OCD among other things (severe depression in my case).
For the other thing: there's this. She didn't mind playboy stuff, and she actually _liked_ dirty movies, although ironically she had me pre-screen to make sure there WASN'T g/g activity... which itself led to a great deal of knowledge about the movies and the people in them (for example, a movie with Tera Patrick is a good bet for straight M/F sex. I haven't seen her with a girl yet).
Anyway, she was more annoyed with the amount of space my collections took up than anything else. At the end of our time living together, she asked me for specific things to take and share with her girlfriend (in case you were wondering why I need the Zoloft).
I can't judge how other people react. I'm not good at that sort of thing. But it's not like I'd talk about it in front of other real-life people. But here I can be at least be honest about such things.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Every invention of the 20th century has been in some way related to sex.
Cars. Drive off somewhere to get sex, or have sex in a private portable room.
Phones. Call people, arrange to meet them. Have sex.
TVs. Watch people having sex. Boobs, too.
VCRs. See TVs.
Internet. Watch people having sex. Contact people around the world in order to meet and have sex with them. Also, look at porn.
DVDs. See VCRs, only with multiple camera angles for Matrix-style camerawork during porn scenes.
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
I have different ideas about this.
First of all, porn isn't meant to be as realistic as possible. We watch porn being fully aware that this stuff isn't real. It's a way to experience fantasies... it kind of ends there. Porn does not replace real sex all together - it complements it.
Let's look at your points:
1. Androids - We already have Real Dolls. A reporter actually had sex with a real doll and documented his feelings in nerve.com. No, I won't post the link - go look it up there if you're interested. Bottom line - it's weird and freaky. If it moves and talks, it's going to be outright scary.
2. "True" Virtual Reality - Maybe, but it's not going to replace 2D porn in a hurry. I'd keep an eye on this one though.
3. Smell / Taste - I don't think so. Is there anyone else who finds the concept of smelling / tasting another unknown person (although a celebrity) gross? FYI, flavor and beauty may not be correlated.
4. Personal Video Players - We already have this stuff. What we don't have is a good quality, consumer grade "personal display", i.e. stuff like the Xybernaut (TV screen in your sunglasses). I believe that personal displays will bring about a revolution but porn would have little to do with it.
5. Stain proof clothing / Genetics - WTF?!
Looking at your point 1, 2 and 3 it appears that you're trying to get replace sex completely. That is not the main concept here. I think that the development in porn industry is going to be not technological. It'd more towards the "subject" of the content. Examples:
a. Customized porn: Some sites offer this. It's like you choose the theme, setting, models, dialogues, name of characters and the story. They act this out for you. Right now it's quite expensive and is only offered by sites that has really weird content (fetish / bondage). I guess this will pick up.
b. Similar to a, but more "community" oriented. Maybe some sort of an moderation style system where the best user-submitted story gets acted out. Or, photo shoot for models / themes with top votes from users. Scoop / Slashcode anyone?
c. Porn for couples: Eventually people get laid. Till date, porn is mostly a guy thing. Now what happens when you feel like watching porn with your S/O? You're not going to watch "4 on 1 DD sluts" with your girlfriend, right? It think the next trend is going to be porn for couples.
d. End of stereotyped porn as we know it. Girls won't keep their high heels on, all acts won't have oral sex, guys won't look like zombies grown in vats, and the movie won't end with money shots. There's too much content in this theme and nobody would be willing to pay for this anymore.