If I had a dollar for every idea...

On suspendable computers retaining network services with conditional wakeup...

(11:28:29 AM) Luke Faraone: don't you hate it when you think of something cool, only to find that someone else already thought of it?
(11:28:47 AM) Peter Harkins: Depends. Sometimes I then think "Awesome, now I don't have to spend all that time building it."
(11:29:34 AM) Luke Faraone: I recently was thinking "it'd be cool to be able to have a smaller 'little computer' with a NIC, some RAM, and a low-powered CPU to maintain presence on IRC etc when my computer's sleeping." Then I saw http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/06/13/0641228/Microsofts-Sleep-Proxy-Lowers-PC-Energy-Use
(11:29:39 AM) Luke Faraone: ... and it's from MSFT.
(11:30:12 AM) Peter Harkins: cute
(11:30:25 AM) Peter Harkins: There are lots of tiny Linux pc's out there, though.
(11:30:45 AM) Peter Harkins: I've seen a couple the size of a power brick - you plug them in, add ethernet, done.
(11:31:14 AM) Luke Faraone: what'd be really cool is if one could author an API that would allow for desktop applications to request access to run services on the device, and have state magically transfer across them.
(11:31:40 AM) Peter Harkins: I've seen people talking about doing that - I wouldn't be surprised to see it commonly in 5y.
(11:31:49 AM) Peter Harkins: It's sort of the logical extension of GNU screen.
(11:32:10 AM) Luke Faraone: we have live migration of VMs in the enterprise market.
(11:32:34 AM) Luke Faraone: if the wall wart had hypervisor support, you could just operate each service in a sort of sandbox.

I know that in order to make it work in reality, we'd need support from app developers, but are there any technical reasons this won't work?