They were hardly cavalier with the information. Our own government allowed a contracted network admin total access to everything... now that's being cavalier.

Well that's valid but clearly you didn't read the book. He provides the code, setup and timing results. He would have had to fabricate the data to make MS look good Java did in fact win a couple categories.

I really do understand your skepticism though because I've seen that as well for more complicated "experiments" where they were dealing with so many variables in the setup that they could get whatever results they wanted.

I'm glad we're finally having an actual conversation than just snarky remarks.

Your claim is that he committed academic fraud, fabricating data from examples that can be easily verified to provide a former employer with a slight publicity spike at great personal cost to himself and his software consulting business. I cannot find the date he left MS but his own company, Construx, was founded by him in 1996 so my guess would be he left MS around that time, well before the 2nd edition of code complete was printed in 2004.

Uh, none. I never claimed that the .Net CLR had additional optimizations beyond what's provided by the JVM. It does perform certain operations faster according to Code Complete 2 by Steve Mconnel but I don't remember the details.

Java does inline optimizations. IL is an abbreviation for Intermediate Language, the bread and butter of CLR and JVM.

Cut the sarcasm man. It doesn't suit your extremely weak argument.

Someone who worked at MS over ten years ago is not "a Microsoft employee". Troll someone else.

DuckDodgers didn't know this and that's who I was responding to.

From a quick web search I found patents from HP covering IL optimizations so I'm not convinced that the giant patent infringement settlement between MS and Sun specifically covered the IL optimizations we're talking about.

.Net also does dynamic and re-usable runtime optimizations. You can also instruct it to inline certain methods, load certain resources in the background that you expect to use but the runtime will do the same thing, just maybe not as intelligently. "Code Complete 2" has some code execution speed examples in it and most of them show C# running faster than Java; The author was comparing simple ops like method calls, conditionals, dictionaries, arrays, etc.

I considered posting a link to the wikileaks article specifically about the CIA plan to discredit wikileaks through ad-hominen attacks against the organization and the individuals running it but then I would have been labeled a conspiracy theorist.

How does one vote the OP as flame-bate? Julian isn't raising the money, he isn't even promoting it. He just re-tweeted about it. This has to be the most purposefully misleading post I've ever seen on slash dot.

Hey, the US could use some of those things too! http://www.infrastructurerepor...

They only read half of the sentence and assumed that was the complete second amendment. The full amendment reads "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It implies that they need to be a well regulated militia to have this right and in fact both the background for the amendment as well as early supreme court decisions show this to be the case. It's also clearly not saying unfettered access to arms, only that they can keep and bear arms; would anyone want a sociopath to have a nuclear bomb or automatic weapon anyways?

There's quite a bit of info on wikipedia about the amendment which is worth reading if you find this topic interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution.

Only antisocial people are afraid of eye contact. It's normal for non-nerds to look eachother in the eyes, especially if they're friends. If they're enemies then yeah, eye contact is intimidating but not as intimidating as looking at the club you're going to beat them with. See wikipedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_contact

You seem to be arguing against basic competitive economic theory. While your point seems logical the more likely case is that the low ROI colleges will starve until they lower their prices or increase graduation and post-education employment rates. I won't argue that the high ROI schools won't go down a bit once people start flocking to them for the best deal but to think the prices would only go up when people are given tools for finding the best schools doesn't make much sense.