Your worst enemy: Ignorance

This post will surely appear as a flame for some people, but I can't avoid talking about it now that I work in a very heterogeneous workplace and I'm part of the smaller slice of Windows users.

It started being funny, being asked things like "but Microsoft .NET costs money, as all Microsoft products, no?" (ignorance of almost all related to .NET, not even knowing what languages it consisted of), or "You have to reboot all Windows constantly because of the updates" (ignorance of the Windows Server versions).

But as time goes on and on I'm starting to see a pattern, the pattern of ignorance.

A lot of people haven't even tried Windows Vista (or any server version newer than Windows 2000) in their lives, but yet judge it "the same shit as XP". Nobody knows how UAC works, why and when it asks you for privilege elevation, "but it's annoying" (probably because they read that on the spanish "cousin" of slashdot or similar Linux-oriented news site).

A lot of people say that C# is shit, not even having looked at its syntax (which is by the way so similar to Java you can easily port any simple class between the two without any effort). Others think that ASP.NET it's the "web language" of .NET, but not even try to see how it works and for example how different it is from PHP.

I've had two BSODs on my work laptop on 5 months because of the crappy NVidia customized drivers Dell brings with it (but if I change them to the normal ones, I can't suspend or hibernate the laptop) and I got the typical comments of "you see? it's always the same crashes", even when then they get kernel panics and freezes too on their Macs or Linux.

I can criticize Mac's money oriented software base (almost every decent app costs money, may it be a few bucks or more) or the different keyboard keys; but I don't feel I am in a position to speak about system speed or stability because I don't own nor use a Mac. In fact I now like some things it has, like decent cross-OS folder access or the zoom/magnifier tool (which I have to substitute by ZoomIt under Windows).

And the same goes for Linux users. My Vista's UAC is the same as their console sudo but in a graphical representation. In fact, I prefer that to not being able to know why my app didn't launched unless I launch it from a terminal and see the output requiring privileges.

I could continue for a lot more, with a lot of examples, like SQL Server costing money, but at least having a powerful stored procedures implementation, unlike MySQL's one (which is slower than doing direct querys in most cases), but I'll leave it here.

Maybe now I've opened my eyes and I see a wider scope of things, but while not blindy saying that all Microsoft stuff is cool, I don't make neither judgements without learning a bit of how something works first. Everything has its good and bad aspects, and nothing is perfect.

As said in X-Files, "trust no one" and try by yourself ;)

Note: Not everybody is as extremist as I point here, but I wanted to emphasize with specific examples.