All they seem to do now is remake movies that don't need to be remade. The original Willy Wonka was a perfectly excellent film and I see no need to ruin it with a remake. Same with War of the Worlds.
I'm a systems admin for a porn company. I have a laid-back dot.com like atmosphere, except that we're profitable. Very profitable. I get huge bonuses, I get paid way too much, and I have easy-going bosses who listen to what I say.
I highly recommend the porn business to any of the geeks out there - quit wasting time coding for stock options!
And the article is fairly accurate - we cut off affiliates who spam pretty quickly and block access to their reseller code.
However, such programs generate incredible amounts of traffic - the money generated far exceeds the bad publicity and attention the occasionally poorly targeted email generates.
I have no formal schooling in computers. I never even finished college. But I've been a UNIX admin now for about 7 years, going on 8.
I started out as a Novell gofer, running disks around for people in a small company running ARCNET and Novell 3.11 on a $5000 486DX/50 and doing Windows for Workgroups installs. The pay sucked.
Then, I moved to a company that was starting up in the ISP business in '95. That's where I first started learning UNIX. After that, I went to a real, national ISP as a junior admin and learned perl.
Basically, I started out in the kitchen scrubbing plates - I did the crap work and moved up from there, getting real world experience. I also got extremely lucky, with the popularity of the Internet starting up demand for UNIX admins, and there being a complete absence of such people at the time.
These days, the supply of junior admins is much greater than it used to be, so getting an easy break like I had is harder, but if you're willing to make almost no money for the first six months to a year, you can get some real world experience.
Seeing as I run a number of successful porn sites, I thought I might comment on the over-simplifications mentioned here.
Everyone seems to think that running a porn website is the easiest job in the world - I am here to tell you it is *far, far* more complicated than you imagine. Much of this complication stems from the very business itself.
Any nimrod can set up a picture viewer. It's a little more complicated than that, but essentially your average script kiddie can get the physical site up. The problems being when you start trying to *take credit cards*.
There are a number of online credit card processing companies, but very, very few that are really willing to take on "adult sites" due to the rampant CC fraud and chargeback problems.
Most processors will accept up to 10% chargebacks from "normal" sites, like say your Amazon.coms and whatnot. For those that don't know, a "chargeback" is the reversal of a CC charge, instigated by the card holder or the CC company itself. For example, if Joe Sixpack sees a charge on his card, he'll call the CC company and go "I didn't make that!" and the CC company will reverse it. This is a chargeback. The processor is responsible for these costs.
The CC companies, like Visa, will allow a certain amount of this to take place before cutting off the middleman processor. It is the processor's job to maintain this ratio.
However, because of the business of adult content, and the chargeback issues, adult sites are usually only allowed a maximum of 1% chargebacks before being "cut off" by a processor. 1% is not a lot, only 1 in 100. It is very, very easy to get cut off by a processor because of this.
What we do is rotate processors, sending one client to one and another to a different processor, hoping to spread the chargebacks across several processors. Even still, we lose a processor about once every few months.
So, the process of managing processors, and the customer service issues with that, plus filtering out known deadbeats, is a major issue - let alone user management. It is *not* easy.
Next, you have the issue of hacking. Since porn is "dirty", no one feels bad about attempting to steal it. That means we are *constantly* under attack from people attempting to hack in, or who share passwords, or attempt to guess passwords - all kinds of attacks on our system. The system we use to filter out these people is all custom-written C code, apache modules, perl, and firewall configs, and is *not simple*.
Bandwidth is not cheap. Our bandwidth costs for our few sites is on average about $7,500 a month. On top of that, the systems required to pump out those dirty pictures rivals that of the national ISPs I've managed. The layers of servers, cache machines, firewalls, traffic shapers, etc. is *not simple*.
After all that is said and done, the final issue is competition - this is a cut-throat business, with *millions* of sites competing for eyeballs. Making your site stand out in that is a full time job.
When people ask me how to get into online porn, I tell them, "don't. It's too late." They think it's as easy as throwing up a page and waiting for the cash to roll in - it ain't. Trust me.
Actually, I think women have a game they like - Everquest. It's all about chatting.
The older the address, the worse it gets
on
Buried in email?
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· Score: 2
Email addresses were supposed to be the ultimate in portable commmunications - you could read your email everywhere, and you'd have it forever.
But the reality is, the longer you have an email address, the more lists it gets put on, and the more crap you get, until even the filters can't hold back the tide of crap, and you're forced to just give up and get a new address.
I've had this email address since 1995, and let me tell you, I get the craziest crap on a daily basis - probably 80% to 90% of the stuff I get is spam...
I hate to break it to you, but QNX had a true multi-tasking OS running on the orginal IBM PC.
There are no technical limitations when it comes to UNIX and UNIX-like OSes...
Did anyone read the forecast? Revenues are below forecasted expectations, but *Yahoo remains profitable*.
If anything, it will mean Yahoo will now trade closer to their captialization value. I mean, they have $2 *billion* in cash reserves. And they have more than just ad revenues - they have a number of revenue streams, albeit that ads are their primary one.
Yahoo will remain profitable for some time to come, I imagine.
If he feels so strongly, perhaps he should realize the Genie is out of the bottle and contentrate on selling *extra value*.
No one I know really enjoys reading online books. They generally buy the softcover to read. Harlan should realize this, and concentrate on making sure this continues by having the *value of the work in the physical printed copy*.
It's called "Value-Added", and it's the reason most people buy stuff at stores, rather than wholesale. He should check it out.
Within that price range, there are a number of good quality receivers. Marantz, NAD, Yamaha. But if you need speakers as well, stick to a higher low-end receiver like a Yamaha 5250 and get some medium quality speakers, such as Bose, or a personal favorite, Mission.
$1500 for an entire surround system will get you something "okay", but not terribly high-end.
My company does web-hosting for a number of porn sites, many of which have the word "fuck" in the domain name.
The secret is to avoid NSI like the plague. We used to use Domain Wizards, but have since moved to being an OpenSRS partner.
I mean, let's face it - these guys aren't huge thinkers or public activists. They run (ran?) a popular website which is essentially a "gosh-gee-wiz-look-at-this" portal.
Although, what with fame these days being dictated solely on face time, I guess these guys are celebrities or something.
Nothing personal guys, but I don't consider either one of you worthy of a podium lecture at a major university...
Am I the only one who finds it highly ironic that Stallman is against religious fundamentalism, let it quite plainly a religious fundamentalist himself?
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck... It's a duck. Stallman walks like a preacher, talks like a preacher, acts like a preacher - he's a preacher.
Being the owner of an Empeg, I can tell you nothing compares as far as sound quality.
However, it doesn't look like anyone here is actually in the know in regards to the next generation of Empeg, the Mark 2. It already has voice recognition - check the feature list in the newsletters.
The Mark 2 player will start shipping next month.
And you call yourselves geeks! None of you even knew about this!
Any $600 solution will be crap compared to the Empeg in terms of sound quality and usefulness.
Moderation? That's not the problem
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
The problem is the hideous UI on Slashdot. It is quite possibly the worst web-based threaded messaging system I have ever used. It is tedious and confusing.
Take a cue from Usenet - instead of having threads that descend to seperate page, then have others that descend to more seperate pages and thus getting people hopelessly lost, have all threads descend on a single page.
Actually, Canada is only wide open to college graduates.
All my experience - over 5 years now - in internet systems administration for some very large Canadian ISPs isn't enough for me to qualify for the unlimited TN-1 visa. For that one, you need a university degree.
Well, I was too busy getting real experience to finish my degree, so I'm screwed. So that means I can only get the H1B, but that's all closed up now anyway, plus it takes months and months to get approval for that.
I've had over a dozen job offers in the valley, but none of them were willing to deal with the H1B hassles.
So, looks like I'll stay in Canada for the time being...
I've been on the waiting list for quite a while now - I'm number 396 - and I happen to be in the UK right now! I gave them a call thinking I might be able to pick mine up before I leave, but alas, they won't be ready until after I've left!
Slashdot Mirror
... would anyone other than eco-freaks drive it? It's hideously ugly and completely unsexy in every way. Three wheels? Give me a break.
Wake me up when they make an electric car that doesn't look like nerds designed it.
All they seem to do now is remake movies that don't need to be remade. The original Willy Wonka was a perfectly excellent film and I see no need to ruin it with a remake. Same with War of the Worlds.
Whatever happened to original scripts?
I highly recommend the porn business to any of the geeks out there - quit wasting time coding for stock options!
However, such programs generate incredible amounts of traffic - the money generated far exceeds the bad publicity and attention the occasionally poorly targeted email generates.
They can be had for $20,000, so no thanks. Just thought I might score a deal.
No pinball machine will ever be worth $150,000 *ever* no matter how rare.
If you're interested in selling that Big Bang Bar, I'll offer you $15,000 US for it. You can email me privately from the email on my webpage.
I started out as a Novell gofer, running disks around for people in a small company running ARCNET and Novell 3.11 on a $5000 486DX/50 and doing Windows for Workgroups installs. The pay sucked.
Then, I moved to a company that was starting up in the ISP business in '95. That's where I first started learning UNIX. After that, I went to a real, national ISP as a junior admin and learned perl.
Basically, I started out in the kitchen scrubbing plates - I did the crap work and moved up from there, getting real world experience. I also got extremely lucky, with the popularity of the Internet starting up demand for UNIX admins, and there being a complete absence of such people at the time.
These days, the supply of junior admins is much greater than it used to be, so getting an easy break like I had is harder, but if you're willing to make almost no money for the first six months to a year, you can get some real world experience.
Everyone seems to think that running a porn website is the easiest job in the world - I am here to tell you it is *far, far* more complicated than you imagine. Much of this complication stems from the very business itself.
Any nimrod can set up a picture viewer. It's a little more complicated than that, but essentially your average script kiddie can get the physical site up. The problems being when you start trying to *take credit cards*.
There are a number of online credit card processing companies, but very, very few that are really willing to take on "adult sites" due to the rampant CC fraud and chargeback problems.
Most processors will accept up to 10% chargebacks from "normal" sites, like say your Amazon.coms and whatnot. For those that don't know, a "chargeback" is the reversal of a CC charge, instigated by the card holder or the CC company itself. For example, if Joe Sixpack sees a charge on his card, he'll call the CC company and go "I didn't make that!" and the CC company will reverse it. This is a chargeback. The processor is responsible for these costs.
The CC companies, like Visa, will allow a certain amount of this to take place before cutting off the middleman processor. It is the processor's job to maintain this ratio.
However, because of the business of adult content, and the chargeback issues, adult sites are usually only allowed a maximum of 1% chargebacks before being "cut off" by a processor. 1% is not a lot, only 1 in 100. It is very, very easy to get cut off by a processor because of this.
What we do is rotate processors, sending one client to one and another to a different processor, hoping to spread the chargebacks across several processors. Even still, we lose a processor about once every few months.
So, the process of managing processors, and the customer service issues with that, plus filtering out known deadbeats, is a major issue - let alone user management. It is *not* easy.
Next, you have the issue of hacking. Since porn is "dirty", no one feels bad about attempting to steal it. That means we are *constantly* under attack from people attempting to hack in, or who share passwords, or attempt to guess passwords - all kinds of attacks on our system. The system we use to filter out these people is all custom-written C code, apache modules, perl, and firewall configs, and is *not simple*.
Bandwidth is not cheap. Our bandwidth costs for our few sites is on average about $7,500 a month. On top of that, the systems required to pump out those dirty pictures rivals that of the national ISPs I've managed. The layers of servers, cache machines, firewalls, traffic shapers, etc. is *not simple*.
After all that is said and done, the final issue is competition - this is a cut-throat business, with *millions* of sites competing for eyeballs. Making your site stand out in that is a full time job.
When people ask me how to get into online porn, I tell them, "don't. It's too late." They think it's as easy as throwing up a page and waiting for the cash to roll in - it ain't. Trust me.
Just because they create a shield, doesn't automatically mean it's harmful.
That's like the pathetic argument that if you give kids condoms, they'll have more sex. It's total crap.
They'll sell them to people who want them, no matter whether they need them or not.
Actually, I think women have a game they like - Everquest. It's all about chatting.
Email addresses were supposed to be the ultimate in portable commmunications - you could read your email everywhere, and you'd have it forever.
But the reality is, the longer you have an email address, the more lists it gets put on, and the more crap you get, until even the filters can't hold back the tide of crap, and you're forced to just give up and get a new address.
I've had this email address since 1995, and let me tell you, I get the craziest crap on a daily basis - probably 80% to 90% of the stuff I get is spam...
I hate to break it to you, but QNX had a true multi-tasking OS running on the orginal IBM PC. There are no technical limitations when it comes to UNIX and UNIX-like OSes...
Did anyone read the forecast? Revenues are below forecasted expectations, but *Yahoo remains profitable*.
If anything, it will mean Yahoo will now trade closer to their captialization value. I mean, they have $2 *billion* in cash reserves. And they have more than just ad revenues - they have a number of revenue streams, albeit that ads are their primary one.
Yahoo will remain profitable for some time to come, I imagine.
If he feels so strongly, perhaps he should realize the Genie is out of the bottle and contentrate on selling *extra value*.
No one I know really enjoys reading online books. They generally buy the softcover to read. Harlan should realize this, and concentrate on making sure this continues by having the *value of the work in the physical printed copy*.
It's called "Value-Added", and it's the reason most people buy stuff at stores, rather than wholesale. He should check it out.
Here's a link to model I got: http://viza.com/vm2.html
Anyway, this thing was totally awesome - it cost $1 in gas a week to drive to work, and I got there in half the time.
The problem, however, is that the cops HATE THEM. I ended up receiving a total of $12,000 in fines for driving a motor vehicle with insurance, etc...
Basically, these things are OFF ROAD ONLY. Don't make the same mistake I did.
The link is now correct, but no acknowledgement of their monumental error.
At least admit you fucked up, instead of pulling the old switchero and pretending you actually read this stuff first...
Within that price range, there are a number of good quality receivers. Marantz, NAD, Yamaha. But if you need speakers as well, stick to a higher low-end receiver like a Yamaha 5250 and get some medium quality speakers, such as Bose, or a personal favorite, Mission.
$1500 for an entire surround system will get you something "okay", but not terribly high-end.
My company does web-hosting for a number of porn sites, many of which have the word "fuck" in the domain name. The secret is to avoid NSI like the plague. We used to use Domain Wizards, but have since moved to being an OpenSRS partner.
Although, what with fame these days being dictated solely on face time, I guess these guys are celebrities or something.
Nothing personal guys, but I don't consider either one of you worthy of a podium lecture at a major university...
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck... It's a duck. Stallman walks like a preacher, talks like a preacher, acts like a preacher - he's a preacher.
Fire and brimstone!
However, it doesn't look like anyone here is actually in the know in regards to the next generation of Empeg, the Mark 2. It already has voice recognition - check the feature list in the newsletters.
The Mark 2 player will start shipping next month.
And you call yourselves geeks! None of you even knew about this!
Any $600 solution will be crap compared to the Empeg in terms of sound quality and usefulness.
The problem is the hideous UI on Slashdot. It is quite possibly the worst web-based threaded messaging system I have ever used. It is tedious and confusing.
Take a cue from Usenet - instead of having threads that descend to seperate page, then have others that descend to more seperate pages and thus getting people hopelessly lost, have all threads descend on a single page.
Actually, Canada is only wide open to college
graduates.
All my experience - over 5 years now - in internet systems administration for some very large Canadian ISPs isn't enough for me to qualify for the unlimited TN-1 visa. For that one, you need a university degree.
Well, I was too busy getting real experience to finish my degree, so I'm screwed. So that means I can only get the H1B, but that's all closed up now anyway, plus it takes months and months to get approval for that.
I've had over a dozen job offers in the valley, but none of them were willing to deal with the H1B hassles.
So, looks like I'll stay in Canada for the time being...
This article seems to imply the empeg unit doesn't exist. Strange that mine is shipping as I speak.
/dev/null'ed.
I submitted an article last week about how they're shipping unit now, but it was
The empeg car player is *not* vapourware.
I've been on the waiting list for quite a while now - I'm number 396 - and I happen to be in the UK right now! I gave them a call thinking I might be able to pick mine up before I leave, but alas, they won't be ready until after I've left!
Doh!
Can't wait to put it in my new car...