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)

Godwin's Law:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. (Mike Godwin)

Grosch's Law:
The cost of computing systems increases as the square root of the computational power of the systems. (Herbert Grosch)

Grove's Law:
Telecommunications bandwidth doubles every century. (Andy Grove)

Hanlon's Law:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (?Robert Heinlein)

Hartree's Law:
Whatever the state of a project, the time a project-leader will estimate for completition is constant. (Douglas Hartree)

Heisenbug Uncertainty Principle:
Most production software bugs are soft: they go away when you look at them. (Jim Gray)

Hick's Law:
The time to choose between a number of alternative targets is a function of the number of targets and is related logarithmically. (W E Hick)

Hoare's Law:
Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out. (Charles Hoare)

Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you think, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account. (Douglas Hofstadter)

Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience:
Users spend most of their time on other websites. (Jakob Nielsen)

Joy's Law:
Computing power of the fastest microprocessors, measured in MIPS, increases exponentially in time. (Bill Joy)

Kerckhoff's Principle:
Security resides solely in the key. (Auguste Kerckhoff)

Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns:
As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes). (Ray Kurzweil)

Law of the Conservation of Catastrophe:
The solutions to one crisis pave the way for some equal or greater future disaster. (William McNeill)

Law of False Alerts: A
s the rate of erroneous alerts increases, operator reliance, or belief, in subsequent warnings decreases. (George Spafford)

Lister's Law:
People under time pressure don't think faster. (Timothy Lister)

Lloyd's Hypothesis:
Everything that's worth understanding about a complex system, can be understood in terms of how it processes information. (Seth Lloyd)

Metcalfe's Law:
The value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users. (Robert Metcalfe)

Moore's Law:
Transistor die sizes are cut in half every 24 months. Therefore, both the number of transistors on a chip and the speed of each transistor double every 18 (or 12 or 24) months. (Gordon Moore)

Murphy's Law:
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it. (Edward A Murphy)

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 10% 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.

Ah Wantok,
this is all covered by a new law of Physics I have dicovered.

The Law of Diminishing Returns. States:

The chance of getting a return equal to effort put in, approaches infinity in proportion exponentially to the increased effort.


(Think of the Richter Scale and you have it.)

There is also "Hamilton's Law" which I have formulated after dealing with Bodies Corporate fo the last 11 years.

Hamilton's Law. States.

When dealing with a Body Corporate, the chances of getting any rational decision within a sensible period of time, is inverseley proportional to the square of the number of people on the Committee.(See Law of Diminishing Returns)

Regards......Ralph.

wantok thanks for the very true advice , can you just put a typical experience to support the idea.

Hehe brada,
"The Law of Diminishing Returns" Example:

Just think. You can pass your exams with a 75% to 85% pass mark with no effort at all. So, if you decide to do better, you can put in 10 times more effort and get to 90%. Or instead you can put in 100 times more effort and get to 95%, and so on.

Alternatively, you could use that extra time, for drinking, partying, or keeping the company of bad women.

Regards......Ralph.

hey thanks Ralph,
that was a good one.
I did learnt something there.

cheers
-.Bexman.-

Too true Ralp! maybe throw in some "wantok system" variables to make it valid for PNG

Can anyone help..I just want to know why water expands when frozen?

Tank u

Well sumatin,
it has to expand.

Otherwise, icebergs would sink to the bottom, and you would not be able to see them. And Eskimos would have nowhere to put their iceholes.

There is a long and boring scientific answer, but I've forgotten it. So it must have been looonnnggg and very boring.

O' what fun it would be,
In a gum-leaf boat,
On the snot green sea. (Eccekio)

Regards......Ralph.

Yes, it was a lullaby type of explaination, but density=mass/vol so just work on that equation to know the simple answer.

For those H2O fanatics like me, I got an interesting trivia.

What percentage of the worlds water is drinkable??

OK,
I'll relent and tell you.

When you freeze water it becomes crystalline. If you freeze it really quickly it becomes like glass, and is much denser because it does not become crystalline. To do this, you have to cool it a rate of about 100K per minute.

Now, as we know, water is made up of 2 atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen. Therefore; 2H2O = 2 molecules of water. Now this molecule is held together with Hydrogen bonds, which are very weak, as differnt to Hydrogen Bombs which are very strong.

So as it cools down water becomes more dense. (contracts) At around 4 degrees C it is at its most dense. The Hydrogen bonds then adjust to keep the Oxygen atoms apart, as the temperature drops furthur. Therefore it expands again. Till it becomes solid at about 0 degrees C. It expands to a factor of 9. So the old saying that Icebergs are 90% below water is fairly accurate. About 1% error.

Are you still awake? I just dozed off myself, but I will continue.

Experiment: Put some water in a container; freze it rapidly with something like liquid Helium; put your "iceberg in water: it should sink, because you have made it into "glass". ergo: it is not crystalline. No Noddy, don't pick this iceberg up with your bear hans. You may freeze the skin off your fingers, and this would ruin your love-life.

Is everyone comatose yet?

Now, those of you who are real Physicists, not merely hacker like me, should be able to supply the figures from quantum theory to about ten decimal places. Thereby proving my figures a fallacy. Is a fallacy the worlds smallest Penis? I imagine at the temperature of supercooled ice, it may well be.

Hello! I told you the answer was long and boring.

ZZZZzzzzzz......Ralph

Hmm Kolwan,
I would have thought that 100% was drinkable.

The caveat being, much of it will kill you.

Regards......Ralph.

Yes water is the most abundant posionous liquid around...hence the cup is half empty.

99% is poisonous!

Hey wantoks,
thought i'd add a little bit of mine here....

IKSIE's Law
"The more you read to learn, the more you know that you know nothing of everything"

Additional interesting ones...

Newton's three laws of graduation (phd comics)
1- "A student (grad student) in procastination mode tends to stay in procastination mode unless unless an external force is applied to them"

2- the age of a doctoral process is directly proportional to the flexibility given by the supervisor and inversly proportional to motivation e.g. f=flexibility, m=motivation
age=f/m

3- for every action towards graduation, there is an equal and opposite distraction


liklik 2 toea addition...
quan...

Hehe,
good one. I like Ward's Law.

Murphy's Law states: If anything can go wrong it will.

Ward's Law states: Murphy was an optomist.

Trhfsd......Ralph.

thank good for Ward..
who seems to be an optimist....

good one ralph

hahaha nadin tru!