62 Laws Every Nerd Should Remember By Heart
Posted by
Maria 22 November, 2008
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- Amdahl’s Law: The speed-up achievable on a parallel computer can be significantly limited by the existence of a small fraction of inherently sequential code which cannot be parallelised. (Gene Amdahl)
- Augustine’s Second Law of Socioscience: For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction. (Norman Augustine)
- Benford’s Law: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. (Gregory Benford)
- Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. (Frederick P Brooks Jr)
- Church-Turing Thesis: Every function which would naturally be regarded as computable can be computed by the universal Turing machine.
- Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (Arthur C Clarke)
- Clarke’s Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. (Arthur C Clarke)
- Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Arthur C Clarke)
- Conway’s Law: If you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler. (Melvin Conway)
- Cope’s Law: There is a general tendency toward size increase in evolution. (Edward Drinker Cope)
- Dilbert Principle: The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management. (Scott Adams)
- Deutsch’s Seven Fallacies of Distributed Computing: Reliable delivery; Zero latency; Infinite bandwidth; Secure transmissions; Stable topology; Single adminstrator; Zero cost. (Peter Deutsch)
- Ellison’s Law: The userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work. (Carl Ellison)
- Ellison’s Law: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. (Harlan Ellison)
- Ellison’s Law: Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts. (Larry Ellison)
- Finagle’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will. (?Larry Niven)
- Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem: The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change. (R A Fisher)
- Fitts’s Law: The movement time required for tapping operations is a linear function of the log of the ratio of the distance to the target divided by width of the target. (Paul Fitts)
- Flon’s axiom: There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs. (Lawrence Flon)
- Gilder’s Law: Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power. (George Gilder)
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It’s worth noting that both Amdahl’s and Grosch’s laws were basically IBM propaganda: at the time, they were facing stiff competition from minicomputers. IBM took the position that one mainframe costing $1M was more effective than ten minis costing $100K each. With the advent of fast ethernet, this position became untenable (hence the rise of server farms).
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