The network is your friend

摘要

I've always viewed with skepticism those pie-in-the-sky predictions that "any day now," everything with an electronic "heartbeat" will have its own IP address. The hype machine might have hit its zenith a few years ago at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) when Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, during his keynote, tried to convince the audience that their next refrigerators had to have persistent Internet connect tions (and, of course, run Java).