After you get the wheel right, and put it on a bicycle, and once the
bikeshed's built, you still have to get people to agree on what color
the bikeshed should be.

I think with virtualization entering mainstream consciousness, the
term image will be okay. But that's just me. If anything else, though,
I'd recommend "snapshot" which is the colloquial term. Note that this
term also implies photography, and thus, imagery.

I actually think there's value in the metaphor, is what I guess I'm
trying to say.

On Friday, March 12, 2010, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>     I'm sure Im opening an old topic but anyway, as I was riding the train to work today I saw a shop called "Audio Images" and it struck me how overloaded the term image is, and how poor a term for the contents of the image file Smalltalk image is.  What's in the image is a snapshot of... almost the entire system (minus platform-specific virtual machine and possibly minus sources).  So Smalltalk system file would be a far better term and stsys a more unique file extension (and according to Wikipedia STS is unused too).  I can imagine that changing form image would be hugely expensive in documentation terms (docs, websites, workspaces, etc, etc).  But I can at least dream of a better term.
>
> P.S.  I know, wasting one's time worrying about names.  Almost as bad as worrying about colours
> "And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
> "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
> "Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
> The marketing girl soured him with a look.
> "Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."
>

-- 
Casey Ransberger