John Dvorak, cementing his reputation as the biggest jackass in the computer world, declares that “Apple’s stock always goes up a few points immediately after the [Macworld] show” (the opposite of the truth) and points out that, when you ignore Apple’s product announcements, they didn’t announce any new products. Dvorak has previously lambasted Apple for selling a mouse with their Macintoshes, claimed that Apple was preparing to replace Mac OS X with Windows, and recently prophesied that Apple could not possibly compete in the mobile phone industry. There’s even a blog dedicated to tracking his ravings.
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Yeah, the guy is looney. So why do people still read him?
We at Transmeta all got an immense chuckle back in our “stealth” days (pre-2000) when Dvorak publicly proclaimed that he had figured out what we were up to. (In those days, the only thing most people knew of Transmeta was that Linus Torvalds worked there.)
According to Dvorak, we were inventing an entirely new method for chip manufacturing, which we were calling “Neosilicon,” and we would be launching a product named “Neon.”
What was behind Dvorak’s nonsense in this case? Well, early on we’d adopted a scheme under which our development hosts and infrastructure servers were named after the elements: the hostnames corresponded to the atomic numbers of the elements, which in turn corresponded to the hosts’ IP addresses on our initial /24 (class C) internal network segment: .1 was Hydrogen (a router), .2 was Helium, etc….
“Neon” was our Internet firewall.
Silicon was our original mail hub, which was replaced at some point by a new host and (re)named “Neosilicon.”
So Dvorak’s revelation to the world meant he’d read through the detailed message headers from an outgoing Transmeta e-mail and then convinced himself he’d just decoded a secret message.
Hee hee hee.