John C. Dvorak Needs an Editor

Folks who spend anytime at all in the Information Technology realm are familiar with John C. Dvorak. He's prolific as can be, writing more than 4k articles since 1986. He writes not one, but two columns for PC Magazine. I have to give him props for that, as well as inventing the nifty Dvorak keyboard layout.*

He's a bit hard to criticize, what with his "cranky" persona, but he holds a special place in the hearts of Macintosh users. In fact, he's admitted to baiting Mac users to increase traffic to his website. Where I come from, we call that "trolling". But can't he have someone check his work before it's printed?

In a recent article on the Nintendo Wii he mentions the potential for Wii Remote-related accidents:

Those news reports about people losing control of their controller and hitting the dog? They seem to stem from the baseball simulation, where you create a 100-mph curve ball by letting go of your controller while it's still strapped to your wrist.

In the article he talks about his extensive testing of the Bowling game within Wii Sports, but he must have skipped playing the Baseball game. I can't imagine how he got the idea that one must release the controller at any point in the pitching process. One can firmly hold their controller throughout the entire game. There's a few microgames in Wario Ware: Smooth Moves (which Dvorak refers too as "Wii Wario" rather than using the game's actual name) that let you relax your grip on the controler, but these are pretty sedate affairs. No fast balls required.

An earlier article bashing the deserving target of Sony mentions a Blu-ray disc burner for PCs:

The latest fiasco is the recent revelation that Sony's Blu-ray player for the PC will not have the ability to play HD movies on the PC. This is to protect the interests of the movie makers somehow. Are they kidding us?

Would that be this player? The link states quite clearly that it plays Blu-ray movies. It does not play HD-DVDs, a competing format in a escalating format war. That's like criticizing a Betamax machine for not playing a VHS tape. Mr. Dvorak clearly understands the difference, so I'm not sure what point he's making here.

Similarly, parsing this sentence is a bit challenging too:

While Microsoft, because of its sheer size, is no more doomed than IBM ever was, it's never going to be a leader again, if the Vista saga is any indication.

What's the argument here? Vista is so bad that it will cripple Microsoft? IBM was big and now it isn't? It's a delicious mix of parenthetical clauses, negative statements and pronouns without antecedents.

Maybe I'm just being cranky. His minor errors and need for minimal fact-checking certainly don't rise to my favorite Central Minnesota weekly: a paper so in need of editing that seven entries in a top-ten list contained errors (one was a misplaced horoscope). I know that by picking nits I'm opening myself up to Gaudere's Law. John C. Dvorak's columns are usually pretty good, if not particularly insightful. But I don't think it's too much for a columnist in a review magazine to write clearly and accurately describe the products he's talking about.

*Disclaimer: Not actually true.