THE FIRST $20 MILLION IS ALWAYS THE HARDEST

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why this tech-whiz comedy is being dumped by its distributor. It's set at the tail end of the Silicon Valley killer-app frenzy (an era that no longer has any app), and it appears to have been modeled on the worst revenge-of-the-nerds cliches the filmmakers could dredge up. Adam Garcia, who plays the only presentable member of a think tank of young compu-geeks, comes across as a genial, sexless Mark Wahlberg. His comrades include a jabbering Indian hacker named Salman, a porn-addicted fatty named Tiny, and a volatile psycho (played by the one-note Jake Busey) who insists on referring to himself in the third person. Instead of, say, dreaming about lap dances, these four zany misfits sit around a dusty garage attempting to invent a $99 laptop. (Have you called Moviefone to reserve your ticket yet?) The film features such witty insults as ''Your mother uses Macintosh!'' as well as a big-epiphany moment in which our heroes reinvent the PC desktop as...a hologram! And you wonder why people lost their shirts on this stuff.