The first one reminds me of a story I was told by my embedded engineer friends. They had just been recently hired to maintain this video harddisk storage application, and had found it to be horrifyingly slow. Looking into the code it was found that the core sorting was little better than bubble sort (and the data was on disk not in memory), as such it was quickly reprogrammed to be a merge sort.
Oddly people started to complain that the application was _too fast_, after much arguments (many of these being management thinking that, because it was too fast it was not working properly) they came upon a solution.
The solution in all its glory was a loop at the end of the sort, with a sleep in it.
The best thing was, that when they were feeling lazy they would put out a release that was, for example 33% faster - by reducing the sleep time.
Oddly people started to complain that the application was _too fast_, after much arguments (many of these being management thinking that, because it was too fast it was not working properly) they came upon a solution.
The solution in all its glory was a loop at the end of the sort, with a sleep in it.
The best thing was, that when they were feeling lazy they would put out a release that was, for example 33% faster - by reducing the sleep time.