A dirty reading is a dirty reading. Terracotta, being distributed / cluster, adds the ability to read even older values of the general altered state that you are accessing without proper synchronization.
It should be noted that with the memory model in Java 5, you are not guaranteed to ever read the updated value unless you use the correct synchronization. Terracotta may decide to take this opportunity. In fact, any JVM can take advantage of this on vacation. Even if it can work on your machine, it can break down on other machines. It can break about minor JVM updates, and it can break for the same version of the same JVM on another processor.
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