John Dvorak

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]