The machine shall never tell a lie to the user/programmer. [1]  It shall obey all orders given to it through the human interface devices, without attempting to pass judgement on their legality or morality.  The machine shall not put the interests of any third party (including society in the abstract) above those of its user/programmer. […]

All of the information contained inside the machine’s storage array (see the Third Law), whether executable or not, shall be accessible at all times for inspection and modification by the user/programmer, in the form preferred for modification.  The user/programmer shall have the ability to modify the functionality of any executable code within the system without […]

If the machine encounters an error condition requiring the user’s manual intervention, the state of the now-halted process prior to this event shall be preserved, and the user given an opportunity to correct the error using an interactive debugger and resume execution from the saved-and-corrected state.  The debugger shall display the code which generated the […]

Compilation is to be considered a form of caching, and thus shall happen solely behind the scenes, like all other forms of caching. (See: the Third Law.) The machine is to accept no externally-introduced executable code except in the form preferred for making modifications (i.e. source.)   All executable code visible during any kind of debugging […]

Volatile storage devices (i.e. RAM) shall serve exclusively as read/write cache for non-volatile storage devices.  From the perspective of all software except for the operating system, the machine must present a single address space which can be considered non-volatile.  No computer system obeys this law which takes longer to fully recover its state from a […]

Information which entered the machine through deliberate user action shall never be destroyed or otherwise rendered inaccessible except as a result of deliberate user action to that end.  No user action shall lead to the destruction of information unless said destruction is the explicit and sole purpose of the action.  If all non-volatile storage space […]

Assuming physically-intact hardware, the user shall retain full control of the machine at all times.  In particular, the handling of the keyboard, mouse, and other human interface devices must take absolute priority over all other processing.  The user shall have the ability to issue commands and receive immediate confirmation of said commands at all times, […]

Note: this post is obsolete. The now-infamous iPhone / iPad SDK Section 3.3.1 reads: “3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit […]

I’ve been patient, I’ve been gracious And this mountain is covered with wolves Hear them howling, my hungry children Maybe you should stay and have another drink and think about me and you. Jonathan Coulton, “Skullcrusher Mountain” The howls of protest coming from iPhone and iPad developers are loud and shrill, and are sure to […]

Perhaps you once took a university course in Operating Systems.  Or you think you did. In reality, the course catalog ought to have read: “Dark Age Software Archaeology: A UNIX Case Study.” But do we still call it archaeology if people are still building pyramids? Moreover, if architects continue to push the pyramid as the […]