TIL the Dvorak layout does not derive its name the same way as the qwerty layout - I guess I never looked at a Dvorak keyboard before.
John C. Dvorak has died
201–210 of 340 posts
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pournelle was good as a kind of (relatively) non-technical user in the early days (70s, early 80s) who just wanted to use computers to write books. Dvorak was quite good, but for me much too oriented towards the Wintel world. And then there was another guy who was sooo consistently bad I referred to him as Less Than Thorough. I'm not sure now whether he was also the MIT economist who died in 2016. Robert X. Cringely…
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 anywhere. Government officials are very very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are too risk-averse to back the true winners preferring CYA to prove that failure wasn't predictable or their fault, no real skin in the game so easily swayed by dinners and sports tickets and personal favours, and almost always double down on failed ideas and companies rather than admitting they got it wrong.
Provide a safety net for individuals, by all means, but not for companies.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#203This is sad, like a piece of my geek childhood dying. I would sometimes email him when he was writing for PC Magazine and as a 14 year old it was cool that he always emailed back, engaged in thoughtful conversation.
that is really cool, I would not expect him to respond to emails like that!
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#204Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#205He didn't get any spam.. the early, great days of TWiT! RIP.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad him and Leo had a falling out years ago. I really loved watching those two together. I remember John was always borrowing Leo's equipment, such as camera lenses, and he would always forget to bring them back and Leo would always scold him for that.
Absolutely, that was some of the best years of Twit.
Listening to podcasts on an iPod era
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#207I’ll always remember him from Twit. He always made the show entertaining. I wonder if he and Leo were ever able to reconcile their differences.
Sadly, I don't think so. I remember Leo saying some not-so-nice things about John on the pre-show to TWIT a few months ago. I never understood how Leo couldn't forgive John for whatever he did, but Leo has had long-lasting feuds with a lot of people over the years. All that wasted time fighting between those two when we could have had them doing great shows together over the past few years and giving us great content…
leo, like other radio-type people, always carried a bad combo of big egos and massive chips on shoulders.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#208Legend. R.I.P. John.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#209I 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.
So many people who have big personalities on the internet are like that. My example is Erik Naggum. I spent a lot of time with him and the gulf between his in-person and on-line personas was vast. Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
Had he acted in real life the way he did on c.l.l, I strongly suspect he would have been punched a lot more often. Certainly one eulogy I read of him led with the sentence: "Erik Naggum was the first person I killfiled in GNUS." On the other hand, I have heard only good things from people who interacted with him one-on-one though (whether in-person or electronically).
His technical content was almost always high-quality, but one would often need to first don one's Nomex suit to get to said content.
Re: John C. Dvorak has died
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The odd part is that the announcement used the same erroneous date that Wikipedia used to have. Perhaps someone forgot to refresh their cache for a couple of years.
More likely they wrote the obit several years ago. That's not uncommon.