Back the F:\ Up

With a (D)echo of French Connection's FC UK ad campaign, Mozy is distributing t-shirts bearing the legend "BACK THE F:\ UP" to people tasteless enough to wear them. I look quite good in mine. It's not as sharp as French Connection's ads but you can't say it's a fcuk up either. The company is running a Computer Nightmare …

[Anonymous Coward]

Tasteless?

Count me in for one! Where do I sign up for one?

[AndyC]

And yet again...

Another semi-decent competition that is only open to residents of the US... Ahh well...

[Aaron]

Think...

...thermite. Think trebuchet. Think catapult. Think death by duct tape. (How?) Think creative ways of inducing catastrophic overtemperature. Think jumper cables. Think Tesla coil. Think Van de Graaf generator. Think wall current connected directly to the motherboard. (Careful!) Think magic smoke generation. Think strong acids. Think cola or soda or pop. (Whatever you call it.) Think liquid nitrogen. Think booze. (This message brought to you by the Booze Council. It makes you careless *and* starts fires!) Think misfortunes involving speeding vehicles. Think misfortunes involving speeding aircraft. (If you're lucky enough to have access to same.) Think blunt force trauma. Think stabbing injury. Think bullets! Think shotgun rounds. Think soap.

OK, think I'm done now.

[John Prew]

I want one too

Where can us Brits get our mitts on one of the T-shirts then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows only

Yet another MS Windows-only promotion! Oh well...

(I prefer to use an OS that doesn't expose it's low level device notes to the user)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, where!?

I'm a Linux user so I don't want one (go fsck yourself?) but this would be great for my (unwashed Windows-using) friend as a Christmas pressie. Tell me where!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah ha, an ingenious computer destruction plan

Well, the most obvious way to turn a PC into a useless pile of Sh*te is to boot with a Windows Vista install disk.

Why use something obvious like a gun, when you can witness the follow scenario -

Wait years for a multi-national corporation to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D, and then run an extension marketing campaign, for customers to then buy and install, and then f:\ up their PC..

[matt]

or...

something simple like this:

http://xtreview.com/images/windows-vista-5728/vista-first-install-screen-2.jpg

[Paolo]

LAME

Actually it's to "Make and submit a video of your worst computer nightmare "

Front runner is a girl putting her laptop in the fridge complete with exceptionally crap acting while doing it.

So funny I nearly wet myself. Not.

[Barry]

Me too !!!!!

Where can I get a T-Shirt ?

[Matt Hoffman]

This is where you get the shirt...

Quick google reveals.... http://backthefup.net/

[Oli Beaumont]

The most effective way to kill your pc...

Is surely to install Windows on it. Not as much fun as an acid bath, I admit.

[Daniel B.]

Crunch!

That's the sound a friend's laptop made when said friend backed up ... and forgot she left her laptop in the ground ... right in the way of the tires. CRUNCH indeed!

Maybe re-do it, this time with a camcorder?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a really good title, but it was aparently too long. So now you get this crap.

If you are a US national reading this, and if you just happen to be serving in iraq, and if your day to day job includes polishing artillery and occasionaly firing said hardware, considder what good target practice it would be to try to hit your commanding officer's laptop after it has been put a few km's out into the desert... remember to leave a camera nearby with plenty of batteries and aimed in the right direction (setting it to actually record might be useful as well).

Anything less will now be considdered a lack of effort.

Pirates, because they like big guns as well (...could probably also have used some sort of PH angle).

[Ian Ferguson]

US only

as all the good compos are...

[Quotes]

Viz Comics Was 'Ere First

Adverts of Dantz Restrospect published in early editions of Viz Comics had the slogan "back up or fuck up". It was usurped by the slogan "To go forward you must back up".

[Dave]

Well-known method?

I guess a video of someone installing Vista doesn't count as a way of destroying a computer?

[Volker Hett]

@Aaron

sounds like me when I tried to set up one of the first Notebooks ready for Vista :-)

Luckily I found a Linux CD and so both of us lived happily therafter

[Tom Paine]

I for one

...can't wait for the hilarious j00t00b footage to start showing up documenting that it's when shit goes wrong that the fun begins! There are so many amusing ways that home-brewed thermite, trebuchets, tinkering with massive currents and/or voltages, high-speed shards of circuitboards, solder, chip packages and whatnot flying and/or melting in all directions can interact with people who think "WEEE" is a games console.

Nice t-shirt, too, though it's failed to knock that Karl Marx "I warned you this would happen" off the coveted number one spot amongst beergut-toting bitmonkeys everywhere. Solidarity, comrades!

[Geoff Mackenzie]

Meh.

And the Atmos was the nice Oric. The one with the proper keyboard.

[Player_16]

Nice shirt but...

...they should have the option of ordering the print on the back.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozy has been combined by EMC with Pi in a Decho business unit."

the what? my brain fails when parsing this sentence.

[skeptical i]

little kids + computer - adult supervision = predictably unpredictable results

Many moons ago, when I was visiting an acquaintance, his brother and his brother's kids came over and the 6- year- old took it upon herself to sit at my acquaintance's desk and start messing with the computer -- deleting icons off the desktop and who knows what else -- before getting bored and coming back into the living room. Apparently, "do not touch things that do not belong to you" is not taught to kids anymore, but even more shocking (to me, anyway) was the total lack of reprimand from the so- called adults -- not even so much as a stern "wait- until- we- get- out- to- the- car" look from Dad. While this is probably only small arms fire in the computer nightmare scenario world, it startled the bejeebus out of me.

[Jon Minhinnick]

Remember the BoFH...

... and use a magnetic pinch. FTW!

[tony trolle]

too much effort

might as well pirate the t-shirt

[Seán]

It's obvious

Take an old G4 and insert it as a suppository in an apple fanboy, and no I don't just mean the chip.

[TeeCee]

I need a tank.

To drive over a computer with and then shell the pieces afterwards, obviously.

[Andy]

killing a PC

heh, easy. install linux. no drivers, no games, no applications, incomprehensible interface.

boots from zero to useless in 30 seconds! :))

[Pierre]

Andy,

The round button with a broken circle on it is called "power switch" in technical jargon. You need to press it once (and only once) in order to use the computer. Also, remember to plug the powercord into the mains. If that's too complicated, forget the computer, you can have crayons and a piece of paper instead.

[Andi Blonde]

ENCARTA 95

Not sure if it will kill every time but a machine will be swiftly and entertainingly disabled when it is challenged to a duel with Encarta '95's Fractal Generator interactive science bauble dangling from some branch of that artificial tree of knowledge creating a snowflake and xmas pine confection that, being a chaos simulation, gets out of hand fairly quickly and assumes absolute control of operations.

[Chris Fleming]

Think!

Made my Friday afternoon mate or mate(ess)..

Cheers and beers from the South Pacific.

[Adam Foxton]

@Soldiers in Iraq etc

Bullets and shotguns? Mortars? Pah.

Cruise missiles. Strap an eeePC to the front of one, camera on, some sort of video-transmitter built into it.

F-22. Strap it to one of the missiles.

Or just install Vista on it. Either way, useless.

The interesting thing is that it's "Back the F:\" up, implying Windows, but the prizes are Apple products.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Pierre

You do realise that not everyone gets on with Linux like a house on fire, and those that don't aren't automatically stupid. FYI, I tried very hard to get Linux (any distro) working as well and gave up after hours of messing around with nonfunctional 3rd party drivers and annoying unintuitive prompts.

So yes, as it stands installing Linux would probably be the best way to kill my machine as well, or at least make it totally useless.

[hexacet]

its not just linux that wont work on modern laptops...

try getting windows xp working fuly on any laptop made in the last 6 months or so - anything with a geforce 8400m wont work as nvidia only provide drivers for vista, connexants audio drivers are vista only, some atheros wifi cards only have vista drivers and the list goes on..

the label needs updating.. not "designed for vista" but "designed for ONLY vista"