Larry L. Peterson, professor and Chair of Computer Science, Princeton University, gave a great talk on PlanetLab: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design which I believe is interesting to people involved in emerging architecture. One of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development’s principles is:

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Remember this principle while listening to the talk. Larry points out many examples of when this is true and the issues that can occur as a result. These issues are all resolvable but the resolution may not be what you initially expect.

One of the great discussion points, in my opinion, was on how inferior tracks lead to superior locomotives. The story is that track standards across the American west were much more liberal than previously defined on the east coast and Europe. Therefore, European trains could not run well on American tracks and the locomotive industry in America had to cope with this issue. The American locomotive industry then created much more robust locomotives which dealt with the real world issues running trains on these tracks. Coming from the Jini community of y’ore this reminds me of the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing and how much abstraction can be designed before increasing missing detail overhead in software development.