I believe Linux is "the best" for a variety of reasons and advocate for my favorite flavors on a regular basis (e.g. Ubuntu which is Linux for those who fear the Penguin) What I don't do is deride Microsoft (their operating systems have kept me employed for years) nor do I attack people who dislike Linux or post negative things about it.

Rather than rant at and about people who rant, why not simply ask them to behave civilly? If they refuse, technology is available to filter them in cyberspace and in meatspace, nice police officers are always helpful with the unruly.

I think the real issue was they had the wrong person for the interview. Very Unfortunate. Seriously, you have a chance to interview the CEO of the hottest tech company in the valley and you don't ask hard questions? Blown opportunity.

I think that she should have been better prepared and asked more pertinent questions. If you see the interview she did after the train wreck, she still maintains that SHE did nothing wrong.

The funny thing is, the crowd got hostile because they had a hunger for knowledge about technology and what is coming. They lost their patience when she never got past the self serving chit-chat.

As a side note: no one is anonymous on twitter. ;)

You can see more on my thoughts on this as well as the video clip of her post interview here:
http://facereviews.com/2008/03/09/zuckerberg-interviewer-denies-train-wreck-shes-clueless/

Cheers!

Rodney Rumford
Editor: FaceReviews.com

I think your interpretation of things is somewhat mistaken. I think the real trend is that technology people of all sorts hate whitewashing, they hate obfuscation, they hate vague misinformation, and they hate the superficial. With all the articles and events you cite, it's pretty clear.
With the reasons to not use Linux article, there was far too much generalization and no nuance. As an example, I used to work in IT and the entity I was employed by essentially paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in license costs to make XP behave more like linux: They paid to get software analogous to a linux package manager, such as apt or emerge to maintains software on their linux boxes, and it took them at least a year to even figure out how to get it set up and working. They also had to expend the energy to redo the users on every system so that there was effective user privilege escalation... essentially a ton of time to make a poor analogue of sudo. Then there were tons of little things. As an example,(I'll admit I don't know if there's some sort of alternative way to do this) changing from one print server to another that ran maybe 30 printers on 3 floors, they had each printer manually added via wizard to the new server. Time consuming and tedious. And I'd bet money with linux you could have just copied a config file from the old one to the new one. So essentially, when I have experiences such as that, only brushing the surface, and then I read an article that overgeneralize about 'linux' instead of pointing out issues with specific distros (such as how annoying yum is on Fedora), it's annoying.

Much the same way, people from a community of some kind don't like lowest common denominator reporting. They're used to being able to change the community with their voices, being taken seriously, and given some respect. The Larry King treatment isn't going to pass muster with them. So when Facebook guy gets interviewed, the people there don't want their questions wasted.

Apple, too, is often subject to a lot of mischaracterization. I meet professional people fairy often who hear about macs and then start talking about problems from the days of Mac OS 8 or sometimes oven Mac OS 7 like the same problems are still around. The worst part is that some people come up with mac issues that have never existed.

It is my opinion that better informed individuals from respective communities, be they the Linux community, the Facebook community, or the Apple community, often get subjected to stupid mischaracterizations by a broader society that doesn't really understand things at the same level they do, and these mischaracterizations only create impetus for a sense of needing to inform of the truth. And, unfortunately, there are 2 layers of truth, One is that there are often simplification, near falsehoods, and misstatements up the wazoo in mainstream articles relating to Mac, the Internet, and Linux. It is one thing to correct them. But the second layer of truth is that the reason there are so many poor articles on these topics is that the individuals who write on them are often not qualified enough, competent enough, or knowledgeable enough to do so accurately. I hardly think it should come as a surprise that people become more radicalized and pissed over time after time of being subjected to the phenomenon.