John Dvorak

Hands Across America, Live AID, the Concert for Bangladesh, and so on. The American (and world) public has witnessed one feel-good event (and the ensuing scandals) after another. Each one manages to assuage our guilt about the world’s problems, at least a little. Now these folks think that any sort of participation in these events, […]

Sony was once perceived as the creative young upstart Japanese electronics company that could do everything better than the competition. This company was the king of innovation. It essentially popularized the VCR (although its format lost its war), made the VCR legal (that was before it bought a Hollywood studio), popularized smaller studio video cameras, […]

The Net neutrality bill took kind of a weird turn despite its defeat, when the public got to hear the mouthpiece for the telecom industry, Senator Ted Stevens. Wow. Stevens, an Alaska Republican, made a 10-minute speech before Congress that was something of a cross between a comedy act by Professor Irwin Corey and testimony […]

How many people realize that were living in a golden age, the Golden Age of the Internet? It wont last; golden ages never do. Some of it will remain, but theres evidence that much of it is headed for the trash heap of history. Radio days. The golden age of radio lasted from about 1930 […]

Last week the Society for Information Display (SID) held its annual conference and exhibition in San Francisco. Youll find photos of many of its highlights in this weeks photo essay. There was one overriding phenomenon: LCDs rule. Though the biggest and most spectacular display was a monster plasma from Samsung, it was all too apparent […]

Ive often thought about the new commonplace practices in society that someone from 1920 might find odd if they suddenly landed in the here and now. We all take them for granted, but if you pay attention, you have to find these phenomena weird. With only a couple of exceptions, all of the following changes […]

A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft […]

Just as I was commenting on how nice it would be to have a TiVo-like capability on my car radio, I saw that Toshiba has begun to promote its new 30GB 2.5-inch hard drives for use in automotive entertainment, information, and navigation applications. Toshiba had 81 percent of the automotive hard-drive market in the first […]

The Software Radio Dept.: The FCC has finally approved at least one implementation of something called software-defined radio (SDR). For almost a decade, experts in the field have told me that SDR will dominate all forms of wireless communications in some not-too-distant future. Essentially, the idea is to create an architecture that uses software to […]

Ive been reading about and following the emergence of VoIP (Voice over IP) services since their inception and have also seen various voice-over-the-Internet initiatives come and go. The investment in those expensive old phone switches and the desire of phone companies to keep them running are the biggest of many roadblocks to the full implementation […]

Of all the technologies that need to settle down, 802.11 wireless in all its manifestations (“a,” “b,” “g,” and—coming soon—”n”) should be at the top of the list. There is a mad rush to make the standards for 802.11—used mostly to share crummy 1-Mbps Internet connections—move forward at breakneck speed. At this point, do we […]

The Blu-ray disc standard continues to battle with the HD-DVD standards in the back alleys of Asia. The final spec for HD-DVD should appear early next year. Though the Blu-ray group has a final standard, they are now adding to it. This process of creating constant additional standards within standards makes a mockery of the […]