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Thread: John Dvorak is an idiot

  1. #1
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    John Dvorak is an idiot

    http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,4148,30,00.asp

    IDLE-TIME PROCESS. Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It's weird, and I almost always have to reboot. When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?

  2. #2
    New Romantic
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    He's been writing crap ever since we were in diapers XPav.

  3. #3
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    I demand that my system stop idling. I paid good money for this computer and I demand that it get off it's lazy ass and stop spending all its time idling! Dvorak is, like, so totally right! ;)

  4. #4
    World's End Supernova
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    My god, what a moron.

  5. #5
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    That has to be a joke.

  6. #6
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    This is upsetting on many levels. If my childhood hero, Dvorak, can lose his clue, what chance do I have?

  7. #7
    Spinning Toe
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    Dvorak used to be really good at keeping up with the technology, but I haven't read his articles in a year since he said blu ray was going to storm the market.

  8. #8
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    Dvorak does make a really nice single-file home page that you can download and set as your browser's home page.

    Other than that, he's been talking shit for at least ten years now.

  9. #9
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    I met him once way back at an industry get together. He seemed, uh, very "sure" of himself. Full of, himself, to be exact.

  10. #10
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    The first Google-able reference to Dvorak being called an idiot on the Internet was apparently 15 years ago:

    http://groups.google.com/groups?q=dvorak+idiot&start=700&hl=en&lr=lang_en|l ang_de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&scoring=d&selm=73405%40sun.uucp&rnum=73 2

    Talk about old news. :-)

  11. #11
    Bub, Andrew
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    Ok, I'm just going to stop nodding and smiling with the rest of you. I can sense why what he done wrote is dumb but I'm too much of a JessicaM described Football geek (see other thread) and not enough of a PC geek to really grok his transgression. Dig?

    Somebody fill me in on, not what's wrong (I think I've figgered that out) but why it's outrageous. And if it's outrageous, why hasn't anyone at PCMag corrected or edited it?

  12. #12
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    The idle process is something the computer does when it has nothing else to do.

    Dvorak doesn't know this, and that makes him an idiot.

    He's blaming a computer problem on the idle process. The truth of the matter is that his computer just isn't launching any programs. Since there is nothing for the processor to do, it just sits at idle.

    He's substituting the symptom for the cause. (I'm sure there's some fancy Latin phrase for this).

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Roger Wong
    (I'm sure there's some fancy Latin phrase for this).
    As done on the Roadrunner cartoons:

    John Dvorak (idioticus rex)

  14. #14
    New Romantic
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    The obvious issue here is that if Dvorak doesn't understand an intermediate level concept in Windows XP, then why the hell should I trust him to understand anything complex about computing with Windows?

    He's supposed to be an expert.

  15. #15
    New Romantic
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    You know, I sort of skimmed the article the first time through and thought it was a joke when reading ones like this:

    REBOOT DISABLED. Starting some months ago, hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete twice would no longer reboot my system. Now I get a dialog box and have to reboot from inside that or not at all.
    and this one

    TRACEROUTE NOT WORKING. Traceroute, or TRACERT on my machine, now goes three hops and times out. I can't trace anything.
    But reading through the whole thing he's actually serious. WTF?

  16. #16
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    The issue is that Dvorak doesn't seem to grasp what the hell it means.

    95% idle processes means they're IDLE, as in not doing anything. He seems to think it is actually doing something - though calling it an "idle process", which is making him angry.

    "Idle process" is a bit of a contradiction - something that is idle yet processing - but how Dvorak could be such a retard is beyond me. It's gotta be a joke. God I hope so.

    I used to respect him and Jerry Pournelle, but Pournelle a few months back thought it was easy to go outside of the space shuttle and fix tiles with a space suit.

    --- Alan

  17. #17
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    Surely this has to be a joke.

  18. #18
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    You'd hope so. What a freaking retarded thing to say. I wonder if this Idle process causes his machine to behave poorly... actually.. I wonder if he's tried to kill the process.

  19. #19
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    He was given this expensive computer, perhaps he doesn't want it to sit around doing nothing?

  20. #20
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    Are you saying this cup holder is actually a CD drive?

  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jazar
    Are you saying this cup holder is actually a CD drive?
    Sure hope so. It keeps shearing off my paper cups!

  22. #22
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    I swear to god, this entire column can be boiled down to "Computers are too hard, he's my magic way that I made up in 5 minutes on the can and have done no usability testing at all to make eveything easy."

    Worthless column. Completely.

  23. #23
    Account closed World's End Supernova
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    "We need an approach in which everything is all on one big page—a form."

    Everything. All Windows configuration settings. On one big form. Right.

    Apparently Dvorak doesn't get why hierarchical options were invented in the first place.

  24. #24
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    I think he want the form idea instead of having advanced tabs so that more people that are 97% computer illiterate can fuck over their systems quicker thus giving tech support more work to do...

    This guy is a fucking idiot. If he attended Certificate 2 of I.T* , where they teach you to use a mouse, most of the class would probably think he needed to be in special Education due to him being such a dumb arse (*which is at TAFE -the dumb/poor version of university in Australia).

    I fully expect his next comments to be on the next line of

    "Why do they call it a 'start' button? it hardley starts anything. In fact, I had to go throuigh multiple layers of confusing menus to get any of my programs to begin at all - this is terrible."

  25. #25
    New Romantic
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    Well, actually, it is pretty lousy UI design.

  26. #26
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    Still an idiot:

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1358153,00.asp

    All the hobbyists in computing are gone!

  27. #27
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    Dvorak really can't get over the fact that he doesn't know how to use modern computers, can he? WordStar was easier to use than Word? WTF?

  28. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by John 'I'm a Tard' Dvorak
    To make matters worse, products such as Photoshop change radically from release to release, making casual use almost impossible except for the most fundamental chores
    It takes me about, oh, I dunno, 30 seconds for me to acquaint myself with a newer version of Photoshop. Given, I won't fully realize the new capabilities the extra features allow me to do for a few weeks, but it's not like the interface changes radically with each new version. Ever since Photoshop 5, they've retained the exact same toolbar layout, and all that happens is some buttons get shuffled around. They only add about 2 to 5 new filters every release, and it takes a version or two before a new tool is created.

    Dvorak needs to suck down some hemlock, STAT. The man is a nutbag.

  29. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by XPav
    Still an idiot:

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1358153,00.asp

    All the hobbyists in computing are gone!
    That is, without a doubt, one of the stupidest articles I've ever read.

    "Boo hoo! Computers aren't dominated by beardy-men any more!"

  30. #30
    New Romantic
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    Unbelievably out of touch. Hell, I can't seem to go that many posts on Shacknews et al without "here's a tool for this-or-that I/some random person created" or case mods or whatever. They don't all smell bad and are social failures anymore, though.

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