The paper quoted as reaching the same intuitions about the CAP-like limitations ("On the Power of (even a little) Centralization in Distributed Processing") makes a simplifying assumption that is not valid for decentralized systems that are... "interesting" (for lack of a better word).
The assumption is (quoting from the Conclusion): "For example, the transmission delays between the local and central stations are assumed to be negligible compared to processing times; this may not be true for data centers that are separated by
significant geographic distances." This sounds to me awfully like an "oracle machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine). It has "more computation" and it can decide instantaneously on where to apply it. I'm skeptical of generalizing the result from the paper to all distributed systems, in particular, the ones where latency-to-effort ratio doesn't fit into the stated assumption.
The assumption is (quoting from the Conclusion): "For example, the transmission delays between the local and central stations are assumed to be negligible compared to processing times; this may not be true for data centers that are separated by significant geographic distances." This sounds to me awfully like an "oracle machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine). It has "more computation" and it can decide instantaneously on where to apply it. I'm skeptical of generalizing the result from the paper to all distributed systems, in particular, the ones where latency-to-effort ratio doesn't fit into the stated assumption.