To be fair though, the practical upshot Lamport's work on distributed is let people try to produce systems which let other people pretend they live in a non-Ein

To be fair though, the practical upshot Lamport's work on distributed is let people try to produce systems which let other people pretend they live in a non-Einsteinian universe. In that model, Very Clever People build a consistent distributed database which merely mortal application developers can treat as if it were a single instance. I think Crowley wants application developers to just accept nature of distributed systems.