This is a nice overview of the distributed programming paradigm in which applications simply read and write from a shared “tuple-space”. Invisibly to the application programmer, a distributed middlerware layer takes care of the replication and consistancy of the data between the processors. The article demonstrates how much simpler this model is than the RPC paradigm that is used for most distributed programming.
date: '2003-02-09 15:33:17'
layout: post
slug: mit-initiative-on-technology-and-self
status: publish
title: MIT initiative on technology and self
wordpress_id: '11'
categories: Product
I am currently listening to a Cambridge Forum speech by Sherry Turkle on our local public radio station. She is the director of the MIT initiative on technology and self.
Interesting stuff. She is talking about the reality and implications of people forming emotional attachments to computation devices (“relational artifacts”) like robot pets and dolls. I wonder how much this extends to the ubiquitous computation world that we are exploring in our research?
UPDATE 2019-09-04: The “Agile” mentioned here is not the Agile software development methodology that had also been named around this tume. Rather it was a project I worked on in HP Labs to create a way to develop apps that work in a distributed way across multiple devices. This use model was way ahead of its time. It is now commonplace in, for example, how Chromecast works.
int timeout = 500; // half a second
SocketAddress socketAddress =
new InetSocketAddress(host, port);
Socket socket = new Socket();
socket.connect(socketAddress, timeout);