journalist seeks help in "Absolute beginner" forum

I laughed and laughed, although perhaps a more appropriate response would have been weeping.  That forum is stereotypical fanboism at its very worst, pure comedy.  You couldn't invent responses like the fanbois are writing if you tried.  It  deserves a spot on XKCD, classic.

The Pi and its software will improve month by month, of that I have no doubt.  In contrast the fanbois there won't, they're beyond repair.

It's all more than a little unfortunate for Pi beginners though.  They might rightly be expecting the official RPF forum to be a little more helpful and understanding of their lack of competence and their mistaken expectations.

Education is predicated on tolerance of the uneducated.  Expecting fanbois to understand this would be overoptimistic, but I would certainly expect the Foundation to understand it and to give the fanbois the appropriate leadership in the direction of being helpful and tolerant to the greatest degree possible.  But instead of such community leadership, they have been fanning the flames of extreme intolerance, and I just cannot fathom that.

"Education is predicated on tolerance of the uneducated." True, but not of the wilfully ignorant.

Not that I'm keeping count, but I think the Foundation's enforcers have not only had a pop at a journalist (bad idea) but I also remember they have taken to task someone with only one arm for their bad typing and punctuation (as they weren't posting something nice and it was the only way to get back at them) and someone else for the same reasons and they were dyslexic.

Liz has also been less than gracious on twitter about someone who is very much involved in the same world as them and is somewhat more at the pointy end (http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3102&start=10)

Bruce, I don't think the post from the Journalist was willfully ignorant, and I've also made posts on the foundation's forums that have been derided for no reason other than the fact I was asking a non servile question. I can't agree with Morgaine more.

I can't speak for your and Morgaine's experience, of course, and I haven't been following the RPi forums as closely as I might. My comment was perhaps stronger than I intended, but even coming to the scene rather late I had easily picked up on many of the points that the OP on the RPi forum seemed completely unaware of and apparently unwilling to make allowance for in a bare-bones computer costing under £30.

As the OP is 'a journalist who works for a national magazine in a technology field' I would have expected him/her to have a bit of specialist knowledge as background to writing an article. Perhaps this is unreasonable of me.

Bruce, I'm going to make a big assumption here, but if it had been in my younger days, yes, I would have expected the Journalist to have had a little bit of knowledge of what they were talking about and in some cases, a lot !

However, today I am not so sure, there has been some woeful reporting about the Pi and many other items in the press by 'technology' reporters - today I am not so sure that actually knowing something about what you are reporting on is a pre-requisite.

Also I guess that the magazine could be something like T3 or Stuff magazine, which I will leave you to draw your own conclusions on :-)

I get the distinct impression that the RasPi Foundation have been marketing the Raspberry Pi to markets outside of the hardware hacking community - including people that want to use it as a media playback platform - so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if it'd got the attention of consumer gadget type publications. There was of course also another incident where one of their fanboys joked about tying someone naked to a lamppost with the logo painted on their chest after they complained about the over-abundant advertising. That comment was carefully left intact when the moderators removed his reply complaining about it. So if people are disappointed after it was over-hyped, well...