How to convince non-programmer his notions about computers are wrong?
- by Suma
Recently I came across a question about 64b on SuperUser for which the accepted answer seemed like a complete nonsense to me. I made two comments pointing out obvious mistakes.
To my perplexion, the comments had an effect of the poster of the answer being alienated. I have no idea how could I convince him he is wrong, as he does not seem to understand the basics of the problem. He seems to be mixing concepts like bus size and address size - see the pearl sentence "it will allow you to address all of your RAM because your processor is reading from your RAM in 64 bit words.".
The poster asks me to provide proves of my claim by quoting a respectable source, but I have no idea where to find such source, as I doubt anything I would consider relevant would be relevant for him (it would be probably too technical).
I think this instance can serve as an illustration of communication problems between programmers and users (and to certain extent even to any expert vs. non-expert communication). How should a programmer handle a communication like this, so that is does not become a useless quarrel?
