Deutsch's "Fallacies of distributed computing"

For a while, I had Peter Deutsch's list of eight fallacies of distributed computing on my office wall for easy reference. I still refer to them often. It seems to me that our next magical trick, and one we're making some progress in being able to pull off, is to make end users think the fallacies actually hold, while simultaneously varying how true they are in practice.

That is, if I'm using the web, I see a network that

• is reliable
• is secure
  
• has as much bandwidth as I want
  
• with negligible latency
• and negligible transport cost
• always looks the same
• looks the same everywhere
• and has one administrative point of contact

Actually, most of the time I don't even see the network. I see resources on the network (that is, I see the web) with a dead-simple topology: the resources are right there. Administration largely means saying which resources I want access to and what access I grant to ones I own.

Meanwhile, we web illusionists work to push the various bandwidth/reliability/mobility trade-offs further out, cache and use other tricks to reduce latency and increase apparent bandwidth, streamline the administrative interfaces, get disparate networks talking to one another politely, and otherwise spin the illusion that none of the problems we deal with need to be dealt with.