Apple, Linux Try to Pawn Dvorak Off On Each Other by in Technology / November 14th, 2007
After a night of botched ritual bobcat sacrifices lead to a printer driver failure on his Windows XP machine, famed columnist John C Dvorak vowed to give up on Windows and switch to a Mac or Linux computer until his “damned contract with the devil expires”. But rather than welcoming him with open arms, it appears that both Apple and the Linux community are trying to persuade Dvorak to stay away.
“Macs are no good at… uh… upgrades,” said Ali McConnell, a spokesman for Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “And the keyboards? Have you seen them? No tactile feedback whatsoever. If I weren’t employed by the company, I wouldn’t be using them. I would much prefer to use Ubuntu!”
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth disagreed strongly in an email sent to PTTBT:
“The fact is, Linux on the desktop is years away. Decades even. And it still looks ugly. Look at Macs, now those are some slick machines. Sexy machines. Did you see how the icons in the new dock have reflections? THAT’S what computers are meant to be. Oh, sorry, I have to go… my network card has suddenly become incompatible with Ubuntu and I have to write a new one from scratch myself. With punch cards.”
Industry insiders say it is no surprise that the leading competitors to Microsoft are trying to dodge the Dvorak bullet. Many cite Dvorak’s extensive history of “betting on the wrong horse”, suggesting that perhaps, on some cosmic level, if the tech columnist starts liking a product, it is doomed to failure.
Indeed, Microsoft seemed to be thinking along the same lines, when asked for comment:
“Oh, we de-authorized Dvorak’s copies of Windows when we saw the news this morning,” said Jim Freebar, VP of public relations for the Redmond giant, “And… uh… it’s impossible to re-authorize him without… um… four vials of blood and… er… the beating heart of a blind Tibetan monk. So tell him good luck from us. Actually, no, don’t do that… don’t want to draw attention.”
For his part, Dvorak was keeping quiet on his plans for a replacement operating system, though sources have pointed to an Ebay user with the hande “JCDvrk” furiously bidding on old Commodore 64 units over the last 12 hours.
November 14th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
[...] gag is amazingly similar to what we ran a few hours later,” said Richard Malcolm, editor-in-chief of PTTBT. “So either we both [...]
November 14th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Oh god, we’ve trackbacked ourselves!
November 14th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Ha ha. John Dvorak = FAIL.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:16 am
[...] columnist John C. Dvorak unveiled a new computer operating system today, as an option for users who feel shunned by Windows, Mac and Linux alternatives. Dubbed “DvorOS“, the software is built on a mixture of Assembly, AJAX and Hypercard, [...]