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...cutesy name, big plans, foggy implementation, airhead CEO... why don't we just link to here?

We're not selling a product here.

Not any more at least! :D

C-X C-S

Dear Pud:
We're fucked. Damn.
Peter Beckman
[ex]Founder of AdCritic.com

Dear Peter:
Fuck you! Your site rocked. Why didn't you just make it subscription-only after you had the audience? Your "slow-bandwith-unless-you-pay" shit was dumb. Subscription-only might not have worked, but why didn't you try? Woulda cut your bandwith-bill down, and coulda made a couple of bucks.
Pud

When: 12/18/2001
Company: AdCritic.com
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 200

Peter Beckman (ex]Founder of AdCritic.com) posted himself that news over FuckedCompany.com: see it and the following discussion here.

For a funny and brash discussion on the topic go to:

Fucked Company

They are the top article right now on fuckedCompany.com

• Those who can, create.
• Those who can't, sue.
• Those who can't create or sue (successfully) end up on fscked company

One assumes there was slightly more to their theories than this!

There's more. A lot more. The best "dumbed down" explanation is that of a used car sale. There's a buyer and a seller. Typically, the seller will know a lot more about the vehicle than the buyer. If the seller offers to sell a $15,000 car for $10,000, is this because the seller knows something the buyer doesn't, is the seller looking to unload it quickly, or is the seller just an idiot?

It's a relatively simple concept, but one with profound impacts as far as markets go. Consider the dotcom bubble. Was it because the companies were really worth it, was it "irrational exuberance", or was it asymmetric information? The basic theory is that there's always going to be a certain degree of asymmetric information, but that in the extreme, the market breaks down.

I had a webring with webring.org. Yahoo purchased them and fucked it up

I had a chat room with egroups. yahoo purchased thenm and fucked it up

Now the webring is going and all the clubs have disapeared.

I had a webring with webring.org. Yahoo purchased them and fucked it up

I had a chat room with egroups. yahoo purchased thenm and fucked it up

Now the webring is going and all the clubs have disapeared.

This was also reported on FuckedCompany a few days ago. An interesting discussion went along with it.

This was also reported on FuckedCompany a few days ago. An interesting discussion went along with it.

... and Fucked Company had it days ago. So there!

See Fucked Company for a slightly livelier discussion on this subject. It was posted there few days ago already... And they um, 'slightly dislike' consultants, too, so it's good laugh for everyone involved! (only thing scummier than a consultant appears to be a head hunter...)

This was also reported on FuckedCompany a few days ago. An interesting discussion went along with it.

This is a brilliant bit of viral marketing. Never heard of them 3 days ago and now they've been on FCompany and Slashdot. They are number 2 on the blogdex.

And for a great example of a case of this going on right now, head on over to Fucked Company where some dot.bomb is trying to get FC to reveal the names of some anonymous posters who said bad things about the company and the CEO's wife.

For those who don't know what sgt_getraer is talking about visit the page this week. The owner of FC got a letter (posted on the front of his site) demanding that he turn over the names of anonymous posters who said unpleasant things about a company he mentioned as being in financial trouble. The names were wanted in connection with a libel suit filed by the company.

No libel -> no lawsuit -> no problems for FC

Wow, finally a legal precident in this grey area of the law. Now any company (and I've seen many of these messageboard libel cases lately) that wants to bring a case like this to court already has legal history against it. Fuckedcompany.com must be happy to hear about this, as they had the same kind of court case brought against them.

Nanite
Beat you all to it

Fuckedcompany.com recently received a subpoena from the lawyers of Printcafe.com to cough up "records" of the anonymous posters who made slanderous comments on the site. Some of the comments were directed to the CEO's wife. It seems that Pud (owner of FC) doesn't keep records of the IP addresses of those who frequent the site. Pud said that it was too bad that he already had finished up his book, because they would have received a mention.

So, whois Brendan Barnicle , "Vice Principle and Senior Research Analyst", with Pacific Crest "Securities" (requires flash plugin to view?), really? & why is he allowed to provide so much MiSinformation (google) to the "mainstream media" (AP)?

"Last month, former Mylackey [defunct .com/scam] Chief Financial Officer Brendan Barnicle called the cops to report that $53,844 in computers had been stolen from the company.

It's not clear, however, why Barnicle waited until March 16 to report the loss, which originally came to light last October when the company closed down. On that terrible day (October 27, 2000), a computer- leasing company showed up to take away the items, only to discover they were missing.

No word on the current whereabouts of the 21 stray computers. Barnicle, who has gone on to become a financial analyst for Pacific Crest, was unavailable for comment." Nancy Drew

Good thing we've got guise LIEk Brendan to help us decide about "investments" in our future, know? More clues as to whoare the REAL .commIEs/FraUDs. Moron Brendan, who, amusingly enough, is touted as a "former" lawyer (turned stock tout/shill?). Looks LIEk he fills the "lackey" position, perfectly.

Al Gore(s) the Bull? from: CNN

Security Problems? Well, first, don't tell anybody, then smear a glop of this m$ bs on IT, & call us, well, um..., don't bother calling us .

Convicted SoftWar Racketeer Gangsters Agree to Settle Victim's Claims, By Taking MORE Hostages IT doesn't get any better than this?

This was blatantly ripped off from FuckedCompany.com. See the post here. Why not give credit where credit is due?

-tim

FuckedCompany Bleem posts

Better yet, you never know when a disgrunteled employee is going to show up at work after-hours and make his own severence package

Is this book more authoratative than the de facto chronicle of disingenuity?

What value does this book add? I sense some irony here.

If you can't find any entries (unlikely, for bigger companies), it indicates that either:

• Company's doing fine, everyone's happy, or
• Employees are clueless dolts that have never read FC. :-)

... and if you want to browse the pages from work, perhaps consider using SafeWeb ...

Pardon this rant...

I was happy to see that Aimster's wrongdoings are being made known to all at none other than FuckedCompany. Nothing would make me happier than seeing ol' John Deep living in the streets of Cohoes, NY. Come on, won't you pay $4.95 for... absolutely nothing? I wonder how far he'll really go in his efforts to turn his daughter into a pr0n star? Maybe we'll see! Stay tuned, maybe Club Aimster will turn into an affiliation between Aimster and Club, the European porn mag!

God damn, I hate those fuckers.

I'm sure Ballmer does not have a "publicity" bug-- it looks more like ebola or something, and he's not afraid to go out in public with it.

"Particularly since Sept. 11, a lot of people are deciding which bills to cut out," said a spokesperson for one major California-based ISP, who asked not to be named. "People are freaked out."

This is laughably a non sequitur. Just what do people have to fear from their DSL line due to Sep. 11? Maybe, maybe, I'd see it as a result of the declining (according to the MS-CNBC-SI folks) economy, but to think that the first (or second, or hundredth) thing that people thought about after Terror Attacked Us, and then we declared War On Terror, was "Jesus Dianne! If they could do that to the World Trade Center with planes, just think of what they could do to us with.. with DSL!" This Unnamed Source is a damn retard, but its certainly not uncommon these days for companies to blame all of their short-sighted decisions on Sep. 11.

A brief history

"Laid off" from Ihigh.com
Graduated in may from UK
Spent the summer both online and off in the job hunt
My Current Employer found me in late September through Monster, I'm now their Jr. Webmonkey and Rookie Solaris Admin who breaks^?^?^?^?^?^? stress-tests machines.

When all is said and done, in this market, be prepared to wait. If you have the time and cash, get training, be ready when things hit the upswing

I am really scared that Slashdot will be dumped real soon by "VA Whatever" and my personal data will be thrown into the wind for the company with the most pennies to snatch up. As we have seen in the past, its real tuff to control your own personal data held by a third party under extreme financial trouble.

I am sure that Pud at Fucked Company will be reporting the demise of "VA Whatever" in the near future. Dump the stock if you got it.

Actually, that's not true... the PC I got from Penguin Computing advertised a 20GB drive and it came delivered as being actually larger, by nearly a whole gig (and I'm counting gigs as being 1024 x 1024 x 1024.

Of course, now I hear from fuckedcompany.com that Penguin Computing is laying people off, so, I dunno, maybe they should have advertised it as a 24GB machine.

They should train for more promising careers, like defense contractors or pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Stop reading fuckedcompany?!!

and give up laughing at CEO's pathetic emails? Never!

About six months ago, when my last employer went titsup.com, I had the opportunity to buy my brand-new totally maxed out Dell laptop from the company for about 20 cents on the dollar.

The machine had been purchased with one of those pricey Dell on-site same-day-service warranties . Since the video card seemed to be giving me problems, and the laptop cover was slightly warped, I decided that I should transfer the warranty to myself -- post-haste... When I had first purchased the laptop on the company account, Dell had bollocksed the order...multiple times . Despite the fact that my company had purchased hundreds of Dell machines, and despite the fact that Dell was one of our company's major sources of venture capital, orders were always being botched.

The order for my laptop had been lost 3 times. An entire month passed before I finally received it. When it arrived, the video didn't work, but nobody at Dell support had any idea what the problem was . Our head of MIS suggested that I send it back and get another -- but I doubted that our company would last long enough for me to ever see it.

So, I was not looking forward to transferring the warranty.

When I called Dell to find out about the transfer, I was told that they had a transfer ownership page on their website that would automate the process. Sure enough, they did.

I filled out all the spaces on the transfer form and hit the submit button. A message appeared stating that I would get a confirmation email within twenty-four hours. Guess what. I got nothing.

Rather than spend another hour on the phone with Dell support, I decided to fill the form out again...and again. I submitted the form from Windows, Mac, and Linux machines...using different browsers. All of this took but a few minutes. Far less than it would have taken for me to get a live human being at Dell support. I even toyed with the idea of writing a quick perl script to do it continuously.

Another 24 hours and no confirmation.

So I called Dell support.

No one had any ability to confirm whether any human or machine had received my request. I was told that the only way to transfer ownership was via the web page. Several Dell employees even filled out the form themselves.

On the third call to Dell support, I was informed that it would take 3-4 weeks to transfer ownership, and that Dell would have to contact my former employer to verify the sale. I told them that my employer had ceased business and had disconnected their phones. No one offered a solution.

PART TWO, HOW I GOT GOOD SERVICE FROM DELL!

I decided to use a trick that I employed when I needed to get the CDROM on my powerbook replaced...

I scoured the web for three phone numbers which you won't find on their website:
1)Dell's Public Relations Dept.
2)Dell's Marketing Dept.
3)Dell's Legal Dept.

I called the public relations office first, and stated:

Hello, this is (linearb) calling from Austin, Texas. I'm getting ready to launch a massive interactive Dell complaint site on the web. Rather than wait for you to contact me, asking what it would take to get me to stop, I'm giving you the opportunity to stop me from putting the site up in the first place. All you have to do is solve a simple problem - I want the ownership of my laptop transferred. I do not want to be put on hold. I want someone to contact me who can solve this problem. And I want it solved in the next few days.

The woman on the phone was very polite and sympathetic. I assured her that none of my frustration was directed at her, and thanked her for taking my call. Seriously, it's important to separate individuals from the company they work for. When a company has massive problems, most of the employees know it. Despite that, many still do the best they can.

I was assured that I would get a return call within 2 days.

Sure enough, I recieved a call...from a total mean bitch on wheels. She told me that there was nothing wrong with the website, and that I simply had to fill in the form properly, and that I would receive a confirmation within 24 hours. I gave her the name of several Dell employees who had filled out the form themselves a week previously, but no confirmation was ever recieved.

I asked her why Dell had no internal way of tracking whether the transfer process had been initiated. She said they did. I said "prove it." She had no answer.

I told the woman that all I wanted was a printed confirmation that ownership had been transferred to me. She said that she would do it personally, and gave me her phone number.

A day later, she called me back stating that the ownership had been transferred. I said that was good, but I still wanted a written confirmation stating such. She said she would send me an email.

I tried to get her to admit that the web interface didn't work, but she refused to do so. She didn't even apologize for my inconvenience in the matter. However, the woman obviously had the juice to solve my problem quickly.

So, as a service to you dear readers of Geek Austin, I'm going to save you the trouble I had to go through. If you have a real problem, I suggest that you just call this woman directly. She may be arrogant, curt, and totally unsympathetic; but she clearly has the juice to solve your problem.

Margaret Coca
margaret_coca@dell.com
1-800-624-9897
1-512-338-4400

Or it could be as successful as NeTraverse, Loki, Penguin Computing, or VA Linux! Rock on!

Cygnus was profitable for years before being bought by RedHat.

No, they weren't. They struggled along for ten years without ever achieving sustainable profitability. The buyout was a rescue.

ADA Core Technology seems to be profitable (they've been around forever),

How do you figure that they are profitable? You get to look at the balance sheets of this privately held company? And how do you figure they're open source? It looks like it's "source included," not open source. There are no source downloads available on their site.

Mandrakesoft was profitable except for a brief stint where they were run by some flashy US CEO.

Nope, they've never been profitable either.

Penguin has jumped back into profitability.

No, they just had big layoffs.

Tim

He was murdered by Bruce Springsteen.

Link

FuckedCompany post Sprint is going to lay off 6000 people. In the forum it seems a lot of it has to deal with ION.

For me, I will still get on the net with my 56k modem to check e-mail until I got some cash to burn in this tough economy to get DSL...

Robert Goulet is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Robert Goulet community when last month IDC confirmed that Robert Goulet accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music. Coming on the heels of the latest MTV survey which plainly states that Robert Goulet has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Robert Goulet is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Billboard comprehensive musician test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Robert Goulet's future. The handwriting is on the wall: Robert Goulet faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Robert Goulet because Robert Goulet is dying. Things are looking very bad for Robert Goulet. As many of us are already aware, Robert Goulet continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. "The Beggar's Opera" is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" director Theo states that there are 7000 fans of Robert Goulet's rendition of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." How many fans of "The Beggar's Opera" are there? Let's see. The number of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" versus "The Beggar's Opera" posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 "The Beggar's Opera" fans. "Meet Me In St. Louis" posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of "The Beggar's Opera" posts. Therefore there are about 700 fans of Robert Goulet's rendition of "Meet Me In St. Louis." A recent article put "Camelot" at about 80 percent of the Robert Goulet market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 "Camelot" fans. This is consistent with the number of "Camelot" Usenet posts.

All major surveys show that Robert Goulet has steadily declined in market share. Robert Goulet is very sick and his long term survival prospects are very dim. If Robert Goulet is to survive at all, it will be among nursing-home residents. Robert Goulet continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Robert Goulet is dead.

Robert Goulet is dying.

while there were layoffs at lutris last week, the letter you posted was from a round of layoffs that occurred in april.

the fact that I worked there and all, and hence, got any mail directed at layed off employees kinda makes me an expert as far as this is concerned.

I have to go with pud and ask: Why the fuck did they need 300 employees to build an encryption program?!
Give me about five other coders who understand their stuff and a $100k budget and I'd deliver them exactly the same product, minus the outrageous development costs that forced them to sell PGP at such a ridiculous price.

Oh well, those MBAs, I'm glad I don't understand how they think...

Good lord, this is old news. This was on FC days ago. :(

Ask Slashdot: Free advertising?
Posted by Moron on Friday October 05, @06:32PM
from the bet-you've-been-waiting-for-these dept.

Lamer asks: I have recently developed an exciting new product. I would like to either sell the product directly, or sell its design to MicroOptical Corporation for many dollars. However, publicity is expensive, and unfortunately, I have little funds left after spending my monthly paycheck on child pornography. Would you be so kind as to direct several hundred thousand of your hacker-wannabe, 15 year-old readers toward my site? Even if the hits don't help me, perhaps I can persuade a few readers into an underage-sex orgy. It's unnecessary to mention that if we "editors" had the brains of a hampster, we wouldn't fall for this crap, but you can't blame us -- we run Linux, after all. ;-)

From the memo:

The FastTrack network designates (perhaps automatically) certain peers - more powerful computers with high-bandwidth connections - as "supernodes." [because of the system's encrypted communication, we are unable to determine how supernodes are designated]. Several hundred "ordinary" peers connect to any one supernode. A supernode also connects to other supernodes. [because of the system's encrypted communication, we are unable to determine how one supernode knows how to locate other supernodes].
...
Significantly, the FastTrack system encrypts all communications (a) between a peer and the log-in server, (b) between a peer and its supernode, (c) between a supernode and the central servers, and (d) between supernodes [we do not know the nature of the encryption].
...
Our claims would likely be strengthened by learning more about the designation of supernodes and the content of communications within the system. However, the encryption of this communication precludes further learning absent cooperation from one of these companies or court ordered discovery.

Having some trouble, Ms. Rosen? Wish you could circumvent that encryption?
Does anyone think this may be a catalyst/excuse for the MPAA/RIAA lobbyists to push for a ban on backdoorless crypto software? The thought of the government and the industry inforcers going hand-in-hand...

From the RIAA lawyers' memo on FuckedCompany:

The FastTrack network designates (perhaps automatically) certain peers - more powerful computers with high-bandwidth connections - as "supernodes." [because of the system's encrypted communication, we are unable to determine how supernodes are designated].

I would love to see them suddenly understand how the supernodes work and the FastTrack developers sue for an incredible amount. It would be nice to see Slashdot's favorite law get used to help the little guy once.

[we do not know the nature of these communications/encryption/etc].

In the emails at fuckedcompany.com I found in this post, I read a number of instances where they plainly stated that they didn't know about how services uses FastTrack worked. I find it very amusing that they're threating lawsuits, but they don't have all the facts at their disposal. If they do not understand how the communications take place, how can they even assume that they can place liability on someone for "damages"?

Check out the emails on FuckedCompany! MIRRORS! RIAA lawyers are
saying its going to be tougher then Napster. Juicy stuff!

Here and Here

Check out the emails on FuckedCompany! MIRRORS! RIAA lawyers are
saying its going to be tougher then Napster. Juicy stuff!

Here and Here

fucked anyway. They have been losing boatloads of money on the slumping demand for computers. While AMD can hopefully shore itself up and keep forging ahead, I can't help but suspecting that Gateway is going to the happy tech company hunting grounds in the sky pretty soon. :)