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John C. Dvorak
John C. Dvorak, July 2007
Born	April 5, 1952 (1952-04-05) (age 57) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Residence	San Francisco Bay area Washington
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Occupation	columnist, host, vice-president
Website Channel Dvorak Dvorak Uncensored Blog Cranky Geeks Tech5 No Agenda TWiT (This Week in Tech)

John C. Dvorak (born April 5, 1952 in Los Angeles, California) is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing.^[1] His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines. Dvorak is also the Vice-President of Mevio (formerly PodShow) and well known for his work for Tech TV.

Personal life and background

John C. Dvorak was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California.^[2] He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in history^[3], and has homes in the San Francisco Bay area and in Washington State. He is married to Mimi Smith-Dvorak.

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 writer.^[4] Dvorak has also appeared as a prima donna version of himself with Steve Gibson in the Up in Smoke Video Podcast, a mini sitcom about a cigar shop.^[5]

Writing career

Periodicals

Dvorak has written 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, Forbes, Forbes.com, 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, MacMania Networks, International Herald Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and The Philadelphia Inquirer among numerous other publications.

His PC Magazine column is licensed worldwide.

Dvorak created a few tech running jokes; in episode 18 of TWiT (This Week in Tech) he claimed that, thanks to his hosting provider, he "gets no spam".^[6]

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 and Dvorak's Guide to Desktop Telecommunications in 1990. His latest book is Online! The Book (Prentice Hall PTR, October, 2003) with co-authors Wendy Taylor and Chris Pirillo.

Controversy

Dvorak's pithy style often attracts critics who point out his frequent--and occasionally egregious--errors of prediction. Dvorak's most famous prediction, coming in 1984 as a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, identified the Macintosh as a useless tool and the mouse as a 'new fangled' device he neither wanted nor needed. "The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation - as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices."^[7]

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).

In 2001, he was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.

TV and online media

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 (formerly ZDTV) called Silicon Spin.

He now appears on Marketwatch TV and is a regular panelist on This Week in Tech, a podcast audio and now video 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 only Triangulation podcast, a similar co-hosted technology discussion program. In March 2006, Dvorak started a new show called CrankyGeeks in which he leads a rotating panel of "cranky" tech gurus in discussions of technology news stories of the week.

Mevio hired Dvorak as Vice President & Managing Editor for a new Mevio TECH channel in 2007. He manages content from existing Mevio tech programming as well as hosts the show, "Tech5", where Dvorak discusses the day's tech news in approximately 5 minutes.^[8] Dvorak also co-hosts a podcast with Mevio co-founder Adam Curry called No Agenda. The show is a free flowing conversation about the week's news, happenings in the lives of the hosts and their families, and restaurant reviews from the dinners John and Adam have together when they are in the same city (usually San Francisco). Adam usually has more outlandish opinions of the week's news or world events while Dvorak plays the straight man in the dialogue.

References

External links

From Wikiquote

John C. Dvorak is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing.

Sourced

• The AmigaOS remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code - there's nothing like it. I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of the thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant - albeit cultlike - not unlike which you have with Linux, the Unix clone.
  • "Inside Track", PC Magazine, October 22, 1996

• The absolute deterioration of the wiki concept is just a matter of time. Once spam mechanisms are developed to eat into these systems, the caretakers will be too busy to stop the public-driven deterioration.
  • (11 July 2005)"The Wikification of Knowledge". PC Magazine. Retrieved on 2008-05-18.

• There was always something about Creative Commons and its name that bugged me, too. The name sounds like a variation of the once-powerful Common Cause political-action committee. A ring of days gone by—nostalgia. All I see here is making the very easy and simple U.S. copyright laws more complex for no apparent reason, except maybe as a protest.
  • (18 July 2005)"Creative Commons Humbug". PC Magazine. Retrieved on 2008-05-18.

• 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?
  • (September 9, 2003)"XP Decay". PC Magazine. Retrieved on 2008-05-18.

• The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse”. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices.
  • (February 19, 1984)"Review of the Macintosh (Not the original title)". San Francisco Examiner.

Unsourced

• People are always looking for the be-all-end-all super perfect Linux. It will never happen until Microsoft does Linux. Oops. Did I say that?
  • PC Magazine, unidentified article, unidentified issue, June 2007

• The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with tags, metatags, übertags, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. "You suck!" is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular.
  • PC Magazine, unidentified article, unidentified issue, May 2005

• 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, unidentified article, unidentified issue, September 1995

• Nobody ever went broke advertising next to a Dvorak column.
  • PC Magazine Editors Day, unidentified publication/date

• I don't plug junk.
  • Business Week, unidentified article, unidentified issue, circa 1982

• All I know is that due to Grand Theft Auto, if my children wanted to be car thieves, they would be damn good at it!
  • This Week in Tech, unidentified episode/date

• In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

John C. Dvorak