Goodbye RealNetworks, hello Real Retirement

It looks like Microsoft has given RealNetworks a golden gift horse worth hundreds of millions. Interestingly only half of that is actually cash, over $300M will be in marketing assistance. My bet is that Real, who only turned one profitable year in the last ten will now quietly go away - and probably be acquired by Microsoft itself.

Lets face it, there were only two reasons that Real ever made any more. Number one it was an alternative music technology for all those Windows users who really just hated Microsoft but had to use it anyway (e.g. for work). Using RealPlayer gave them the little "F**k the system!" feeling everytime they fired it up. Number two was as a platform neutral audio technology for all those companies that didn't want to stream their content in two different formats.

Apart fromt these two things Real never really brought much to the table, and furthermore their RealPlayer sucked from the start and still does to this day. Its probably my least favourite piece of software and the first I think about uninstalling when I'm looking to clean up. Even though it looks a tad prettier than it used to they still populate my machine with daemon processes poping up RealNetworks "Messages" all over the place and giving me no way to disable them fully. Finally they have always tried to charge users for using their proprietary technology by making the stunted free player so hard to find that sites using RealNetworks formats had to issue help pages on how to find it.

My belief is that Microsoft will start to support/bundle the RealNetworks formats in WMP, but there will be no more development of their formats. Then we'll see Apple and Microsoft continue to duke it out for the cross platform media player technology, Apple representing the non-proprietary video formats like MP4.

This may all take years, but ultimately with hindsight the golden settlement from Microsoft is going to look like a golden shovel for Real's post-retirement days...

Whatever happened to SCO?

I notice that IBM has dropped its patent infringement suit against SCO. Now I know you're thinking it was SCO that sued IBM for patent infringement, but it turns out that in 2003 IBM contersued SCO. Part of IBM's contersuit included infringement of several IBM patents, but IBM has now dropped that part of its contersuite. Why? Well amusingly because they don't think SCO has enough money left to make it worthwhile.

I checked SCO's financials and indeed their last three quarters show a they are losing at least $2M a quarter, and as of the end of July they had a scant $10.5M cash and $11.3M net tangible assets. At that rate they may well be history with a year at which point I wouldn't put it past IBM to gobble up the SCO name and acquire all their remaining customers who apparently still generate around $9M in revenue a quarter.

They only read me for the pictures

The joke is that people only read Playboy for the articles whereas the reality is supposedly that they only look at the pictures. Ironically it appears I could say the same about my blogs, 'cept it would be a joke because people really are looking at just the pictures. The cause has been Google image index which has lead a lot of people find images I've used or created and then post links to them here, there and everywhere. The problem is it actually creates little if any traffic since most people just see the image and never bother to look where it came from.

My most popular image to date has been a frame grab from a movie of the Ariel Atom 2 being test driven on the BBC show Top Gear. It got so popular I ended up adding a watermark with my site URL on it. That seemed to drive some actual hits to this blog, but not nearly as many as the downloads of the image. While I realize there are technologies to stop this kind of "image leeching" they mostly just encourage people to make a copy of the image and host it locally.

I've actually have no problems with the amount of bandwidth used by the image downloads - my bandwidth quota at DreamHost could cope with millions of hits for these images. But I would like to stop the squew on my site statistics caused by people purely searching for images and not written content. So I'm happy that I discovered that Google's image indexing robot can be taught to ignore certain images or all images on a site. Just add to your top-level robots.txt file the following incantation:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/image1.gif
Disallow: /images/image2.gif
Disallow: /images/image3.gif

replacing /images/image1.gif etc. with the path of the images you don't want indexed. To prevent indexing of all images use:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

For more information on taming Google's image indexer see their FAQ

Hydrofoil kayak

After my post on underwater sculling I couldn't help but mention this Engadget post on the Flyak, a kayak fitted with a hydrofoil that actually allows you to paddle above the water. Of course it happens that I had already suggested this as a possibility to my erstwhile underwater sculler, but he never took me seriously. After watching the Flyak videos I'm afraid he'll have to now.