Rules of Computing

Things to remember if you use a computer. (And if you're reading this, you very likely do.)

1. Computers are stupid. They do only what they’re told, nothing more, nothing less, even if it’s the wrong thing to do.

Therefore:

2. Save often! Especially before printing. Because if you forget to save your work every 5 minutes, the computer will crash after you've been working for 5 hours. (See Murphy’s Law.)

Therefore:

3. Always keep back up! More than one! (Because Murphy was an optimist, and hard drives will fail. It's not a question of if, but when.)

4. Artificial Intelligence is no match for the real thing. Most people really are smarter than computers. Especially if they try to be. Put some effort in to it.

5. You can't break it. Under normal circumstances, doing normal stuff, you can't break your computer just by working on it. So, make sure your data is backed up, and then go explore, play, learn, and take notes so you can get back to where you started. But, worst case scenario, if you really mess up something, you can wipe the hard drive, reinstall the operating system and you apps, restore your data from your backup and go on with life.

Those are the most important ones. Here are a few more:

A working program is one that has only unobserved bugs.

No matter how many resources you have, it is never enough.

Any cool program always requires more memory than you have.

When you finally buy enough memory, you will not have enough disk space.

Disks are always full. It is futile to try to get more disk space. Data expands to fill any void.

If a program actually fits in memory and has enough disk space, it is guaranteed to crash.

If such a program has not crashed yet, it is waiting for a critical moment before it crashes.

No matter how good of a deal you get on computer components, the price will always drop immediately after the purchase.

All components become obsolete.

The speed with which components become obsolete is directly proportional to the price of the component.

The hard drive on your computer will only crash when it contains vital information that has not been backed up.

Profanity is one language all computer users know.

A patch is a piece of software which replaces old bugs with new bugs.

The only program that runs perfectly every time is a virus

The likelihood of problems occurring is inversely proportional to the amount of time remaining before the deadline.

The smaller the size of your email account, the more junk mail you will get.

Antivirus systems only effectively work on a virus after given virus has passed its prime.

Proof-read all e-mails three or four times before sending it. All errors are detected immediately after being sent.

Can you suggest any others?
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