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Murphy's Laws and Other Observations

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Murphy's Laws

  1. If anything can go wrong, it will.
  2. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the first one to go wrong.
  3. If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
  4. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
  5. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
  6. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
  7. Mother nature is a bitch.
  8. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
  9. Every solution breeds new problems.
  10. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
  11. Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner.
  12. Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it.
  13. The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management.
  14. Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
  15. Experts arose from their own urgent need to exist.

Murphy's Corollaries

Commentaries

Hill's Commentaries on Murphy's Laws
  1. If we lose much by having things go wrong, take all possible care.
  2. If we have nothing to lose by change, relax.
  3. If we have everything to gain by change, relax.
  4. If it doesn't matter, it does not matter.
O'Toole's Commentary
Murphy was an optimist.
Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
Things get worse under pressure

Ginsberg's Theorems

  1. You can't win.
  2. You can't break even.
  3. You can't even quit the game.
Forsyth's Second Corollary to Murphy's Laws

Just when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, the roof caves in.

Weiler's Law

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

The Laws of Computer Programming
  1. Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it.
  2. Any given program, when running, is already obsolete.
  3. Any given program costs more and takes longer each time it is run.
  4. If a program is useful, it have to be changed.
  5. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
  6. Any given program will expand to fill all the available memory.
  7. The value of a program is inversely proportional to the size of its output.
  8. Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
  9. All's well that ends.
  10. A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
  11. The first myth of management is that it exists.
  12. A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
  13. New systems generate new problems.
  14. Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
The Murphy Philosophy
Smile . . . tomorrow will be worse.
Murphy's Constant
Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value

Pierce's Law

In any computer system, the machine will always misinterpret, misconstrue, misprint, or not evaluate any math or subroutines or fail to print any output on at least the first run through.

Corollary to Pierce's Law

When a compiler accepts a program without error on the first run, the program will not yield the desired output.

Addition to Murphy's Laws

In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is going right ... something is wrong.

Brook's Law

If at first you don't succeed, transform your data set!

Grosch's Law

Computing power increases as the square of the cost.

Golub's Laws of Computerdom

  1. Fuzzy project objectives are used to avoid embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs.
  2. A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project takes only twice as long.
  3. The effort required to correct course increases geometrically with time.
  4. Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.
Osborn's Law

Variables won't; constants aren't.

Gilb's Laws of Unreliability
  1. Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
  2. Any system that depends upon human reliability is unreliable.
  3. Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
  4. Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

There's always one more bug.

Troutman's Postulate
  1. Profanity is the one language understood by all programmers.
  2. Not until a program has been in production for six months will the most harmful error be discovered.
  3. Job control cards that positively cannot be arranged in improper order will be.
  4. Interchangeable tapes won't.
  5. If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input, an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it.
  6. If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction.
Weinberg's Second Law

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Gumperson's Law

The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability.

Gummidge's Law

The amount of expertise varies in inverse ratio to the number of statements understood by the general public.

Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics

Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can (old worms never die, they just worm their way into larger cans).

Harvard's Law

Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

Sattinger's Law

It works better if you plug it in.

Jenkinson's Law

It won't work.

Horner's Five Thumb Postulate

Experience increase directly with equipment ruined.

Cheop's Law

Nothing ever gets build on schedule or within budget.

Rule of Accuracy

When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.

Zymurg's Seventh Exception to Murphy's Law

When it rains, it pours.

Pudder's Laws
  1. Anything that begins well ends badly.
  2. Anything that begins badly ends worse.
Westheimer's Rule

To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. Thus, we allocate two days for a one hour task.

Stockmayer's Theorem

If it looks easy, it's tough. If it looks tough, it's damn near impossible.

Atwoods Corollary

No books are lost by lending except those you particularly wanted to keep.

Johnson's Third Law

If you miss one issue of any magazine, it will be the issue that contains the article, story or installment you were most anxious to read.

Corollary to Johnson's Third Law

All of your friends either missed it, lost it or threw it out.

Harper's Magazine Law

You never find the article until you replace it.

Brooke's Law

Adding manpower to a late software makes it later.

Finagle's Fourth Law

Once a job is fooled up, anything done to improve it will only make it worse.

Featherkile's Rule

Whatever you did, that's what you planned.

Flap's Law

Any inanimate object, regardless of its position, configuration or purpose, may be expected to perform at any time in a totally unexpected manner for reasons that are either entirely obscure or else completely mysterious.


Burkhard Kirste, 1993/07/17.



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: March, 12, 2019