John Dvorak

Welcome to the “Internet Spyware Prevention Act.” Just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, this proposed federal law eventually will give the Justice Department the initiative to stop companies that install spyware. Its aimed at tricksters who try to scam personal details from the hapless user, but because these programs are so annoying in […]

This weeks column is in a way an exercise in futility, since information about long-gone laptops is scarce. We need a publicly maintained resource—such as a wiki—detailing the history of some of these old machines. I put the list in this column together largely from the collective memory of myself and my colleagues. Some dates […]

Once in a while its good to remember the computer classics, in order to see how far weve come in making these devices more fun and more useful. Im going to illustrate the utility of this by citing what I believe are some of the great products of yesterday. Readers are invited to toss in […]

Most of todays long-term computer users have experienced dead media in the form of the 5.25-inch floppy disk. If you have an old disk to read, you probably no longer have a computer equipped to read it; the 5.25-inch drives are becoming collectible. But if you have one, you should know that a lot of […]

It was only after I upgraded my main computer to Office 2003 that I discovered that, for some inexplicable reason, Microsoft had erased one of my favorite programs—Microsofts own Photo Editor—and seemingly replaced it with the useless Adobe Image Ready program. Actually, the Adobe product doesnt totally suck. It just doesnt have the quick features […]

Why have we seen so many new virus attacks in recent weeks? I believe its because there has been little effort made by law enforcement officials to find or stop the virus authors. Maybe there is more effort coming from law enforcement than Im observing—but if thats true, what theyre doing is incredibly inefficient, and […]

Looking back to my historyIn a mystery,how it came to meA little moneyand a lotta timeI gave all thats mine,and now I got my signOhhh, Im not your puppetDont pull my strings,fool with thisIll make you,yea yea yeaDance for me —”What Chu Want” by Australian rap group J Wess Project Its always something! Last week, […]

Californians like to talk about the Big One: the disaster-of-the-century earthquake that will wreck the state. Its coming soon, they say. Well, so is the big attack that will shut down the Internet completely and destroy all computers—the online equivalent of the Big One. So far, all weve had are slight tremors. The viruses and […]

Although nobody has been able to smuggle out a single screenshot of the top-secret IBM Linux desktop OS—often referred to as Blue Linux—I have friends who have seen it. I am assured that it not only exists, but is being used by large numbers of IBMers. “They are going through a process of eating their […]

Comdex is broken. I suspect this happened because of a combination of changing ownership, lost vision, and pent-up resentment of the show that has been building for a decade. The sociology could fill a book, but the show has never been liked much, and it seemed as though people everywhere were waiting for the moment […]

The sadomasochistic nature of programming, in my opinion, means that open-source software will always be better than commercial software. This is a whopper of a concept, but something has to account for the excellent code coming from the open-source movement. It may seem like an exaggeration, but hear me out on this one. Recently I […]

Over this past weekend yet another virus/Trojan/worm/whatnot attack culminated in a lot of panic. Apparently, far too many systems were infected with this latest disease, and the Net was once again choking on the aftereffects. Probably the blackout in New York and much of the Northeast saved us because it simply took machines offline. This […]