Computers & Technology

I watched the movie Autumn the night before last. It was quite entertaining; it highlighted the rise and fall of a fictional Dot Com company called Landshark founded by two brothers--one, a computer techie-genius; the other, a sliver-tongued snake-oil businessman/CEO.

There's one scene from the movie that I especially liked--the business brother arrives at the startup company's offices to find every staff member huddled in the conference room around a laptop. When he enters, they try and hide what they've been looking at. It's the web site, FuckedCompany.com. FC's tagline was, "the official lubricant of the new economy." Anyway, in the movie, Landshark had made it onto FC; it reportedly had only a few weeks of operating capital left. As in the real world of the early 21st century, the report of the fictional company's demise in the movie plot is uncanningly accurate. Reports were more often supplied by insiders who had intimate knowledge of a company's upcoming F-d status.

When I tried calling up this iconic site this morning, I was greeted with a rather humorous statement from FC: "Fuckedcompany is... sorta fucked." Seems the FC is kaput. Sigh. It, along with the other iconic symbol from the movie--Omni Magazine--have been relagated to the /dev/null of history. I did find all the old archives of FC on archive.org. In fact, it appears that FC remained in business up until about August 11, 2008 until it, too became, well, F*cked.

ptemples: TV ad: "You could be Microsoft-certified and make REAL money!" Sounds great--I'm tired of this monopoly $ I make as a UNIX sysadmin.

See original: TV ad: "You could be Microsoft-certified and make REAL money!" Sounds great--I'm tired of this monopoly $ I make as a UNIX...

ptemples: Would-be Onion headline: "T-mobile Sidekick customers automatically enrolled in free data deletion service."

See original: Would-be Onion headline: "T-mobile Sidekick customers automatically enrolled in free data deletion service."