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I've had problems with power supplies in PCs, so that's a good guess. 
Make sure you have PSU, that can pull make watts.

was it a spike ?

So, Chris, you have a hard drive failure followed by a power supply 
failure.  It's common.

I wasn't around when the outage happened.  It was plugged into a 
surge protector.  However, the power supply is around 6 years old 
and the fan quit late last year.

Oh, that's not a guy! "Behind every important man is a woman."

Ok, pulled out the brick and cables.  It appears to be 250W ATX/ATX12V 
with a 20-pin connector, 5 peripheral (Molex?) connectors and 2 floppy 
connectors.

When looking for a replacement, can I ignore the ATX and just go 
for ATX12V?  Or one with a 20+4pin connector?  I'm thinking 400-500W.

If you purchase a ATX 2 power supply with 24 pin power connector, 
ask them to give you a free adaptor to turn it into 20 pins.  The 
ATX 2 power supplies normally have cables for SATA hard drives

Those are good numbers for a current machine Louis.

By the way... Is there anybody outthere that has a Hardware device 
that runs with rebol?.. I like a Hardware device.. that talks and 
uses Rebol.. I want to program that thing to do in Rebol what i want 
it to do... Because im very Jalous at these guys at Processing "http://hardware.processing.org/"..its
JAVA oke.. but If I want my Home-Robot to do a job for me I would 
like to say that in Rebol rather than in Java or C... ;-)

I want to visit a Cash-Machine and "not" see the blue screen of dead 
but "Please call Carl, init.r is missing"..

In 100% a electronics but it should be possible to create a Hardware-Gadget 
that has rebol inside without theneed of a VM..

Anyone, who has bought a Playstation3? Any good games? Tried to install 
Linux on it? I've played Motorstorm and Oblivion at my nephews place. 
Good experience! :-)

a ps3 with linux is something that i want to eventually try... (well, 
a ps3 with rebol/os would be better, but...)

I would not mind have the linux kernel with a rebol dektop running 
over it :-)

Consoles dont need that much drivers. Could be a nice target for 
an own os. But i guess coding at the game-level will cost lots of 
money.

What's your impression? Do you have prior experience with Linux to 
compare it with? How is performance compared to a PC with/without 
hardware accelerated graphics?

Well, I don't have much experience with Linux so I wouldn't be able 
to judge but it works so that is a start. I don't think that it is 
optimized to take advantage of the graphics HW but I could be wrong. 
We have 1080p projector so seeing a 12 foot wide browser is pretty 
cool. I've pretty much decided that it will be my next "Amiga" as 
a couple of guys at work now have PS3's. I just bought some parts 
for a new PC Build but the next comp will be a PS3. Apparently they 
are coming out with a better Cell chip.

Just got a Playstation 3. The experience so far reminds me much of 
when I bought my first Amiga, an A500 back in 1987. Let's see, if 
I'm as hooked in the next days and weeks as I was back then.

This setup will be for software development and remote administration. 
It can be a big box, but I'm not opposed to docking a small machine, 
as long as I can use a good monitor and my ergo-keyboard.


What are your favorite setup configs? Have multiple monitors helped 
you? Lots of disk space? An in-house NAS? etc. On the software side, 
what general infrastructure bits do you use? I like Reichart's drive 
model, and have used it very well with Ghost and Partition Magic, 
but haven't gone to PGP or TrueCrypt (yet).


Hardware wise, after setting up a machine with a fast SAS drive, 
man, that's appealing, but expensive. What kind of KVM do you like, 
or do you avoid them (my epxerience is mixed)? Do you like separate 
machines or VMWare? Do you like a Mac base, and emulation, or a real 
Windows machine? Any converts from Win to *nix? Build your own, or 
who do you like these days? Plain Jane, or something special like 
they build for traders? Silent PC? Mini?

What have you tried that didn't work out?


Space is not an issue. I have a huge old surplus desk that will hold 
anything.

My Mac iBook is the best machine, I've bought in more than a decade. 
I've used it daily for more than 2 years without any problems at 
all. I plan to get a Mac Mini and a flat HD monitor in the near future. 
I hope to have better Mac support for REBOL with R3. I find, that 
I get more work done with a Mac, because it just works. When I have 
to use Windows, I use Remote Desktop Connection from my Mac to a 
Win machine at work.

I still use 1.8GHZ Athlon machine, I have ability to use 2 notebooks, 
or other hw. The main trouble for me is noise. When I come home, 
in the evening, I would prefer silent pc. So, even my current set-up 
has some Arctic Cooling Silent Pro CPU cooler and my gfx card is 
fan free. I also bought power supply with big 12cm fan, as fanless 
(passive is quite expensive). If you want to silent your pc, go and 
read some sites, as:

-  www.silentpcreview.com
- www.mini-itx.com
- www.epiacenter.de


IMO nowadays you need all those fancy DualCore CPUs only if you do 
some CPU crunching intensive work, e.g. video, sound editing, etc. 
Other than that, I can bet your PC is pretty much overspecced. I 
remember doing fine with Duron750, with enough of memory and windowsXP. 
If your PC starts lagging, then just reinstall XP from scratch ...


I will live with my current set-up for another one - two years, and 
then I plan on completly silent PC, maybe even without HD, with gigabit 
local network plus wi-fi around the house.  I will combine it with 
some new hi-fi set-up, as my Technics set-up starts to be a bit aged 
(12 years) ...

I've heard many good things about the Apple Cinema Displays: http://www.apple.com/displays/

The 23-inch model is 1920x1200 pixels, which is enough for HD, 1920x1080. 
But there is something about a standard (HDCP), and that's not supported 
on the Apple displays, afaik, so it might not be the perfect monitor. 
Apple hasn't updated their displays in a long time, so maybe there's 
something new just around the corner, who knows.

I think, it's ok with a big monitor, if it has high resolution. Then 
it feels ok to sit so close to the image. And you start using your 
OS desktop in a new way, having e.g. the browser window at one side, 
other windows on the other side, etc. instead of always on top of 
each other.

About noise, as Pekr wrote about. Even if my iBook has a fan, it 
very rarely starts, so my computer is totally noise free, which I 
really enjoy. The new MacBooks are the same, and battery lasts for 
6 hours. I'm not sure, if the MacMini is the same!?

:-) I went to a Ruby meeting, to talk about REBOL and scout for local 
developers, and two of the five people had MacBooks. Of course, that's 
not great for demoing REBOL, but it did impress enough to download 
and try it.

I've owned a PC with a rather cheap motherboard for a few years and 
suffer under bad RAM performance. It was bought so I could use my 
then current PC133 RAM, but did not expect it to perform about half 
as fast as other motherboards with the same CPU.

My Mac Mini however is pretty fast for a G4 (runs circles around 
the 2.6 Ghz PC) and amazingly stable.

Geomol, when my mac mini fan is running at max speed, it's about 
half as loud as my PC. During normal operation it's about as loud 
as a brick. :-)

Just a shameless plug from my site.

2 Mac mini (PPC) with 23" Cinema displays plus an iBook with Parallels 
running WinXP. The whole lot is networked via AIrport Express to 
an ADSL modem and a Brother MFC-8840D. I've had no problems and zero 
downtime for over two years. I switched from Windows/Linux about 
two years ago and haven't looked back. Some of the business advantages 
include:

	- Almost silent operation
	- Low power consumption
	- Small footprint
	- Zero admin
	- The WOW! factor when clients see your setup
	- Cheap
	- Out-of-the-box solution (no extra s/w required)


In fact, the only software I have purchased is iWorks and .Mac membership. 
The one issue I have is with Spreadsheets on the Mac minis. I don't 
want to use/pay for MS*Office and iWorks does not have a spreadsheet, 
so I'm using NeoOffice (aka OpenOffice) which is SLOWWWWW on PPC 
hardware. Works well on the (Intel) iBook though. I'll upgrade the 
Mac minis to Intel when Apple refreshes the line (probably when they 
release Leopard later this year).


Parallels is a must if, like me, you have to run or support legacy 
software running on Windows. Coherence mode puts the Windows task 
bar directly on the Mac OSX desktop and enables you to run Windows 
programs directly from it. It's hardware virtualization so it's fast, 
and removes the need for multiple machines. The ability to cut&paste 
directly from a Mac app to a Windows one is also pretty handy.


Bottom line is, if you like to play and endlessly tinker with stuff 
then WIndows/Linux is the way to go; if you want a tool that just 
works then get a Mac.

Thanks Ashley! That's valuable info. I do *not* like tinkering with 
hardware. I want a set-and-forget setup. The main issue is getting 
over the FUD of changing platforms in a big way.

Yep...I'm with Ashley.  If you want a computer to use, get a Mac. 
 If you want to stick it to the man, use GNU/Linux, but do so knowing 
that whizbang feature X will be lacking or require gnome level tinkering.

If you want to be a lemming, go Windows, sorry I mean, if you like 
mainstream, go Windows.

Ashley, can you explain in a little more detail how your setup works 
for you? i.e. why two minis, is the iBook just for traveling, etc.

Gabriele; Really?  Is it just my small brain...but I can't focus 
on more than a webpage, an editor or altme  and gizmo and that all 
fits fine on on a 15" lcd.  When I work on the 21" that the graphic 
designer uses, I just get distracted.  I sit beside the 21, a 19 
but prefer to work on the 15.

it's not that you multitask much. it's that you have a bird-eye view 
of things.

Yeah, I find that too distracting.  At corporate they had walls of 
monitors.  I watched the staff ignore a big red dot for many minutes 
before I mentioned it.   They get swamped in data...but yeah I see 
your point.

another thing that has been *really* great is using vim vertical 
split after stretching it to cover both monitors :-) eg. vimdiff. 
it does not even compare to using it on a single monitor where you 
see only half of the line.

Without tabbed Konsole I might freak out a ltitle, but with...tabs 
15 inch is nice for focus

Ashley, can you explain in a little more detail how your setup works 
for you?

 Sure. I run a home office with two studies. Each has a Mac mini (plus 
 Cinema display) for day-to-day work. My study also has a TabletPC 
 connected to a 1280x1024 VGA LCD display. I use this for REBOL development 
 and demos away from home.


The iBook is located in the other study and is used by my better 
half when running Windows software related to our finance company 
(CRM/Sales software distributed via the professional body we belong 
to, no Mac or Linux option available). We also use the iBook when 
showing non-IT people stuff (e.g. a spreadsheet showing how much 
their portfolio could be worth if they geared it) and when attending 
training sessions.


The ADSL modem has an ethernet connection to Airport express, which 
in turn has the MFC plugged into its USB slot. The Mac's pick up 
the printer automatically, the TabletPC runs Bonjour and does the 
same. Everything, including the TabletPC, detected the Network without 
issue. It really has been as simple as, 1) Unpack, 2) Plug-in, 3) 
Use. I've also noticed that WinXP running on the iBook is a lot faster/smoother 
than on the TabletPC as it installs 'clean' (i.e. piggy-backs off 
the Mac's Network and Hardware support).


Large screens are a must if you write and or read a lot of documents. 
A 1920x1200 screen lets you do a slideshow on a PDF document and 
read the pages side-by-side. On wide screens I always have the task-bar/dock 
on the right to maximize the vertical display area.

Ahhh, a multi-room setup. Excellent info, and most helpful. Thanks 
very much Ashley.

And one more: I'm using a 2TB NAS system (Thecus) to store shared 
things. Works great (things to add: automatic backup to Amazon S3 
(now you know why I want it)). Than I have two PCs (1 Desktop and 
1 Laptop) and 1 Mac Mini (Intel)


The Mac Mini is a totaly cool machine. Silent, fast, and it just 
works.


Hence, my next desktop will become a Mac Pro. Hopefully VMWare works 
than.

To get rid of reinstalling everything I have packed two things into 
a VMWare:

1. My office stuff. Only office and some add-ons nothing else. (To 
keep it alive)

2. My development setup. Everything configured, compiler, include 
paths etc. Totally self contained.


Than one that I don't use that much for some apps like graphics stuff.

I haven't tried it, but good hint, if it's available I give it a 
try.

I heard that Parallels eats a lot of memory and degrades in performance 
over time, so VMWare is perhaps better.

Going for a VMWare for development was my best decision. I hate it 
to setup/move complex environment with different compilers etc. As 
long as you have enough memory, you don't feel a speed difference. 
For some things I even have the feeling it's faster.

So: NAS (and use Gigabit ethernet), VMWare for stuff you will use 
for years and don't want to reinstall and keep protected by wild 
software setups, and if everything you need is available for Mac, 
go for a Mac.

BTW: For single apps, going with application virtualization is a 
good choice too. You can get Office packed into 4 EXE files.

Yes, but it's worth the money. If I save 20h per year by using a 
Mac the ROI is more than enough.

My girlfriend needed 15 minutes to switch from Windows to Mac and 
haven't asked me anything since than... So it has a good WAF = women 
acceptance factor.

Robert, doing the same here. Pulled my last WinXP out behind the 
shed a few weeks ago and shot it. Just need some way to get encap 
for windows working again.

The more I can virtualize the 'still Windows only apps'

 ... you can even replace Windows itself these days without resorting 
 to Wine. Check out ReactOS ( http://www.reactos.org/), quite a few 
 forum posts indicating that folks are running it on Mac under Parallels 
 ... there was even mention of REBOL/View running on it.

Ashley, well it's a bit early to switch to it. But my needs for Win 
only apps is really vanishing. I think getting Office for Mac would 
be enough to switch. And of course, doing my own transition phase 
to find all the equivalent tools on Mac.

I'm building a computer system for my friend. The motherboard comes 
with a magnetic ring which is supposed to reduce interference. But 
which cables is it supposed to go on ? (I think I've seen it in another 
system around the front led/power/reset cables.)

A web-based console?

Patrick, as the iPhone uses a "stripped" down version of OSX, I think 
it should be pretty simple.

I'm not sure they will allow runtimes and emulators meant for running 
other programs on the iPhone. it will probably need to be done on 
a jailbroken iPhone.

On the other hand, REBOL isn't really a programming language: it's 
a structure processor with a set of library functions available at 
runtime. Encapped apps may be legal.

Does anyone know if usb flash drives have a unique ID that can be 
read via rebol.


I'm nearly ready to release an app and I'm trying to come up with 
some methods of  "copy protection".

There is a spec for serial numbers in http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbmassbulk_10.pdf
(§4.1.1)

I'm currently investigating the same topic. 99% of USB sticks have 
a OEM serial number. And you need to use WMI on Windows to get hold 
of it. Best way is to write a Rebol compatible wrapper function in 
C and use it via the DLL interface.

Does the | integer! in the rebcode spec refer to an argument type 
or a return type?

If it is a return type, does the operation still modify its first 
argument when the return value is used?

The new do seems to take a word before the block, presumably to catch 
the return value, but the assembler stage of removing the do blocks 
for binding doesn't take that word into account.

If the braw opcode is a computed goto, does this mean the label words 
can be referenced to get their offset value? Or is this just for 
compilers?

I would LOVE to add a syntax check to the assembler, if only I knew 
the current syntax. I also have an idea on handling of nested labels 
better.

Can you branch out of a block to an enclosing block?

Sorry for the mass of questions, rather than just testing for myself 
:)

I have to go elsewhere for a while, and can pick up the discussion 
later...

is there any particular design you are going for yet? as in when 
we can expect to see a fixed feature set?

Hi Pekr: true reason is the move to better support OSX, which is 
on PPC. I wanted a VM so people could make faster funcs but without 
problems on other CPUs.

Yes, about the same.  Depends on if your CPU is hyperthreaded.  The 
problem there is that removing instructions (making the opcodes more 
efficient) actually has slowed it down a bit (like here on my system).

btw - would it (technically) make sense to provide interface to internal 
representation of datatypes? Dunno, just very primitive question, 
maybe it can't even technically work that way, but I thought that 
using technique as a rebcode, theoretically we could produce our 
own natives. Think of 'remove-each as an example. You had to provide 
us with one. I thought that if it would be possible to access e.g. 
block from within the rebcode, do some operations, that such functions 
could be done. Is that nonsense? :-)

I've though a lot about internal access to datatypes, but the problem 
is that they change. For example, the 2.7.0 core kernel changes the 
internal id's for 80% of the datatypes.

So, the only way to do it would be to isolate them (datatype identifiers) 
via a lookup table.

A better approach is to use VM, and eventually JIT to native.

Then, if we come up with a datatype definition method, it may be 
possible to allow user created datatypes.

Pekr: vector as a word for 1D array.

rebcode8.zip (there's a typo above)... but, wait, we found a couple 
bugs ;)

Carl:for some reason IE can not open/save rebcode9.zip-the page just 
gives me a blank icon ? But Firefox does work ! :)

After testing and some guesses I figured out that the rebcode dialect 
is statement-based, although it can be converted from expression-based 
by the aforementioned rewrite rules. Also, the | in the declaration 
of opcode syntax refers to alternate data types, so that:
    skip: [word! integer! | word!]

means that skip takes a word! as its first argument and an integer! 
or a word! in its second argument.

So far, argument words with the wrong type of values assigned to 
them just seem to cause the opcodes to be skipped without complaint. 
Certainly better than crashing, but it could lead to the kind of 
errors that would be difficult to find without extensive unit testing 
or a type inferencer. Still, I'm pleased.

gabriele, the gradient is a little boring, but still a good demo. 
:-)

try adding a blur or other effect to the image in dotflowers. looks 
really cool :-)

eats 45% here... show eats a lot on my machine for some reason

I'm wondering a bit if it's possible to do anything more direct than 
show. simply have a pixel buffer directly to put pixels in without 
the need for show

benjamin is it a celeron or pentium 4?

yes, I have disscussed this with Carl on DevCon05. I hope we find 
a good solution to finally get faster blitting in View.

A couple questions:

- Are the exit and return opcodes still implemented with setjump/longjump 
?

- Is there still a plan to enable rebcode procedures to call other 
rebcode procedures, other functions? Or do we just use the do opcode 
for that?

Just poking around, and found a hint of things to come. There are 
more new (not working yet) data types in addition to rebcode! and 
vector!: percent! and unicode! are there as well. This should be 
fun!

Brian: i think exit and return are implemented internally by wrapping 
a TRY around rebcode calls. About calling subroutines, that is planned.

Gabriele - what is the code above? You should not be so cruel to 
us novices - I've got a headache trying to understand, what above 
code does :-)

I just ran Cyphre's Dotflowers at 1600x1200 and it ran pretty good. 
 it ate 75-99% of my CPU but it worked.  While it was running though 
it messed up the OS's window layering somehow.  When I click on a 
window in the background it does become the active window but is 
not brought to the top of the window stack.

Petr, yes I mean struct! in /Core. I keep on having situations that 
could use struct! when I don't need libraries. For instance, conversions 
from external binary data encodings to internal REBOL values, say 
for file formats, network protocols, and so on. Now rebcode has added 
other forms of strong typing like the type-specific opcodes and the 
vectors. Having structs, their constrained field types, their specific 
data layouts, would be a perfect match for the low level operations 
of rebcode. They would be helpful later when implementing your own 
data types as well.

Yes please, use RAMBO imo - if you feel it is important, fill it 
in ... also put your question in RT Q & A group here ...

Gabriele, thanks for the info about the rewrite rules. That's an 
interesting way to lay them out - a little more traditional that 
I've come to expect from REBOL, but that #==> is unlikely to be found 
in REBOL code so its use to delimit the parse rules should work nicely. 
I look forward to trying it out!

Actually, when I think about it, the flexible function call syntax 
of REBOL would be a bit of a slowdown to implement directly in rebcode. 
All of the operations now are fixed in arity and known ahead of time. 
One way to get that same predictable behavior in rebcode is to put 
the call in a block and assign the result - coincidentally this is 
the syntax of the do opcode.


Another way to do this would be to add something like an APPLY opcode 
with three parameters: A result param (word!), a function param (word! 
| path!) and an arguments param (word! | block!). This opcode would 
pass the arguments to the function (perhaps with refinements) and 
assign the result to the word provided. This would allow the higher 
order programming that would otherwise be awkward - the do opcode 
could be used for traditional function calls. If necessary, the operation 
could be split into two opcodes: APPLY for function values assigned 
to a word, and APPLYP for a path literal or value assigned to a word 
- whether to do this would depend on which was faster.


Another awkward thing to do in rebcode is getting and setting values 
through indirection, like the get and set natives do. Those seem 
like a really basic operations that should have opcodes assigned 
to them rather than having to resort to do blocks. I'm just thinking 
of the basic get/set word assigned to word scenario, not the more 
advanced object/block stuff.

Well, I would hope that the RT people implementing rebcode might 
check the rebcode group every once in a while, but sure. I'll have 
to rephrase since it's out of context though.

BUG (possibly): The SETI and SETD opcodes don't work unless the variable 
has already been set to a value of the appropriate data type.

I've been thinking about temporary variables generated by rewrite 
rules. I have a way to generate extremely unlikely variable names, 
but no way to bind them in the rebcode function after they've been 
added. Any ideas?

you can consider X a temporary variable here.