5 tech commandments

Ah, even more geekiness for today: The 5 Commandments supposedly describing our technological process. They are:

MOORE'S LAW: The number of transistors on a processor doubles every 18 months
ROCK'S LAW: The cost of semiconductor tools doubles every four years
MACHRONE'S LAW: The PC you want to buy will always be $5000
METCALFE'S LAW: A network's value grows proportionately to the number of its users squared
WIRTH'S LAW: Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating

None of these are particularly rigid... read the article for lots of exceptions to these rules. The end of the article even mentions Jakob Nielsen's attempt at such a law... Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth: a high-end user's connection speed to the Internet will grow by 50 percent per year, but Web site developers won't get to take advantage of this added bandwidth to make Web pages larger until 2003.

I wish my connection got 50 percent faster per year; my DSL got 50 percent slower when I moved to another neighborhood. The first part of the law seems rather suspect and possibly misleading... it may be more accurate to phrase the law in terms of infrastructural cycles (e.g., modem -> dsl/cable -> fiber optic? -> ???). Perhaps the annualized averages over these jumps works out as he says... but it doesn't help for the 3-4 years you sit at one speed waiting for the next.