62 Laws Every Nerd Should Remember By Heart

Posted by Maria 22 November, 2008 (1) Comment
  • Nathan’s First Law: Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container. (Nathan Myhrvold)
  • Ninety-ninety Law: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. (Tom Cargill)
  • Occam’s Razor: The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct. (William of Occam)
  • Osborn’s Law: Variables won’t; constants aren’t. (Don Osborn)
  • Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. (C Northcote Parkinson)
  • Pareto Principle: 20% of the people own 80% of the country’s assets. (Corollary: 20% of the effort generates 80% of the results.) (Vilfredo Pareto)
  • Pesticide Paradox: Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffectual. (Bruce Beizer)
  • Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. (Laurence J Peter)
  • Red Queen Principle: For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the system it is co-evolving with. (Leigh van Valen)
  • Rock’s Law: The cost of semiconductor fabrication equipment doubles every four years. (Arthur Rock)
  • Rule of 1950: The probability that automated decisions systems will be adopted is approximately one divided by one plus the number of individuals involved in the approval process who were born in 1950 or before squared. (Frank Demmler)
  • Sixty-sixty Law: Sixty percent of software’s dollar is spent on maintenance, and sixty percent of that maintenance is enhancement. (Robert Glass)
  • Spector’s Law: The time it takes your favorite application to complete a given task doubles with each new revision. (Lincoln Spector)
  • Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. (Theodore Sturgeon)
  • Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity: You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you’ve reached that point, you can only shift the burden around. (Larry Tesler)
  • Tesler’s Theorem: Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn’t been done yet. (Larry Tesler)
  • Weibull’s Power Law: The logarithm of failure rates increases linearly with the logarithm of age. (Waloddi Weibull)
  • Weinberg’s Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. (Gerald M Weinberg)
  • Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Nicklaus Wirth)
  • Zawinski’s Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. (Jamie Zawinski)
  • Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:
    A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
    A robot must obey orders given to it by a human being except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
    A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.
  • Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics:
    A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
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    Comments
    November 23, 2008

    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).

    Stu Smiths last blog post..Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I’d Known Two Years Ago

    Posted by Stu Smith
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