"The answer may surprise you."Today I learned that:
- RealPlayer still exists;
- RealNetworks is valued at $70 million;
- They got a $2.8 million Payroll Protection Program loan that they did not give back.
The worst gamers of the PPP system are companies you've never heard of. Something called Staffing 360 Solutions, who make $500 million a year, somehow got $19 million in PPP loans. Other $10 million loans went out to a video company called Quantum Corporation (valued at $143 million), Universal Stainless & Alloy Products ($69 million valuation), and Independence Contract Drilling ($23 million).
Though in RealPlayer's case it should have been a Point-to-Point Protocol loan, amirite?
I fear that one will SLIP right past a lot of folks.
My reaction to that was sort of like a 'groan' and 'zing' simultaneously. I might be having a heart attack.
Oh...good one. Those were the days, configuring my Debian box to manage the SLIP/PPP connection to Mindspring on demand for the rest of my network. Paper cuts every single day, but we loved them!
Remember Usenet? It was really good.
And PLIP. It was really interesting, but not very good.
In the early 00's I worked for a company that competed with them, and even then I was wondering how they still existed.
The answer might be that the four latest posts in their "What's New" feed all mention how awesome their facial recognition system is. You know, to spot celebrities in crowds (I didn't make that up.)
You know, if it mentions being able to find members of the back street boys in a crowd, it may not have been updatednin a while
I think you misspelled Klept.
That term, 'the Klept', is about the one thing I liked in William Gibson's The Peripheral.
<herp-derp> Maybe reading it in the last month didn't help, but when the "good guys" from one side of the narrative entirely co-opt, colonial-style, the stub reality of the other side of the narrative and it's accepted as being the least-worst way to achieve narrative conclusion ... I guess post-colonial thinking is here, it's just not evenly-distributed. And it's worse when they explain the characters and their motivations.
There are TNG fan-fickers writing creative ways to follow the Prime Directive for a achieve-your-goals/leave-no-trace conclusion and Gibson's spoken that the stub mechanism is a way to avoid The Peripheral being a time-travelling escapade -- but it is and it sucks because the entire genre of time-travel stories is self-referential wank founded on the dilemma-not-drama of following or breaking narrative rails. Heinlein wrote "...all you zombies" (a short story, here's the full text at github) and that should be the self-contained end of it. </herp-derp>
K3n.
One of my friends retired from Real a few years back. At the time, according to him, their only substantial profitable business was ringback tones. Remember those?