Dan Ingalls wrote:
> If you put these two operations together, you get a high-performance 
> deepCopy operation.  If you save the imageSegments on a local file, 
> you get application overlaying, and if you send that file far away 
> and read it into another image, you have export/import of Squeak worlds.  

You have more than that, don't you?  You also have one half
of an easily-scalable, potentially-heterogeneous parallel-
processing pool that requires little or no setup to run new,
ad hoc parallel applications.  Or am I missing something?
  
I read Dan's message with TSpaces [1] on the brain, and was 
reminded of the notion of an anonymous pool of crunch, which 
appears in "TSpaces: the Next Wave," among other publications
from the TSPaces group.  TSpaces clients (they're fond of the
Palm Pilot) can create requests for work to be done (e.g. 
database queries to be performed) and post them in a well-
known area in tuplespace; any available server(s) monitor that 
area, claim those requests and act on them, returning the 
results in some manner specified in the request.

How well do ImageSegments cope with things like Blocks?  If
the answer is "not terribly well yet," then one has to do a
little work for a given parallel application Foo to define
FooRequest and perhaps FooReply objects -- which one might
as well pass around between machines in some way that does
not involve ImageSegments.

A Squeak port of the TSpaces client was already on my wish
list.  Does anyone know of a similar Linda-esque technology 
which has already been enSqueaked?  

> They are fast.  They are compact.  AND, they are platform-independent!  
> Imagine a DLL that you can use on Windows or a Mac or a bare chip.

Imagine harnessing all those poor, obsolete P-II 266's lying
around in your basement for music synthesis by physical
modeling in Squeak.  :-)

I'm not sure how I managed to overlook ImageSegments when
they were first announced, but this announcement has 
certainly grabbed my imagination.  Go Squeak Go!

--Michael Stevens

[*] http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/TSpaces/