Back in the day, mainstream tech publications were notorious for taking biased, inaccurate, vendor-produced press releases and publishing them as original articles without even a modicum of fact-checking. It’s one of the reasons tech blogs have done so well and why tech rags have tanked so quickly: when offered two separate biased and inaccurate media outlets (tech rags vs. blogs), the strong preference is toward the one that’s not a blatant PR delivery device; or, when both are blatant PR delivery devices, whichever one has the least number of punch-the-monkey style adverts running along the banner.

I don’t often read tech rags anymore. Every once in a while, though, you see an article from some rag make its way around the blogs just so everyone can doodoo on it. And that’s kind of nice, really.

Take this InfoWorld piece on Java performance improvements, for instance:

Scripting languages are ideal for smaller programs but Java is the choice for larger programs, he said. “As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don’t find the million-line Perl program,” he said. One-million-line Java programs are plentiful, Click said. Strong typing refers to the capability of knowing the type of memory objects.

If anyone feels it necessary, we can go through the motions of addressing the individual issues presented in the aforementioned paragraph (i.e., doodoo on it), along with the rest of the article, in the comments. (Chromatic has already reproved much of it, although much too politely for my taste.)

Me? I’ve reached a stage of acceptance with this kind of lazy hack work and no longer feel the inclination to offer a rebuttal. It’s just no fun doodooing on something for accuracy knowing all along that the people who published it never made accuracy a priority in the first place.

That being said, there are a few things the tech press holds dear and I personally feel are more appropriate for criticism, like copy-editing:

Java Virtual Machines and garbage collection, for example, have improved and Java itself has come along way, the technologists argued.

Now that is a goddam crying shame. Is there anything the tech press does better than blogs at this point?