John C. Dvorak

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For the inventor of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, see August Dvorak.

John C. Dvorak is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines.

[edit] Periodicals

Dvorak writes for various publications, including PC Magazine (two separate columns since 1986), Marketwatch, BUG Magazine (Croatia), and Info Exame (Brazil). Dvorak has been a columnist for Boardwatch Magazine, Forbes, Forbes Online, MacUser, MicroTimes, PC/Computing, Barron's Magazine, Smart Business, and Vancouver Sun. (The MicroTimes column ran under the banner Dvorak's Last Column.) He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International-Herald Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and the Philadelphia Enquirer among numerous other publications.

His PC Magazine column is licensed worldwide.

[edit] Books

Dvorak has written or co-authored over a dozen books, including Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of the Osborne Computer Corporation with Adam Osborne. His latest book is Online! The Book (Prentice Hall PTR, October, 2003) with co-authors Wendy Taylor and Chris Pirillo.

[edit] Awards

The Computer Press Association presented Dvorak with the Best Columnist and Best Column awards, and he was also the 2004 and 2005 award winner of the American Business Editors Association's national gold award for best online columns of 2003 and 2004, respectively.

He was the creator and lead judge of the Dvorak Awards (1992 – 1997).

[edit] Audio and video

Dvorak was on the start-up team for CNET Networks, appearing on the television show CNET Central. He also hosted a radio show called Real Computing on NPR, as well as a television show on TechTV called Silicon Spin.

He now appears on Marketwatch TV and is a regular panelist on This Week in Tech, a Netcast audio program hosted by Leo Laporte and featuring other former TechTV personalities such as Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron. As of December 2005, that "TWiTcast" regularly ranks among the top 5 at Apple's iTunes Music Store. Dvorak also participated in the first and only Triangulation podcast, a similar co-hosted technology discussion program. In March 2006, Dvorak started a new show called CrankyGeeks in which he sits with a panel of "cranky" tech guys to discuss common technology news stories of the week.

[edit] Personal

Dvorak was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California.<ref name="smart">John C. Dvorak (HTML). Smart Computing® Encyclopedia. Smart Computing. Retrieved on 2006-04-25.</ref> He attended the University of California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington and Port Angeles, Washington (near the Straits of Juan de Fuca.) His wife, Mimi Smith-Dvorak, was an occasional writing collaborator.

Earning "hundreds of thousands of dollars per year"^{[citation needed]} from his writing, he asks for a speaking fee of between $10,001 and $20,000 per appearance.<ref name="aas">John Dvorak (HTML). AllAmericanSpeakers.com. Retrieved on 2006-04-25.</ref>

[edit] Criticism of Apple Computer

Dvorak has been a long time critic of Apple Computer, even during his stint as a columnist for MacUser magazine. In 1984 he famously criticized Apple's inclusion of a mouse with their computers, saying “There is no evidence that people want to use these things.” In 1999, he ridiculed the iBook as “‘girly’”,<ref name="g4-1">Dvorak, John C. (26 July 1999). The iBook disaster (HTML). PC Magazine. Retrieved on 2006-04-25.</ref> saying, “It looks too juvenile— something a kid, a little girl, would like. Something you'd get at Toys 'R' Us.” For this he was slammed not only by Mac afficionados, but also by female computing pundit Janelle Brown for reinforcing gender stereotypes. In 2005 he suggested that recent good press about Apple was due to media bias, writing “With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect?” He is also famous for his claims that Apple would obviously release a Video iPod despite Steve Jobs' denial; suggesting the Mac brand should be discontinued; predicting that Apple would switch to Intel chips and that the move would be a success, not a failure like many tech writers predicted; and that would possibly harm Linux, and Apple might be switching over to Windows and abandoning their Mac OS to save money.<ref name="pcmag">Dvorak, John C. (15 February 2006). Will Apple Adopt Windows? (HTML). PC Magazine. Retrieved on 2006-04-25.</ref>

On 9 June 2006, he humorously explained to Dave Winer that he would bait Mac users in order to increase traffic to his website.[1] It should be noted that Dvorak often speaks in facetious, devil's advocate manner, making it sometimes hard to tell when he's serious or when he's not.

[edit] Controversial statements

• The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things.
  • San Francisco Examiner, February 1984^{[citation needed]}
• The Noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this technology succeeding is zilch.
  • PC Magazine, Sept. 1995.^{[citation needed]}
• Microsoft is dead in the water.
  • On This Week In Tech Episode 14 at 49m38s [2]
• I get NO SPAM!
  • TWiT Episode 18 at 4m05s[3]
• My kids may play Grand Theft Auto, but that doesn't mean they're gonna go out and steal cars, but if they ever did become car thieves, they'd be damn good at it!
  • On This Week In Tech Episode 14 at 10m00s[4]
• When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?
  • PC Magazine, "XP Decay", Sept. 2003[5]
• If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.
  • PC Magazine, "Why CSS Bugs Me", July 2006[6]

[edit] Trivia

• Dvorak has inadvertently created a few tech running jokes — in a 2005 This Week in Tech episode<ref name="TWiT">Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorak, Steve Gibson, Robert Heron, David Prager, Roger Chang, Bob Young, Mike Lazazzera. (2005) This Week in Tech Episode 18 [TV-Series]. California: This Week in Tech. </ref> he claimed that, thanks to his hosting provider, he "gets no spam". This became a short-lived catchphrase and half-hearted chant among the audience. No mention was made of his false-positive rate (how much legitimate mail gets inappropriately deleted). Also, Dvorak's self-advertising (quoting the URL dvorak.org/blog whenever possible) has become an in-joke of the This Week in Tech crew.
• Dvorak has expressed admiration for the Wikipedia concept and said in another This Week in Tech episode that he has made corrections to the Wikipedia article about himself. However, in December 2005 he predicted on his blog that "once Wikipedia becomes a target for [organized vandalism] the 'wiki' is dead. Well, at least on the grande [sic] scale."
• Dvorak is a noted collector of Bordeaux wines and has been a tasting judge at various international events. He started his career as a wine and food writer.
• Dvorak appeared as primadonna version of himself with Steve Gibson in the Up in Smoke Video Podcast, a mini sitcom about a cigar shop.
• Dvorak, while at CNET Central, used to make a habit of throwing "mediocre" CDs he was reviewing at the camera, once hitting a cameraman and cutting his lip ^{[citation needed]}. He has recently revived the practice on Cranky Geeks; now he throws cue cards at the camera.
• Dvorak also has said on This Week in Tech that the New York Stock Exchange is heading towards a Stock market crash in 2009 based on a cycle.
• In a 2006 CrankyGeeks episode, Dvorak said that the first person to show him a chatroom was Robin Williams.

[edit] References

<references />

[edit] External links

• John C. Dvorak's blog with commentary on news articles, observations on industry trends, and links to web pages of interest.
• John C. Dvorak's column - PC Magazine
• John C. Dvorak's Inside Track - PC Magazine
• John C. Dvorak's Second Opinion - MarketWatch
• Official short biopt:John C. Dvorak