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John C. Dvorak has died
111–120 of 340 posts
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was a very readable columnist for PC Mag among other places. He was also more focused on being interesting and at least a bit provocative than being correct. >He was a hilarious curmudgeon. Agreed.
>> He was also more focused on being interesting and at least a bit provocative than being correct. So exactly like everyone today, but also interesting?
He set the style of being confidently incorrect. At least he was entertaining.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#113I first become aware of John C. Dvorak in Byte magazine, ( back in the 80s?) to me he was a respected insigtful interesting content wrighter. The post link above says he was 74, THe wikipedia page says 80. I gues one will be corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak RIP
Dvorak hated that for decades wikipedia had the wrong birth year and refused to let him change it. He wrote at length about how wikipedia is the antithesis of the entire conception of a wiki. He was 80, born in 1946.
This is odd. So you are saying wikipedia kept getting it wrong for a long time but now the announcement has it wrong and wikipedia is correct?
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#114I had many lovely dinners with John back in the 90s (he loved Chez Panisse). While his public persona could occasionally be curmudgeonly, in person he was a warm-hearted, passionate computing enthusiast.
This is exactly who it sounds like Dvorak was. I never got to know him like that, but being a public curmudgeon, but private warm-hearted person is a pretty great compliment.
For sure. I got to know John after meeting him in our respective roles as 'journalist writing about startup' and 'young startup entrepreneur'. As we got to know one another well enough to hang out after trade show hours, he gave me pretty invaluable insights and perspective on how to think about the evolving computer industry.
10 months ago, I actually posted on HN about how much John (and his peers) cared and helped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45076557.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#115Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#116I sat next to John in our office for a year or so back in the heyday of podcasting. He was quite the character. RIP.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#117Wow! What a shock and a bummer, I've been a fan for a long time.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#118Was this the guy that always had it out for Apple, and was somewhat notorious with bad Apple predictions?
Yes…
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#119I don't know the man personally, but I was never impressed by his punditry even in the early PC MAG days and it got even worse when he started writing for MarketWatch. He was always lots of loud platitudes or damnations with more noise than signal or thoughtful analysis. At some point, I just stopped listening and/or reading whenever his name came up.
I think part of what made him amusing was he was earnest in his bad takes. If you heard him on a podcast he seemed kind of lovingly wrong, like the annoying uncle that you might not like listening to but you can't say you hate. Caveat, I haven't read or listened to anything with him in some time, so I could be wrong or out of date, but that was how his public persona came across to me years ago.
Truth regarding his earnesty.
I never felt he mislead, but also at some point (much like ESPN’s Stephen Smith) he decided “winning” in punditry was more about by being loud than about by being right.