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John C. Dvorak has died

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Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#211
I remember first coming across him on ZDTV/TechTV, then realizing he also wrote articles in some of those magazines I had bought. But mostly I just saw him as the resident tech curmudgeon.

Haha, yeah.

  "Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100-Mbps Ethernet has not produced a killer app. The modern network has produced convenience and the ability to share the Internet on one connection. Some people reckon this to be a killer app. I don’t. Perhaps the networked game is the killer app here."

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#212
I'm going to post something that contradicts this outpouring of fondness for the late Dvorak. While I did enjoy his friendly curmudgeon act in the days of TWiT, I was very dismayed by him jumping in bed with that paranoid crackpot and I blame him for a lot of toxic ideas that he helped spread in his No Agenda show years. Maybe his earlier act was the mask and the latter John C Dvorak was the real persona. Or maybe the other way around. I'll never know. But I can't celebrate his life because of what he decided to do with it in his latter years.

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I cannot imagine why you find the statements above odd but compare and contrast: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_C._Dvorak&ol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak Enough scrolling through the edit history and you could determine when wikipedia finally got their shit together on his birthdate.

It was changed to '46 today

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I referred to him as Less Than Thorough... Almost certainly Lester Carl Thurow (May 7, 1938 – March 25, 2016). I've read that sobriquet a few times myself. I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.

I've never read any of his economics (didn't know until today that he was one) and formed an opinion based only on his tech press writing. Interesting that he was on the board of TSMC! > I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong. I don't think economics is a time-dependent field. Apparently he favoured more government involvement in industry, which I believe has rarely if ever worked out well anywhe…

Re: ...more government involvement in industry,...

See the American School of Economics (19th century), China from Deng onward, industrial policy in Japan (Meiji Restoration, post-WWII), Germany (pre- and post-WWII), Israel, South Korea (post-WWII, particularly 1970 onward), the US (particularly FDR/WWII, also Cold War and much since), just off the top of my head. Whilst it's quite true that government involvement can go bad, it can also go quite well, and as with many matters, the distinction generally isn't between regulation and no regulation, but effective vs. ineffective regulation.

If you read Adam Smith, you'll find that much of what he inveighs against is actually economic power compounding upon itself to interfere with what would otherwise be more productive economic organisation and activity. Protectionism and monopolisation (Smith's term was engrossment) have been harmful for many centuries. A more recent but fascinating account was compiled by Bernhard J. Stern in 1937, published as "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations": https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...>. Markdown (my own effort): https://rentry.co/szi3g>.

Corporations are also very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are risk averse, practice CYA, and ... seek to sway those susceptible to dinners, sports tickets, and personal favours, etc., etc., etc.

There may even be a role for safety nets for companies, as operational concerns, but in which investors remain at risk. That is, yes, if your country is fundamentally reliant on, say, a well-functioning electrical (or other) infrastructure, banking / finance sector, pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing network (especially networks of smaller parts suppliers and service providers), then act to stabilise these when exogenous factors other than superior competition threaten them, but don't bail out the investors. Money can be sourced from elsewhere, but capital equipment, institutional knowledge, and market relationships can be easily destroyed and take many years or decades to restore, if at all.

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#215
The span of technological growth that JCD chronicled is hard to match. His body of work is a singular thread to the early days of personal computing all the way through commercialization of the internet and up to artificial intelligence. One career covering such an arc is pretty incredible.

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#216
post #197

For those like me wondering if he's also the creator of the Dvorak keyboard, no but close! > He is a nephew of sociologist August Dvorak, creator of the Dvorak keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout

There does not seem to be a documented close lineal connection between August Dvorak and composer Antonín Dvořák, although it would be reasonable to suppose some relation exists.

There's also no documented close lineal connection between John C. Dvorak and August Dvorak, any more than his birthplace being Los Angeles. Both of which are blindly-repeated, unsourced (and untrue) Wikipedia inventions.

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#218
post #89

I 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.

Been racking my brain trying to understand what the purpose of this comment is. I'm not saying everyone MUST write something positive about the man, but I just have a hard time understanding what this comment in particular adds.

The purpose could be to connect with others with similar opinions. Like me. Reading this thread, I’m discovering that the point about Dvorak wasn’t his typical wildly off-base opinions but, to many people apparently, the entertainment value in how he presented them. I mistook him for a bad pundit when he was really an entertainer - like treating a boy band as musicians instead of performers.

Re: John C. Dvorak has died

#219
Started reading John’s columns in InfoWorld in the 80’s when my parents scraped together the money for a subscription.

After that I never stopped reading his work, watching his shows, and listening to him (up till last Sunday’s excellent show).

Thank God for John C. Dvorak What a loss.

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