Underdogs

Everyone loves an underdog. Except for the people who don’t, which is why we have underdogs. I am a fan of two underdogs. One is mostly overlooked and considered to be not useful, due to the environment it’s in. The other is vilified because of things that happened in the past.

Haiku

Haiku is an operating system. In simplest terms, it is the interface between you and the computer. The best way to understand Haiku is to understand its predecessor and inspiration, which was an operating system named BeOS. Other people have written better things about BeOS that I can, so if you’d like to read about the history of it, please do so. I’m going to rewind a little bit.

I used my Atari Mega ST until it was impossible to continue with it. It couldn’t be networked and couldn’t get onto the Internet easily. I resisted using an IBM compatible computer for as long as possible. I didn’t like dealing with DOS and the weird way it handled memory (do mouse drivers go in high memory, or upper memory?). Or messing around with IRQs and addresses for serial cards and the like. Giving up the Atari was difficult, but necessary.

Along with DOS, there was Windows. Windows didn’t thrill me, either. However, for playing games, it was the only way to go. Macintoshes were expensive and I didn’t much care for the Macintosh operating system, either. One mouse button? No thank you! I know that doesn’t have much to do with operating systems, but it still annoyed me.

Eventually, Windows and DOS gave way to Windows 95, then Windows 98. Games started working better under DirectX. Life got a little better, if you didn’t have to deal with device drivers that much.

Linux came around, also. Which, at the time, was only for people with technical expertise and a desire to overcome all obstacles to get it to work. There was also OS/2 Warp, which had some things going for it. But, since I was a game player, neither of those really worked for me and they weren’t something I wanted to use on a day-to-day basis.

BeOS had been in the works during this time, but I hadn’t heard of it when it was running on Hobbit processors. Then it was released for PowerPC computers, which I also didn’t have. By 1998, it was released for Intel compatible processors, and I was able to try it out. And I loved it. No DOS to worry about, it was fast, it was easy to use. It could play MP3 songs backwards, in real time. It could play videos on all faces of a rotating cube. The part that I loved the most, the title bar for the windows was a tab. A tab that you could move back and forth across the top of the window. Such a simple thing, but it made it easier to lay windows on top of each other and still get to them easily if you moved the tabs to be able to click on them. It didn’t play a lot of games, but I loved using it as my day-to-day operating system. Not that it didn’t have any games. In fact, the only copy of Civilization: Call To Power I ever bought was for BeOS.

At this point, I’ll give an example of one of the reasons why BeOS was a joy to use.

I had bought a new video card. Before installing it, I went into Windows and removed all the old video drivers, which was not an easy task. Some of it could be done easily, other parts meant manually deleting files and then going into the registry, to remove entries there.

Then I installed the card and went back into Windows. The resolution was set to the lowest it would go. I installed the new drivers, which required rebooting. Then I changed the resolution, which required another reboot. Then I tried a game, and it didn’t work. There was a problem with DirectX. I went and manually removed a lot more files, changed more registry entries, rebooted, re-installed DirectX, rebooted. Eventually, I got it all straightened out and it was working again.

Then I booted into BeOS and it just worked. It was the same resolution I had left it at. It still ran the few games that I had. I didn’t have to do a damn thing. It was a beautiful moment.

Be Inc. eventually went out of business. Despite their best efforts (and Microsoft shenanigans), BeOS never caught on like it should have. Much like with the Atari, I used BeOS until it was no longer feasible. Around that time, the Haiku (then called Open BeOS) project started.

Haiku was to be an open sourced BeOS compatible operating system. After twenty-one years of development, it’s gone through a few changes. One of the larger ones being a 64-bit version, which loses BeOS compatibility (the 32-bit version still keeps it). It supports most modern things, such as USB and SSD drives. There are still a lot of things that don’t work, completely, because of closed source drivers, so getting a computer that fully works (sound, networking, etc.) can be an exercise in research. I’m lucky in that I have one computer that is fully supported, and it is now running Haiku full time. I have another computer that mostly works, but I’ll get to that a bit later.

The windowing system has changed a bit, too. I no longer have to manually stack my windows and move tabs about, as it can be done automatically using “Stack and Tile” (Stack places windows on top of each other and adjusts the tab position, while Tile sticks windows together at the edges). It’s the little things that I enjoy the most.

Tiled windows can be stuck together on any edge and move as one

At this point, Haiku is good enough to use on a daily basis, depending on what you need to do. Well, for me it is. In fact, I’m writing this using Haiku right now.

When most people think of an operating sytem that isn’t Windows or macOS, they usually think of Linux. One day, I wish more people would think of Haiku, instead. It’s fast, friendly, and easy to use.

Atari

Atari, the fifty year old company that wouldn’t die. The company that made their name synonymous with “TV games” and made a billion dollars, and then lost it the next day due to gross mis-management. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole. It didn’t take a day, sort of. Well, maybe it did.

Anyway, Atari used to be at the top of the heap. They made arcade games, home consoles, and home computers. Their logo appeared in the movie Blade Runner. When someone wanted to play a home videogame, they said they were going to play “Atari”, even if it wasn’t an Atari. They were the top dog.

And then they lost it. They went from a videogame Godhood, to a struggling computer maker, to a game publisher, to a free-to-play mobile app pusher. As times got more desperate, they survived by licensing out their name and intellectual property to anyone who asked for it (so it seemed).

People who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s seem to mostly hate Atari, now. They aren’t the company they remember. Which I think is a little unfair, given the company they remember wasn’t the “real” Atari, either.

From top of the heap to bottom of the garbage pail, that’s why they’re underdogs, today.

Despite growing up on Atari video games, at home and in the arcade, it was their first computers that really hooked me. Like many other things, it was based on the 6502 processors, but unlike many other computers, it had custom processors for graphics and sound. Arguably, it was the first home computer to have a GPU. But, again, a lot of other people have written more informative and accurate things than I will right now.

When Computers didn’t always look like boxes

Suffice it to say, Atari were at the top of the heap, and then at the bottom of the landfill.

They coasted along for many years and then decided to come out with a new console. Originally, it was being called the AtariBox, but the name soon changed to VCS, in honor of the original 2600. Some people were probably offended by this, but, to be fair, the new VCS is more of a Video Computer System than the 2600 was. This was because of Atari’s promise that the console would also be able to be used as a computer. Which is why I can write this blog post on an Atari VCS with Haiku.

Originally, I wasn’t going to participate in the Indiegogo campaign to raise money to create it, as I questioned Atari’s ability to deliver. But, then I thought, it might be my last chance to own an Atari branded computer.

I’m glad I did. I’m glad I got my unit with the wood grain face. It’s a very nice looking machine, and very welcome in this age of ugly block-like cases.

A lot of people wanted to compare it to the Ouya, but there is no comparison. The VCS uses an AMD R1606G at its heart. It’s not a massive powerhouse, like the PlayStation 5 or XBox whatever, but it’s a very capable system. Capable, even, of running Windows 11, if you wanted to do such a thing.

If one were struggling to own a computer, the VCS would be the thing to get, especially at the prices it’s been available for, lately. If you wanted to play games and do some computing, this thing can do it. If you needed do to some work using Google Docs, Office 365, or iCloud apps, you can do that, too, without needing another operating system.

So, yes, it’s also a console and it is capable of playing games. Several games are from indie developers. One can also get the full suite of Atari’s Recharged titles, too, among many other things.

Lately, Atari has done an about-face. They’re concentrating more on the game side of things, which is good. I believe the current incarantion is really looking to bring the Atari name back, when it comes to games. Unfortunately, I also think they lost interest in the VCS, which I find sad.

In a near perfect world, I wish Atari would look at Haiku and convince their AMD partners to write drivers for the few things that don’t work on the VCS, such as Wi-Fi and sound. Maybe see how nice, simple, and friendly it is and adopt it as the operating system for the computer side. It’s a fool’s dream, but I’m a fool and willing to dream it.

In a more perfect world, Atari would have been managed properly from the beginning. It’s not hard to think that, had that happened, they’d still be the company everyone likes to remember, probably being in a similar position to where Apple is, now.

Happy New Year 2023

This was the post that was going to say that I was going to post something every day for a year. Again. Because I keep saying that. This year, it’s even better because I missed the first day.

It’s pretty obvious, then, that it’s not going to be an every day thing. I think I’m going to try something different, though. I think I’ll actually write about myself. Because I know you’re all absolutely dying to know more about me.

The first thing you should know (because it influences almost everything that goes on in my life) is that I have a hard time making up my mind about things. It’s what turns a fifteen minute shopping trip into a two hour ordeal. That is not hyperbole. I’m sure there are people who are really happy that laundry detergent comes in twenty different fragrances, but I’m not one of them.

When I’ve got too many choices, I tend to shut down. I get overloaded in decisions so I just give up. What does this have to do with writing a blog? It’s like this: I love my Mac Mini, so I try to use it to write as much as I can. But, I like the mechanical keyboard on my Windows computer, so I think I should do my blogs on that. But, Haiku (if you don’t know what Haiku is, that’s OK; you’ll find out, soon) just got a web browser that works with WordPress, and I have mechanical keyboards for both of my computers that run Haiku, so I feel like I should use that, because it’s been a long time since I could. Worse, one of the Haiku computers is an Atari and it’s been forever since I could write a blog post on an Atari computer (which is also a console; if you don’t know what the Atari VCS is, don’t worry).

And I can’t make up my mind, so I stop and figure I’ll pick it up later and write something. I never do, though, because trying to figure out what I want to use just keeps looping, so nothing gets done.

If I’m trying to do this more frequently, though, then I think I can figure out a time sharing schedule for it. That should fix it.

That’s not counting all the times I think, “Do I want to write a blog entry? Do I want to play a game? On the game computer? On the VCS? Do I want to read a book? Watch TV? Teach myself Unity? Teach myself how to use Inkscape? Re-learn C++? Oh, so many things to do.

Maybe I can make a resolution to have less brain-lock when it comes to making decisions and deciding what I want to do.

We’ll get started with the rest of the junk in a day or two. Stay tuned.

NaNoWriMo 2021 (Day 01: 719/50,000)

This is a lot less stressful when I’m not counting words. Anyway, I had a day long meeting today, so chances to write were slim to non-existent. Couple that with the ‘fun’ walking I’m supposed to be doing every day so my ‘team’ can… win something? I’m still not sure how all that is supposed to be working. Anyway, this is what I crammed in today.

Chet pushed through the aluminum and glass door to the bank and walked straight to the table with the deposit slips. He looked around, nervously, trying not to look nervous. Reaching the center of the lobby where the slips were stored, he took one out of its slot and flipped it over so that the blank side was up. Then he took one of the pens out of its holder and placed the point on the slip. A chain, which secured the pen to the table, was draped over the back of his hand. He flicked his hand making the chain jump, but it laid back down on his hand.

He started to write, and then paused. What should he write? “This is a stick up,” or should he skip the whole explaining part and go straight to, “Give me all the money in the till”? Chet didn”t know; he wasn”t a bank robber by trade, just an unfortunate individual in unfortunate circumstances.

Flicking his hand again, he sent the chain writhing like a small silver snake. That was the thing, wasn”t it? He wasn”t a criminal. He never wanted to be a criminal, he was just at the end of his rope after being laid off and not being able to find another job. And the bills keep piling up and he has a family that needs to be taken care of. So what else could he do?

The chain rubbed against his hand. In a fit of sudden rage, Chet yanked on the pen, snapping the chain and leaving a small stub attached to the pen. This was stupid. He”d probably end up dead, shot by an over zealous guard. Or hunted down by the police. He”d find another way. Right now, he just wanted to go back home to his wife and his kids.

Crumpling the paper in one hand and still grasping the pen in the other, he turned away from the little table and strode through the bank doors. Turning and walking along the sidewalk he realized he was still holding the writing supplies. He threw them both at a trash can as he passed it. Neither of them went in.

She hurried down the street, deftly weaving between the people who weren”t in as much of a rush as she was.

“Just text me the info,” she said into her phone. “I don”t have a pen or paper! Just text it! How can you have a phone and not know how to text? That”s, like, the most important part of them. Oh my God!”

She stopped at a corner in a throng of people waiting to cross the street. “Look, just… hang on.”

Stooping down in her too tight dress, she picked a pen and scrap of paper off sidewalk. The small bit of dangling chain gave her a moment of curiousity which lasted as long as it took her to brace the paper against the pole for the walk sign.

“Okay, give me the info.” She wrote something on the paper while balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder. “Great. Okay, thanks. I”ll talk to you later.” She folded the paper and dropped it into her small purse along with the pen.

She looked at the paper then looked up at the number above the door. She stepped through the doorway into a narrow dingy yellow hallay and made her way to the ancient elevator. She rode it up to the floor and stepped out into another dingy yellow hallway. She looked at the paper again and walked down the hallway looking for the office she was supposed to go to.

Finding it, she pushed open the door and stepped into a small office with plastic chairs lining the walls. There were more women here than she liked, but she pushed on in and approached a desk with heavyset woman looking at papers.

“Hello,” she said. “I”m here for the reading.”

The woman didn”t look up. “Name?”

“A-lease Bonton”

The woman looked through her tortoise shell glasses, which had a thin chain attached to the temples that wound underneath her hair. “Spell that?”

“A-l-i-c-e,” said Alice.

The woman looked at her over her horned-rim spectacles. Then she made a mark on a piece of paper. “Go ahead and have a seat.”

October?

Well, it’s midway through October. This is usually the time when I start wondering if I should bother participating in NaNoWriMo.

I haven’t completed a NaNoWriMo since my first attempt, which was a long time ago. It doesn’t, then, make a lot of sense to try again. Especially since I don’t plan on doing anything with whatever I come up with, even if I did finish.

On the other hand, I kind of enjoy it. I can block out a space of time and say, “I’m a writer!” Then I can feel important. So, I will waffle on and see what happens.

I’ve actually wanted to do it using unusual tools. Like, in an Atari ST emulator using a period word processor. Or Amiga. I think that would be a lot of fun. But, then, I have the Atari VCS with Haiku and FocusWriter along with a really groovy keyboard, so that sounds like fun, too.

The year that I did finish, I went all out. I even went to write-ins, hoping to get some social time stuck in. I never did, though. People just wrote and wrote and wrote and left. But it was nice being around other people, I guess. Now, I live further away from people so that, along with the remnants of the pandemic, will probably quash any idea of going to one.

I could host a write in, if people didn’t mind sitting outside. I’d probably spend more time making snacks and coffee and keeping the fire pit lit (still never lit it up, by the way) than writing, though. That’s assuming anyone showed up, which they probably wouldn’t. Maybe if I told them they could pet the cats?

Maybe… it would make sense to post here what I’ve written each day? Maybe that would be a further incentive. I’ll have to think about that one. The worst that happens is that you’ll probably understand why I give up.

I actually used an Atari ST for quite some time and I know I had a word processor for it, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was. I’m not even sure which one I used the most on the Atari 400 or 130XE, although I suspect it was AtariWriter. I think I had a ‘type-in’ one for the VIC-20.

Come to think of it, the VCS has Chrome so I could write using Google Docs (or, presumably, Word or Pages) then switch over to Centipede: Recharged as a reward for getting a paragraph down. At that point, though, Black Widow: Recharged should be out. It’s probably better to stick with Haiku, where I don’t have any games.

Of course, Forza Horizon 5 will also be out next month…

It turns out, in addition to FocusWriter, the same author has a word tracking utility called Novprog. It’s QT based and compiles without issue on Haiku, so I reckon I’ll add that to the arsenal. If I had even the faintest idea of how to make a package, I’d make one and try it get it on HaikuDepot. Unfortunately, I find the tutorials on making such a thing too mystifying to follow.

How I Spent My Labor Day Vacation

Everyone enjoys a little time off from work, am I right? Sure I am! And I would, too, if I could feel like doing something. But I usually don’t.

Granted, this pandemic thing makes me think twice about driving out to other towns to take pictures. For some reason, I get this vision in my head of a group of town folk ‘persuading’ me to leave town, just in case I am laden with virii. There are torches and pitchforks involved. Things are shouted at me as I drive to the edge of town while rocks rain down around my car.

Now, I’m not saying that would happen. Of course not. I’m just saying that it could happen.

So, instead of going out and tempting fate, I opted to stay in. I didn’t watch much TV. I didn’t play much games. I didn’t do any reading, except for the stuff that I couldn’t avoid on account of a lot of things I see being on screens. I didn’t even listen to music.

First, I went grocery shopping. Some would say I should have my groceries delivered. And I probably should. I get frustrated at the grocery store, with people leaving their carts in my way while they go to the other side of the store to get something. Or the people that block aisles because they’re having a nice chat (I don’t talk to anybody, so neither should you). Or people looking at every single bunch of celery in all three bins. Or… well, the list goes on. I actually have a grocery list and try and grab everything on the list. For my dinners, you see.

Speaking of which, a friend of mine thought I should start my own YouTube channel for cooking. He thought that maybe I could meet some ladies that way. I appreciate the thought, but I can’t imagine any woman watching a cooking show that’s done by a single guy who cooks for himself. But, what do I know? Maybe I’ll start small and do reviews of recipes that nick from other sites. Then, if there’s a clamoring for me to start a YouTube channel, I’ll do it. If nothing else, it’ll give me a reason to spend money on cameras and stuff.

Ok. So, I did my shopping. Then I drove home. Later, I cooked dinner (which was a slow cooker Beef & Broccoli that turned out really good). I watched Away on Netflix. Then I let the birds out. Or, rather, let one of the birds out. The other refuses to leave his cage. I’m kind of worried about him, but he seems all right, hopping around the bottom of the cage and playing with his toys. Still… He used to get out and stretch his wings a bit. Then I washed dishes. Then I went to bed.

Sounds pretty unimpressive, huh? That’s ’cause it is. The next day I made a big effort and went through a lot of boxes in the room with a lot of boxes. I cleaned a bit out. Threw away some stuff, cut down some boxes, re-arranged some stuff, and moved other stuffs to where they oughta be moved to. Like a closet. I’m happy to say, that’s there’s quite a bit more room in there, now. If I really had to, I could probably push everything that’s left against the walls. The cat is less happy about it, because now there are less places for him to crawl around in.

I took some time to fire up an Atari ST emulator on my Mac. It’s surprising to me that I can’t really remember using mine (the ST, that is). I know I used it a lot because it was my only computer for a long time. But I’m not 100% certain what I did with it, besides call BBS’ and GEnie. I’m sure I wrote using it, but I don’t remember which word processor I used. I do know I wrote a program to keep track of different orders for my dad. That was in GFA Basic. But, otherwise… I’m afraid it’s a bit of a blank to me. I can’t even remember what games were my favorite. Oh well. Maybe one day it’ll all come back to me. Sometimes I think if I had mine again I would remember. But I’d be surprised if the hard drive still works. Because I had a hard drive. With NeoDesk 4.

And that’s pretty much how I spent my vacation. I really should take time to do something enjoyable before I shoot myself.

Oh, and I played around a bit with the Haiku operating system. In fact, I’m writing this using WebPositive. It’s come a long way since the last time I tried it.

In Days Of Yore

Recently, a friend of mine was lamenting the fact that he had a hard time learning programming by reading or watching videos. I suggested he learn like I did: looking at code and typing it in. Then I had a great idea and suggested that he look up an old magazine with a BASIC program and convert it to whatever language he was trying to pick up.

Long ago, back when the world was still flat, a computer in the home was seen as an expensive frivolity. There was nothing particularly compelling about getting one because whatever you could do on a computer, you could do cheaper with a pencil and paper. Maybe it would make sense if you were a company, but not so much for the individual.

Finding software, then, could be difficult and expensive. Luckily, there were magazines and books that contained code listings for various types of programs. Mostly, they were in a language called BASIC.

The thing is, as a child in this computer pre-history time, I didn’t have a lot of money to buy software. It was a lot easier to get the parents to plunk down a lot less money on a book or magazine. It could even be justified as being educational, because I could learn how to program by typing in those code listings.

The joke was on me, though, because I did, in fact, learn how to program that way. And debug. When you don’t have an Internet to search, going through a program you typed in to find out why it doesn’t behaving properly does wonders for figuring out how programs work and where you made your mistake.

BASIC is not a universally loved language. It was designed to be a learning language; something easy for someone, like children, to pick up and learn the basics (get it?) of programming. Many people, then as now, thought BASIC should be buried beneath the Earth and not taught to anyone, much less children in their formative years.

But BASIC was popular among the home computer users because, in most cases, it came built into the computer. You turned it on, there was BASIC. Even if you didn’t have a disk drive, you still had BASIC. It was ubiquitous. Given the choice of, say, dropping $95 to buy Microsoft’s Fortran for your TRS-80 (which would be the equivalent of $318 today) or using the BASIC the computer came with, well, you kind of know who’s going to win that one.

So, it was (technically) cheap, and (generally) available. The other advantage BASIC had was that it was an interpreted language. That meant the BASIC commands were turned into “machine code” when they were encountered. This meant typing in something quick and dirty, like PRINT 27*42, would give you an immediate answer and you wouldn’t have to compile it, link it, and then run it.

What about the disadvantages, then? Why wouldn’t people want this language taught to people? There are probably numerous issues (memory management, etc.) but one of the biggest was that BASIC did not teach structured programming. It was, in fact, very unstructured. It gave rise to the descriptor of “spaghetti code.” This was all most due to one command: GOTO.

The GOTO command allowed the programmer to jump to any line in the program, arbitrarily. Aside from being a great source of bugs (like, maybe using it to jump to the wrong line), it also made programs very hard to read. Given that early BASICs didn’t have, say, IF..THEN..ELSE statements, GOTO was used a lot.

Consider this:
10 IF X > 10 THEN 30
20 PRINT “X is less than or equal to 10”:GOTO 40
30 PRINT “X is greater than 10”
40 END

This simply checks to see if variable X is greater than 10. If it is, it jumps over line 20 to print a message saying so. If it’s less than or equal to 10, it prints its message then jumps to line 40. This may not seem particularly awful, but when you have a program that’s a hundred lines or more, following all those GOTO statements gets to be a real chore.

With a structured programming language (or a more modern BASIC), one could write the same thing like this:
IF X > 10 THEN PRINT “X is greater than 10”
ELSE PRINT “X is less than or Equal to 10”
END

By chance, around the time my friend mentioned his issue about learning and my suggestion of converting a BASIC program, I was reading a post by the CRPG Addict about a game called “The Devil’s Dungeon.” Evidently, there was some controversy about its status, not only as an RPG (or, Role Playing Game) but also about if it could be termed the ‘first commercial computer RPG’ because it was written in BASIC and distributed in a book, rather than being sold on disk or cassette.

“What luck,” I thought. If I could find a copy of this book online, I could try converting it to, say, Python and show my friend just how awesome an idea it was. So I found a copy of the book that “The Devil’s Dungeon” was in and began the task of converting it over. I thought it would be pretty easy.

It was not as easy as I thought it would be. The biggest sticking point was (and you should be completely not surprised by this) was the GOTO statements. It’s not a particularly long program, but following the twists and turns of the GOTOs, used to jump over sections of code and then to jump back into those previously skipped portions was breaking my brain. IF statements had to be reversed in order to get things to flow properly.

As it is, the game sort of works in Python, but I know there are issues all due to how the program executes. I may try to find these problems and fix them, some how.

The Devil’s Dungeon sort of working on Haiku

After the trouble of doing this, I began to re-think my advice of converting a BASIC program to a different language. It wouldn’t, necessarily, be an easy task. But then I thought about how much I learned about Python (take away: I don’t like it) just by having to look things up or working around issues. So, I still stand by it. I still think it’s a valid learning experience. If nothing else, one would learn how not to write a program.

I may fix Devil’s Dungeon. Or, I may move on to another game that was mentioned by the CRPG Addict, called “The Dungeon of Danger.” I found the listing for it, already. It’s a lot longer and a lot more complicated than Devil’s Dungeon. It also re-introduces a long forgotten command, ON GOTO, which is already causing me heartburn. But, I also miss those old DATA statements.

Computer Justification Wednesday — Part 3: Processor

And then there’s the brains of the outfit: the processor. This is the fellow who actually does all… the processing. The one that makes your programs do something. It’s also known as the CPU.

Today we live in a multi-core world. Back in the old days if you wanted to be outrageous you bought yourself two processors and hoped you could find a motherboard to put them both in. Then you hoped you had an operating system that could actually use them. Linux did. BeOS definitely did. Windows, well, not so much. Windows NT kind of did, but it never got rockin’ until NT 4 showed up. And even then it wasn’t that great until XP showed up.

But now it’s hard to find a processor that doesn’t have at least two cores. Essentially it means you have two processors on one chip, if you’ll accept the simple answer.

I don’t worry too much about the amount of cores I have when I’m in Windows. Games don’t really use more than one. Some do, but I don’t think anyone has made it past using two yet.

Then there’s Linux, which I also use. Specifically, I use Gentoo and that means I get to compile (taking code from text files and turning into code that the processor runs) everything on my system. For that, more cores are better. So I went with the AMD FX-8150 Black Edition.

Sure, it doesn’t look like much but you’re never going to see it except when you put it in or take it out. It has eight cores in there. It’s pretty fast. Best of all, it works.

Everyone makes a big deal about being careful when you put in a processor. And you should because the bottom of the thing is a crap load of tiny legs that get bent very easily. I usually just drop it on the socket and it manages to get all the legs in the holes. You never want to force it, though; if it’s hard to get into the socket that means there are legs that aren’t positioned right and trying to shove it in will bend all those tiny little legs. If you do that, good luck trying to get them straight again. It was possible way back when there were fewer legs and they were bigger. But now… Yeah, you’re better off getting a new one.

Having all these cores makes me want to try out Haiku, which is an open source BeOS clone. I don’t know how it’ll run on all the modern hardware, but I’m willing to give it a shot.