/. and misreporting

We all know and love Slashdot for its anti-Microsoft, pro-Linux commentary. I follow it almost every day and I always smile with the Microsoft-related posts. It’s ok, it’s fun. I still haven’t digested the blue pill I was given when I joined the Borg collective, so I can still appreciate the justified critique against my company.

But this is just plain misreporting; the title reads: “C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton’s DARPA Chances“. The reader (well, at least me) thinks that Princeton lost on their autonomous vehicle challenge attempt because of a memory leak bug in C# (well, that’d be the CLR and not the programming language but that’s a different discussion). Then the reader reads the short paragraph, especially the part that is not a quote, and they think… “wow, poor Princeton guys… a bug in the CLR prevented them from winning!”.

Then the reader goes to the actual article (if the reader bothers to do so) only to discover that it was Princeton‘s code that introduced the bug. They kept object references around so the garbage collector couldn’t clean the memory.

Now, I am not suggesting that Microsoft software is without bugs/problems/issues/etc. But this is just ridiculous.