I think I’ve made it through my backlog of things to post.  For no apparent reason, I ended up with a whole bunch of ‘this vs. that’ links this week.

• BSD vs. Linux.  The target article is way old, but it’s interesting to see the comments.
• Arch vs. Slackware, a friendly comparison.  Mentions BSD in passing, and Arch is the most BSD-ish Linux distribution I hear mentioned.  The package count for both Arch and Slackware is much smaller than I expected, relative to pkgsrc.  (via previous link.)
• Internet arguments about similar products, crystallized: WikiVs.  Allthearguments you’ve ever seen, plus more.
• Emacs for Android.  Requires “a rather big display”.  (via)
• It’s somewhat off-topic for this site, but I’ll mention it: I read Ubuntu Made Easy from No Starch Press (who publishes a number of BSD books) recently and reviewed it on Amazon.
• The original drawing for the HP-35 calculator.  The creation story is neat, but if you look closely at that drawing, you can see the little bumps in the red lines where the artist used a radius template to draw the curves with his marker.  I learned to render that way, and it’s a visual flavor you don’t see often, given the ubiquity of computer rendering. (via)
• Maaaaybe it’s time to slowly sidle away from MySQL?  Lemme bring out my favorite quote.  (via many places)
• The problem and the fragmentation of content and communication.  Maybe it’s just me that finds this interesting because of what I do here.
• Ken Thompson’s debugging method, as told by Rob Pike.  Sounds a lot like the Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm.

Your unrelated link of the week: Taipan!  I played this on the Apple ][ and loved it.  The buy-low-sell-high game is an old genre that hasn’t been used in newer games in the same fashion as roguelikes or sidescrollers.  The only recent equivalents I can think of are Drug Wars and maaaaybe Eve Online.