meta-challenge: conquering system complexity


related to resiliency
going to go on a normal accidents digression now
yale sociologist charles perrow book, 1999 (latest edition)
focus on large scale systems more tightly coupled than ever imagined 
interactive complexity, coupling, and catastrophic potential
Internet not mentioned once in this book
but you'd never believe this guy hadn't configured a BGP session

why i hope dr perrow writes a book on the Internet next:
      (from same NSF workshop, http://www.cra.org/reports/gc.systems.pdf)
     "rule of thumb in production software about 70% of the code deals with 
      error conditions and exceptions, and only the remaining 30% provides 
      the functionality expected by users. In complex systems with billions
      of components, the portion of code devoted to functionality will decrease 
      further; most code will deal with adaptation to dynamic change, 
      not just error handling, but overall self-sustainment."