My sister, I’ll call her S, is never wrong. At least in her mind. I love my sister but she really drives me nuts sometimes.
Last night I called my sister to ask if she could loan me a Windows CD so I could copy a cab file. (I am not ripping off Windows, my copy of the Windows CD burned when my apartment went up in flames. I just need a cab to install my USB card. I still have the MS registration number.) Somehow during this conversation my sister said that I could pick up Win XP Pro and the .Net SDK for cheap through the University. She offered to pick up the CD’s for me. I thanked her for the info but said I wasn’t really interested in either XP or .Net.
S asked me why. I told her that I was unhappy with MS and that I did not think that .Net was secure. I also meationed that other OS’s were better depending on what you are trying to do.
My sister somehow took this as an insult and said “MS and .Net ARE the industry standard. MS is the ONLY thing people are using and don’t even bother arguing with me about this”.
When S said that I thought my head was going to explode. My sis is working on her Masters in Computer Sci yet she cannot code her way out of a wet paper sack. I have built and trouble shooted all of her computers. My sis couldn’t even get BSD installed on one of her machines without my help. She calls me all the time asking me for the best way to solve a programming problem. But she knows what the whole industry is doing?
She is never wrong. If someone says the sky is blue S will say the sky is Red and never back down.
I love my sis but, damn, I want to smack her back into reality.
I keep getting people that say “You’re on Windows 98??? When are you gonna get XP?” or whatever OS they have. I then ask them what advantages they’re enjoying with XP over 98. (These are home users- not gamers or high level users. Average home Joe). I get stunned silence. Then I say "Mine ain’t broke and I ain’t fixin’ it. Been there, done that.
As to the crux of the OP, I hate know-it-alls too. There is little you can do with them, though, especially if it’s someone you care about. Sometimes repeating “I’ll take that under consideration” over and over gets the point across.
While MS certainly dominates the market share in the OS world, it is not correct that .NET is the industry standard. MS has been working desperately to make this so, but as far as I’ve seen, .NET has not been the raving success they had hoped.
MS is also not the only thing people are using. The people who want secure web servers usually run Apache on a unix machine, for instance.
Tell her this comes from a person who already has his Masters in CS, and teaches C++ at a major university. (BTW, my students are not able to use MS-only for programming – I make them do some of their assignments using the GNU compiler (g++) in the unix environment )
I agree. In fact I have used just about every OS out there. DOS 1 through 6, Windows 3 through XP, Mac 6.1 to OSX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, VOS, AS-400, Net BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. OOPs, I almost forgot my Commador64.
I worked in the NOC at AOL for two years. We kept 12 or 13,000 servers in production. My sister does not realize that I know more about computers than she does. She can do machine code but she doesn’t know what the hell it means. I bail her out all the time but she always seems to think she knows more than I do.
Try betting money. “Put up or shut up” worked with a neighbor of mine. Understand too that she may feel insecure, and uses the “never wrong” defense.
Just some thoughts
I’m blessed with a brother in law who knows everything about everything. I smile and nod and thank my lucky stars that I don’t have to live with him or deal with him on a regular basis. Some things aren’t worth the ulcers they could generate.
You hit it on the head. Usually I just shut up when my sis gets on a rant about how she is right and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes my sis is down right funny. For example one day my sis insisted that she knew more about nuclear power than my Dad. My sis kept telling my Dad that he was full of s***. What made this so funny is that fact that my Dad got a PHD in math and for about 18 years ran the Sandia Lab Nuclear Reactor Saftey division. My sis just didn’t realize, or care, that my Dad was one of the worlds experts on nuclear saftey. She was right and he was wrong, end of story.
I think that she does the ‘I’m always right’ thing because she is insecure. She has a really big problem with admitting that she doesn’t know something.
slee, are we related? No one in my dad’s family is ever wrong about anything…ever. It makes for really interesting intra-family arguments. Actually, a couple of my cousins and I make jokes about the family “right gene.” (We can get by with making fun of the gene since we have it, too. Anyone else would get his ass handed to him on a platter.)
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