PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak's blog proudly displays an image labeled as "used without permission." Is Dvorak bragging about the copyright violation? Nope. He's just pulled a boneheaded move known in the blogging world as "hotlinking," and the altered image shows that he got caught at it.
"Think of how cool it would be! Think of how many families will get to experience the friendly spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist propaganda, Nazi propaganda, exhortations, movie clips of cats playing the piano, advertising, advertising, and more advertising. Do you now feel better about the world's problems, knowing that some poor tribesman's child has a laptop? What African kid doesn't want access to Slashdot?" — Professional contrarian John Dvorak on MIT do-gooder Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project. But John, think of the potential new readers for your column! [PC Magazine]
For all you crybabies who complained that we quoted him out of context mwah mwah mwah, here's the long version of the short version of the wit and wisdom of John C. Dvorak. The guy impresses me, to be honest. He's made a career of pretending to have idiotic, badly-written contrarian opinions. He drives irony-challenged tech workers berserk. Their angry clicks turn Johnny the C's publishers a tidy profit. And like skunk-chasing dogs, the geekboys come back for more. After the jump, a Dvorak twofer: He tees off Apple and Google kooks in one post. Which I've edited, so you can get back to work.
San Francisco videographers Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel have broken ties, we hear, with troubled online-video network PodTech. So what were they doing lunching earlier in the week with PodShow executives Adam Curry, the former MTV video jockey, and John Dvorak, the faux-grouchy tech columnist? The foursome were spotted eating al fresco at a restaurant near AT&T Park. We'd make jokes about the frying pan and the fire, but from the looks of Codel in this photo snapped by a Valleywag informant, he's just happy to be eating a hot meal. Eddie, baby, call us up. Next lunch is on us.
PodTech founder John Furrier, now that he has dethroned himself as CEO of the troubled Web-show network, has time to finally review the online-video competition. Referring to John Dvorak's CrankyGeeks, Furrier says, "Is this considered the best tech show on the net??? Time to think about doing a new tech show." John, while CrankyGeeks may not be the "best tech show on the net", it is better than PodTech's lineup of more than twenty tech shows. The time to think of a new tech show was a year ago, before you started firing your best tech-show video producers.
