Systems

Would you rather your body attempt to act as one "logical" cell, or are you happy to survive as a system of cooperating cells with billions dying off and being replaced each day?

Steve Loughran reminding us of a Note on Distributed Computing. From the note...

We look at a number of distributed systems that have attempted to paper over the distinction between local and remote objects, and show that such systems fail to support basic requirements of robustness and reliability. These failures have been masked in the past by the small size of the distributed systems that have been built. In the enterprise-wide distributed systems foreseen in the near future, however, such a masking will be impossible.

A favorite quote from elsewhere by Jim Waldo, one of the authors...

I've been known to claim that there are two kinds of reliable message systems. The first kind are those that come with an asterisk; following the asterisk leads you to the small print, where you find out when the messaging system can fail and so it is not, therefore, reliable. The second kind are those systems that simply lie – they are no more reliable, but they don't tell you that there are circumstances where they can fail.