Murphy's Military Laws1. You are not superman. 2. If it's stupid but works, it isnt stupid. 3. Don't look conspicuous - it draws fire. 4. Never draw fire, it irritates the people around you. 5. When in doubt, empty the magazine. 6. Never share a foxhole with someone braver than you are. 7. Never forget your weapon was made by the lowest bidder. 8. If the attack is going really well, it's an ambush. 9. No plan survives the first contact intact. 10. All five-second grenade fuses will burn down in three seconds. 11. If you are forward of your position, the artillery will fall short. 12. If you can't remember, the claymore is pointed toward you. 13. Try to look unimportant because the bad guys might be low on ammo. 14. The enemy diversion you are ignoring is the main attack. 15. The importaint things are always simple. 16. The simple things are always hard. 17. The easy way is always mined. 18. If you are short of everything except the enemy, you are in combat. 19. When you have secured an area, dont forget to tell the enemy. 20. Incomming fire has the right of way. 21. No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection. 22. No inspection ready unit has ever passed combat. 23. Beer math is 2 beers times 37 men equals 49 cases. 24. If the enemy is in range, so are you. 25. Friendly fire - Isn't. 26. Recoiless rifles - aren't. 27. Suppressive fire - Won't. 28. Things that must be together to work usually can't be shipped together. 29. Radios will fail as soon as you need fire support desperately, (Corollary: Radar tends to fail at night and bad weather, and espcially during both.) 30. Anything you do can get you shot including doing nothing. 31. Make it tough for the enemy to get in and you can't get out. 32. Tracers work both ways. 33. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire in incomming friendly fire. 34. Teamwork is essential. It gives them other people to shoot at. 35. If you take more than your fair share of objectives, you will have more than your fair share to take. 36. When both sides are convinced they are about to lose, both are right. 37. Professional soldiers are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs. 38. If it jams, force it, if it breaks, it needed replacing anyways. 39. If its indescribable, its edible. 40. If it was important during peacetime, its useless now. If it was useless during training, its important now. 41. Bullets dont subscribe to the "rank has its privileges" theory. 42. Murphy was a grunt. Murphy's Programmers Laws Brook's Law Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Dijkstra's Law of Programming Inertia If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it. First Maxim of Computers To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer. Gallois's Revelation If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes back out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled, and no one dares to criticize it. Corollary- An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the Grand Fallacy. Glib's Laws of Reliability 1. Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Corollary- At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer. 2. Any system which relies on human reliability is unreliable. 3. The only difference between the fools and the criminal who attacks a system is that the fool attacks unpredictably and on a broader front. 4. A system tends to grow in terms of complexity rather than simplification, until the resulting unreliability becomes intolerable. 5. Self-checking systems tend to have a complexity in proportion to the inherant unreliability of the system in which they are used. 6. The error detection and correction capabilities of a system will serve as the key to understanding the types of error which they cannot handle. 7. Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited. 8. All real programs contain errors unless proven otherwise, which is impossible. 9. Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until somebody insists on getting some useful work done. Golub's Laws of Computerdom 1. Fuzzy project objectives are used to avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs. 2. A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; if carefully planned, it will take 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. Goodin's Law of Conversions The new hardware will break down as soon as the old is disconnected and out. Gray's Law of Programming N+1 trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as N trivial tasks. Loggs Rebuttal- N+1 trivial tasks take twice as long as N trivial tasks for N sufficiently large. Grosch's Law Computer power increases as the square of the costs. If you want to do it twice as cheaply, you have to do it four times as fast. Hoare's Law of Large Programs Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out. IBM Pollyanna Principle Machines should work. People should think. Law of Computability as Applied to Social Science Any system or program, however complicated, if looked at in exactly the right way, will become even more complicated. Law of Computability as Applied to Social Science If at first you don't succeed, transform your data set. Laws of Computer Programming 1. Any given program, when running, is obsolete. 2. Any given program costs more and takes longer. 3. If a program is useful, it will have to be changed. 4. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented. 5. Any given program will expand to fill all available memory. 6. The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output. 7. Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it. 8. Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will discover that programmers cannot write in English. 9. Software is hard. Hardware is soft. It is economically more feasible to build a computer than to program it. 10. An operating system is a feeble attempt to include what was overlooked in the design of a programming language. Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology There's always one more bug. Project scheduling "99" rule The first 90 percent of the task takes 90 percent of the time. The last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent. Sattlinger's Law It works better if you plug it in. Segal's Law A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. Shaw's Principle Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it. Troutman's Programming Postilates 1. If a test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction. 2. Not until a program has been in production for at least six months will the most harmful error be discovered. 3. Job control cards that positively cannot be arranged in proper 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. Profanity is the one language all programmers know best. The Unspeakable Law As soon as you mention something...if it's good, it goes away; if it's bad, it happens. Weinberg's Law If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy society as we know it. |