John C. Dvorak this afternoon is making his debut on SYS-CON.TV (http://sys-con.tv) and will be following up on some of the issues most commonly associated with him including the state of the Nasdaq, blogging, and i-technology in general. Viewers are able to communicate directly with him by emailing questions to tv@sys-con.com.

 A typical Dvorak approach to technology current events can be found in his recent PC Week column "Googlepedia: The End is Near" in which he wrote as follows: 

"Google has been using Wikipedia to deliver appropriate results in a non-natural-language fashion, but would love to get hold of the entire database in-house so it would not have to continually spider the thing with its legions of Web crawlers. So the debate now begins. Should the Wikipedia folks get cozy with Google, a public company? The big fear seems to be the notion of letting the camel's head into the tent. Pretty soon the whole camel will be inside."

View John C. Dvorak in "The Maureen O'Gara Show" With Roger Strukhoff Live on SYS-CON.TV 

Or then there was the recent How to Kill Linux column, which sparked Web-wide controversy when he introduced the world to what he called "the lopped-off head approach" - the head being that of Linux, and the beheader being Microsoft.

Dvorak's notion was that, since the key to competitive success is to gain dominant market share with a proprietary product, all Microsoft needs to do to neuter Linux is to usher "MS-Linux" into the world, then cut the driver layer out of Windows and attach it to Linux directly.

"If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market."

With that one driver element proprietary, in Dvorak's view, the murder plan might succeed, with Microsoft taking its distribution of Linux and selling it as a "lopped-off head."

Dvorak's key explanation is here:

"That means tearing away the entire top of Linux from the driver layer - and that would be MS-Linux. Users who needed to add the driver layers would be offered the standard Linux driver package, which would be attached with a utility program. The utility would sew the drivers back into Linux, resulting in an OS that would be more or less the same as everyone else's. Or the user could pay for the Windows drivers and attach those to MS-Linux, resulting in an OS that had the PnP benefits of Windows."

The suggestion naturally met with instant dislike and horror worldwide, with Dvorak being called everything from "strange" to "mad."

View John C. Dvorak in "The Maureen O'Gara Show" With Roger Strukhoff Live on SYS-CON.TV

John C. Dvorak is a PC Magazine columnist writing Inside Track, an essay and a weekly online column. These articles are licensed around the world. He is also a weekly columnist for CBSMarketwatch, Info! (Brazil) and BUG Magazine (Croatia).

Previously Dvorak has been a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, MacUser, PC/Computing, Barrons, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. He is a former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld and has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. He has written over 4000 articles and columns as well as authoring or co-authoring 14 books and was 2003 Award winner of the American Business Editors Association's national gold award for best online column of 2003.