screenscraping
screenscraping is big i tell you. mark my words. no point in even making a front end for your website any more, just make a data feed and let people do what they want with it. "skip intro" has been taken to the next logical step.
Posts by Mark SPLINTER
64 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2007
Yahoo! co-founder takes open road against Google
Pirate Bay fans: Lay off our neo-Nazi Sugar Daddy
Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines
Friday 17th April 2009 13:22 GMT 
OH NOES!!! NEED MOAR FREE FINGZ!!!
I hope they DO prevent google from indexing illegal downloads. I hope google get fined 17 trillion dollars or something. I hope the lawyers and ISPs get together to make it near impossible to download copyrighted works without paying the price the owner demands.
The owner could then choose a price of $0.00 but that would be his choice, not the choice of a bunch of retarded geeks sponsored by a fucking nazi. kthxbai.
Microsoft: have it your way on IE 8
Report: Legalising drugs would save UK plc huge packet
Wednesday 8th April 2009 09:17 GMT
Alcohol a part of our culture for longer?
Listen retards, marijuana grows out of the freaking ground, so do coca leaves and poppies. If you think that distilling fruit juice precedes eating plants in human history, you are retarded. Queen Victoria was high, not drunk, you retards. Our culture is a drug culture and always has been and always will be. Unfortunately our culture is also retarded and will shoot itself in the face every day with ridiculous laws just because politicians are too embarassed to tell the truth and people are too retarded to listen to it. Some of the comments in this thread make me want to cry.
If we could base this debate on facts only, and disqualify people when they make a factual error such as "alcohol is part of our culture, jesus drank wine, so therefore cannabis should be illegal"... in other words if we could BAN RETARDED LOGIC and we might get somewhere. Jesus healed the sick. I'd be willing to bet my left index finger that he had a big sheaf of weed in his doctors bag.
US judge bars teen 'sexting' charges
Government kids website pays £6 for every visitor
Apple swipes £121 for 'free' MobileMe trial
Thursday 17th July 2008 16:09 GMT 
retardorama
hmmm what's more retarded, buying consumer electronics in their first year of release? or going on the register to tell apple users that they should use the products YOU like instead of what THEY like?
I dunno, i reckon both those things are pretty retarded. And I just made it worse by coming on here to point that out. Gah.
Woman finds Lithuanian living in shed
Wednesday 16th July 2008 07:48 GMT 
Your Man In Lithuania Says:
Lithuanian lager louts are also better behaved than yours. In fact almost all English stereotypes have a more polite Lithuanian equivalent, except for old female shopkeepers who are infinitely more rude in Lithuania. But also they are sometimes Russian so that doesn't count.
Hooray for Lithuania! Now even our ridiculous Mayor is less ridiculous than yours. Overlord overload coming your way!
Busts 4 Justice battles Bulgarian airbag tax
Tuesday 15th July 2008 10:08 GMT
stupid women
why do so few people understand capitalism?
the shop charges what they want to charge, based on what will get the most possible money out of you. this is not directly related to the weight of the materials or the length of the labour involved.
if you want specialist enormous bras that are M&S quality, you pay what they ask you for. Or you go elsewhere. Having a facebook "protest" claiming that you have some right to a certain price of a product might be a good idea in a meeting of the Marxist Society of the University of Lower Bognor Regis, but in the real world, you're talking bollocks. I mean... you're being a tit.
Family Guy creator's sellout to Google almost complete
Tuesday 1st July 2008 09:15 GMT
A LAWYER?
"“What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal"
A *LAWYER* ????!!!?!??!1!!11!!
Couldn't they find someone LESS qualified to make a comment about how "cool" a new idea is?
And what he says is the opposite of the truth, i'll translate it from legalese to english for you:
"What is annoying is that this is a way to piss people off immediately. Instead of creating an intertube datapage and hoping a miracle happens and people actually want to watch this shit, we are simply going to ram it down their throats instead," said Karl Austen, a scumbag who hasn't got a clue about entertainment.
"What's good is the naive advertisers will pay a fortune for this idiocratic experiment and we are completely insulated from risk, and also we get a cool press release about partnering with a hasbeen animator," said Bumblety Kablethump, a PR girl who joined Google 3 months ago because "their office looked really kewl on youtube".
T-Mobile not alone in spinning price hikes
Tuesday 1st July 2008 09:01 GMT 
Treasure Island
It fascinates me that Lithuania has a mobile phone network that costs me about half what I was paying in the UK. How do they do it? Is plastic cheaper in Lithuania? Do they get an EU subsidy for 3G masts? Is the call centre in Uzbekistan?
No, i guess the truth is that people in the UK pay 200% for everything and moan about how they should get a 10% reduction. Fools and their money...
Spain dodges Zapatero kiss of death
Peter Gabriel cranks his f*ck machine
Friday 6th June 2008 08:55 GMT
language is a mechanism for communication?
Man, you're like, so retarded. Language is a hell of a lot more than a "mechanism for communication," buddy. Language is identity. And you know what? People like to be a bit individual with their identity. What are you going to nazify next, you wanna go round london and correct everyone every time they use a double negative? Interesting that the double negative is actually standard in Lithuanian, the most archaic living language in Europe, closest to sanskrit. So maybe you should go round Oxford and tell everyone to use the double negative because it's "correct".
There. I used "bad" grammar and you still understood me. To expand your narrow perception of the function of language, I suggest you read a freaking book about it.
Thursday 5th June 2008 12:59 GMT
time to sort this out
As for grammar nazis... why dost thou not speak correctly? why dost thou lungs and not gills posess?
As for the Web2.0 economy / net neutrality freak: There is very little money in web 2.0 because.... drumrolll .... the content is not worth paying for, and advertising isn't very effective in a majority of applications, people's brains are active, poking their friends, not dreaming with an inactive brain while TV ads parade by. They simple have better things to do than play bingo.
As for the "we have a new algorithm that will find stuff for you" delusionals.... errr... the reward in finding something is that it was HARD to find. If you make it easy to find, it becomes less interesting. People do not make quantifiable judgements on the quality of music, they seek something to define their individuality. Is my individuality defined by an algorithm recommending me Oasis because I like Blur? NO. NO. NO.
And as for "genres" omfg. Is it dubstep, newstep, dub, dubby techno, garage or grime? Good luck with that categorisation. 3 dubstep fans could argue for 1 hours about it. Pick the wrong subgenre label and I will think I don't like the music, and therefore not click, however similar it is to its sister genres. Seeing as the job of a good musician is to combine and confound categories and categorisation, this shit is DOOMED i say. DOOMED.
Of course, technologists and consumers and marketeers don't understand this because they think they are making rational, quantifiable decisions about ART. They are not. It's like trying to disprove the existence of God. Talk all you want, it's still a mystery, and it's BETTER if it's a mystery.
Verizon sends text messages to the big screen
Thursday 5th June 2008 13:32 GMT
never understood cinemas
especially if they can't get me a beer out of the fridge or pause the film when i want to piss the previous beer out.
come on people it's 2008, cinemas only existed because people couldn't afford their own projectors... therefore they didn't mind sitting like battery chickens surrounded by idiots and bad interior design. it was better than sitting at home and looking at the wall. Whereas now, your wall probably has an HD tv on it, and you probably have a super 5.1 sound system which annoys everybody else in your block of flats because you coupled it to the thin floor. So why would you go to a cinema? You actually like paying five pounds for a gram of popcorn?
Spanish chanteuse strips for anti-bullfighting campaign
UK cops arrest six alleged BitTorrent music uploaders
9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster
Tuesday 3rd June 2008 01:11 GMT
Official story is always a lie, but so what?
As pointed out here, it doesn't really matter what the 9/11 conspiracy was, look at the blatantly illegal shit they did out in the open, starting on 9/12. It's all documented fact, no need for spurious backofanenvelope calculations about jet fuel and bending.
Metadata ruins Google's anonymous eBay Australia protest
Bletchley Park rattles tin for urgent repairs
The economy: A big Arab did it and ran away, claims PM
Friday 23rd May 2008 10:06 GMT 
Shhh... there's a war on
I would like to congratulate the readers of the Register for almost completely ignoring the fact that there is an illegal war happening on top of most of the oil, Putin owns the rest of it, and the US won't raise production in its own back yard because of the "envirument".
Keep mumbling crap about getting the kids to Tesco's and back. At least your kids still have legs to walk on, due to the lack of clusterbombs in their school playground.
Cornish lingo gets standard written form
Thursday 22nd May 2008 09:14 GMT 
So many retards in this thread
It amazes me that people get ants in their pants when tiny amounts of money are "wasted" on cultural projects, just because they don't happen to care about that particular part of our culture.... and yet if the same money is spent on a fancy bomb which destroys an iraqi school and rips a child's legs off, we all just carry on with our lives.
BBC's Today Programme shutters message board
Tuesday 20th May 2008 08:23 GMT 
BBC BIAS
If you analyse the bias of the articles on bbc.co.uk you will see that the BBC are quite clearly a loosely allied network of liberal biased nazi communist jewish muslim soviet politically correct new tory conspirators of blairite/livingstonian/cameroonian darkness. I for one welcome our incompetent and disparate propagandising overlords.
USAF Colonel goes on the offensive with botnet destroyer plan
Google (re-)branded world's greatest brand
Dubai mobe cracking demo barred by Heathrow boffin bust
You'll learn to love mobile TV
Monday 21st April 2008 09:38 GMT
Turn off your TV set and do something less boring instead
The problem with all these predictions about TV is that they assume people actually like TV.
As far as I can see, TV only existed when it was practically forced on us, and now we've got better things to do. We can even make our own TV, and it's fun even if the production costs are lower.
How many people would rather facebook and ebay than watch unproductive, unsatisfying TV? Will that number increase?
Humans prefer to do real things. TV is the lowest, most useless form of entertainment, and it's dying.
Oldham murders owl with whalesong
Saturday 19th April 2008 16:50 GMT
JonB, meet Mister Fibonacci, Pythagoras, Leonardo et al
There's no science or "proof" in art? lol, well I guess if you haven't learnt it, it doesn't exist.
And no artist ever helped society understand itself, right? Fucking Warhol, that stupid ponce. Fucking Blake, stupid Sgt Pepper album cover, waste of money, should have just used a tracklist in 12pt Times New Roman.
Friday 18th April 2008 15:46 GMT
JonB
Dude, I learnt about art theory in a school. Just like I learnt physics. Both subjects enabled me to see more of how the world works. I accept that I am not an expert in either field, but I acknowledge both branches of study do exist and have uses.
Some people don't understand astrophysics and evolution, they say God made everything in seven days, four thousand years ago. Isn't that retarded? Maybe you think the Earth can't go round the Sun because you "aint seen it wiv me own eyes, from where i'm standin, looks like the sun goes round the earth, you elitist ponce"
:P
Friday 18th April 2008 09:31 GMT
Oh, you're illiterate?
I suggested Oldham could have done it cheaper, and better, or maybe not at all. You didn't read that part? Oldham are wankers, you get me now?
Then I started defending the concept of branding generally, as in the commercial world, where it does make sense and isn't as easy as it looks (like most professions). And as Alexis points out above, modern town councils are also the marketing department of the town. They might be shit at it, but it's part of their job, to attract residents and businesses.
Once more for the kneejerk retards: Oldham wasted money on a logo, but not all logos are a waste of money.
Friday 18th April 2008 07:47 GMT
Sorry, me and PH know what we are talking about
Branding is:
a) Not easy
b) Not quick
As PH says, you are being morons. The real issue here is how a council was talked into / desperately trying to spend so much public money rebranding. They could have got it cheaper, or not done it at all. They could have rebranded to a style that doesn't already look dated, to save future costs. They could have used the freaking town owl mascot. They could have smoked less joss stick.
But all of that only shows incompetence, greed, and masturbation by the council and the consultants involved. It does not prove anything about the concept of rebranding as a whole.
Ask Nike how much value they got out of their Swoosh, and how much they paid for it. Ask Skype if it was easy grabbing ridiculous amounts of mindshare in a market occupied by giants. Picture the golden arches of a certain hamburger company, you can can't you? Clear as day. Only takes 10 minutes to draw it, but does that mean it takes 10 minutes to design it? You don't know, because you're a moron.
This thread is full of the kind of idiots who look at a Jackson Pollock and say "faaaakin ell, my 4 year old daughter could do that wiv her own vomit, fuksaiiik"
I could maybe copy out 5,000 lines of code in a day, if you provide coffee and biscuits. So shall we start laughing at applications that cost more than £50 to produce from scratch?
Adobe pulls bug-riddled Photoshop update
Wednesday 19th March 2008 10:58 GMT
Smoke Adoobie
Even if Adobe software worked without bugs (lol) the interface design is complete junk.
Photoshop is a total mess, features layered on top of features on top of features for years, but Adobetards don't notice, because they are so proud of saying things like "you just make a new layer and do alt D f4 and click ok and choose the tedious operation tool and alt click back into the layer and do apple J and then drag the thingy into the wotsit and then choose Object...Image...Canvas...Canvas Size...Width...100 and select pixels and then click OK and then click the layer again and use the magic sponge tool on the new layer of the mask of the layer".
We need an "evil adobe" icon.
Nathan Barleys mourn Great Lost Quango
Friday 14th March 2008 12:27 GMT
merry go round
the idea is not to actually get anything done or actualise any of these ideas. They don't care if they have to drop these "concepts" eventually.
the idea is to get paid for talking shit about these ideas for a few years and then abandoning them for the next debate about the next shit idea.
thus, no work need be done, just "brainstorming".
let me see now, this is the 1,352,664th reason i stopped paying tax in the UK.
Darling budget fails to paint Brown government green
Thursday 13th March 2008 12:19 GMT
An alternative for Dr Mouse
"I'm all for green measures, but I work 25miles away from where I live. If I got the earliest train at around 6, I would get into the station nearest my work at 9, half an hour after I am supposed to start. Buses are no good either. This means I have no choice but to drive to work."
Or you could move house, or get a job closer to home, or work over the internet, Einstein.
Cities would be fine places to live if we banned cars.
Jodrell Bank offloaded on eBay
Ofcom cracks down on London pirates
Wednesday 20th February 2008 11:00 GMT
Music Industry = Organised Crime
So the commercial broadcasting mafia is annoyed that the government regulation mafia isn't doing enough to crack down on the nonprofit broadcasting mafia interrupting the transmission of the messages of the advertising mafia.
Paying your taxes funds organised crime. So basically, you're either with the tax evaders, or you're with the terrorists. What a mixed up world we live in.
Microhoo! or YahSoft!? The! people! must! decide!
US scientists puncture the ethanol biofuel bubble
Pirate Bay slapped with copyright charges
EU to ban the patio heaters that ate the planet. Not.
Lessig gives up on Free Culture
Monday 4th February 2008 11:42 GMT
ownership whatever
As a "content creator" I have to say I don't give a flying fuck who "owns" my "content" as long as I am paid fairly for it. All I want to "own" is the money, i.e. the ability to get something back from my effort. If my work makes some noncreative middleman distributor a million bucks, I want more than $0.02. OK? Is that too much to ask?
I am sick of this "if they were no huge clever capitalist distibutors then artists wouldn't have an audience" bullshit. Fact is, big media have shown how pathetic they are at coming up with content on their own, the audience has shown how little it cares for big media, so we should be saying "If there were no clever artists then capitalists wouldn't have a revenue stream".
And copyright for life plus 70 years? that's just a fucking joke. If you can't make your money in 5 years, or write (god forbid) ANOTHER album, then fuck off.
We just installed a vocal booth in our studio. Shall I pay the builders revenue from everything we record there? For life plus 70 years? Fucking bullshit. They are now doing another job, as opposed to buying an artificial island off the coast of Dubai.
Microsoft rides PCs and Xboxen to rich Q2
Last.fm unveils 'free global jukebox'
Banksy artwork tops £200k on eBay
Tuesday 15th January 2008 11:56 GMT
It looks like you're writing a retarded comment...
Hello people.
They said Van Gogh was shit. They said Monet was shit.
"A conservative is someone who admires radicals when they're dead".
Damien Hirst is infinitely more obvious and up his own arse than Banksy, but Saatchi buys his shit and puts it in a big white room so you lap it up. Or at least, you will in 50 years when it's "classic".
Capitalism sets the price, not Banksy.
And as is pointed out above... you tolerate millions of square metres of printed SHIT from horrifically cynical advertising companies, but you don't like it when someone uses their imagination on a wall illegally. Think about who is the real visual polluter here. Think about who is really adding to society and who is just selling cars with posters of traffic-free roads in a country you can't drive to because of the sea getting in the way.
First year students talking about Marx and Guevara? HEAVEN FORBID! Why can't they discuss that nice Tony Blair instead? He's an inspiration with his database state and his illegal war for oil.
Jesus. If you think Banksy is the biggest problem in the world you're a wanker.
And my £35 print from 6 years ago is doing better than your pension fund, so fuck you.
IT contractors cry foul over HMRC income splitting law
Thursday 10th January 2008 09:13 GMT
how's that UK thing working out for ya?
I no longer pay for your depleted uranium clusterfuck bombs because I left the freaking country. I highly recommend the rest of you do the same and stop moaning about it. The UK isn't even a very nice place to live, why stay? Beer costs a pound or less in almost evey other country in the world. kthxbye.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
