Chapter 461

Say thanks to R J Shore for this one!!!!

A little girl walks into her local pet store and asks the shopkeeper, “Mist-ter, do you have little bunnies?” The shopkeeper crouches down so the two are eye-to-eye.

“Why yes, young lady, I have several cute little bunnies. I have white ones, and brown ones, and a few black ones. What color would you like?”

The girl puts her closed fists on her hips and answers, “I don’t phink my pet pyfon weally gives a shit!”

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TrueAirSpeed provided these useful? tips...

SYSTEMS LAWS & RULES

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

Any Given program, once running, is obsolete.

If a test program functions perfectly, all subsequent systems will malfunction

If a program is useful, it will have to be changed corollary:

If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.

All programs expand to fill available memory corollary:

All programs expand beyond the ability of the programmer to understand them.

Interchangeable files won’t

Regardless of the units used by the customer, the programmer shall use his own arbitrary units, convertible only by means of weird & unnatural conversion factors. Speed, for example, will be expressed as furlongs per fortnight.

Files that cannot be destroyed will be.

Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the cost of errors, or until someone insists that work be done.

A carelessly planned program takes 4 times longer to complete than a carefully planned system, which takes only 3 times as long as expected.

There’s always one more bug.

A system could be designed that’s foolproof, but only a fool would want it.

If the input editor has been designed to reject bad input, an ingenious idiot will discover a way to get bad data past it.

The value of any program is proportional to the weight of its output Corollary:

The value of any program is inversely proportional to its cost.

Information necessitating a change in the system will be conveyed to the designer after, and only after, the plans have been finished.

variables won’t: Constants aren’t.

Once you have exhausted all possibilities and failed, the answer will be patently obvious to everyone else.

Any given program costs more and takes longer.

Adding staff to a late systems project makes it later.

If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.

The reliability of any piece of equipment is inversely proportional to the number of people watching it, and it’s overall productivity.

Undetectable errors are infinite in probability, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.

Given any problem containing ‘n’ equations, there will always be ‘n-1’ unknowns.