You know what is amazing? Is that as soon you hit bigger or more general problems like this, you always face the compromise of "trading X resource for accuracy". Which leads me to believe that software, so far, has only been deterministic by pure accident.
Experience has led me to conclude that modern software is both non-deterministic, and prone to accidents.
Seriously, though... garbage collection, multiple processors, race conditions, networks, OS scheduler preemptions, cache evictions, branch mis-predictions, disk failures. Even without getting into drivers, the reason that software appears deterministic, is because we try our damnedest to maintain that illusion.
