How recently have you tried Moz? Admittedly, it's not operating at *warp* speed but I find it completely usable on my laptop (which with a p3-500 and a slow laptop hd is hardly an all-devouring speed demon). Even with anti-aliasing and all that glitzy, shiny crap enabled, the only time I see noticeable slowdown is when I fire off my "news and blogs" group-of-tabs bookmark (which has 15+ entries). This is mozilla 1.6 from debian-testing.
your enthusiasm is unwarranted
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
That's great and all, but as a practicing web
developer, I can assure you that dealing with MSFT's various idiocies as embodied in IE is a titanic pain in the ass. Just to pick one area where IE's stagnation is very much a big issue if you do this for a living: CSS support. They barely support CSSv1 correctly even in the latest IE, and anything later than that is totally haphazard. As for why CSS is a big deal, well, this comment box isn't big enough to contain all the reasons behind that. I'll leave aside for brevity all the other ways that IE makes our lives difficult at work!
As for the rest of your post, despite how much I'd love to use web-like tech to make traditional applications, I don't see that working. It's been tried before by quite a number of people unsuccessfully, and C#/.NET/blahblahblahbuzzwordsoup isn't different enough to really stand out. I find it ironic, to a degree, that you ask "how many technologies do you have to learn to build a simple app?" when you yourself list quite a number in relation to the MSFT development paradigm..NET is a bit better
than the trainwreck that is traditional win32 development, but not by a whole lot (see Joel Spoelsky's writings on this topic, that I'm too
lazy to link at the moment). Fred Brooks said it best those decades ago, there is no silver bullet in computer programming, and there never will be.
55bn isn't so much, really
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How long will 55 billion USD last once you start paying dividends (as many investors both institutional and individual are clamoring for) and/or buying back stock to reduce the share price dilution due to employee stock options? The world of finance and corporate monetary structures is one just as detailed, subtle, and complex as that of code or computer architecture. Just becuase it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and would to a layperson appear to be a duck does not make it a 100% bonafide waterfowl...
Which replication mechanism would you (or anyone reading, for that matter) recommend? I'd like to bring up Pg as an alternative in a proposed application with a fairly high transactional load, which probably means that whatever DB we go with will need to support some sort of load-balancing/clustering/replication.
IAAC. Most reagents are indeed rated
rather precisely with respect to their
purity. For example, "spectroscopic"
grade toluene is different than "hplc"
grade toluene, and they're both different
from "reagant" grade toluene. (These
are so-called "customary" names for
different purity grades. It can be a little
confusing even to practitioners, so typically
something will be labeled like
"Reagent Grade (95%) Foo.")
Those extra 9s frequently are important.
For a plain synthesis reaction, 95% may
be ok (you may just want to make some of
product X to prove that it can be made,
so if you have some miniscule fraction of
an isomer of X due to that 5% similarly-reactive
reagent impurity, it's not such a big deal).
But if you're doing a really precise analysis (say
ppt range), you don't want any peaks from
chemically similar impurities crowding into the
spectral range you're looking at.
But yeah, outside of the actual practice of
science, most anything above 99% is speculative
horseshit dreamed up by a marketer. _Proving_
that something is that pure is an expensive
and time-consuming prospect.
(disclaimer: one of my livejournal interests
is "informed dislike of c++".;))
Bruce Eckel has written some fairly good (IMHO)
books on c++ and Java. You can download them
for free from here.
The thing I like best about his approach is that
it tries to teach you more than just the syntax,
also (as the titles suggest) how to think in that
language. The only con to his writting style
is that his examples are sometimes a little
contrived...
As other posters have said, do try to learn
the STL as soon as possible. It makes C++
far less painful and more like Java. Of course,
you could be stuck in a situation where your
compiler is really old (bad templates support)
and/or the environment doesn't have the STL,
so as nice as std::vector is, you should probably
learn how to use arrays too.;) One of the
biggest flaws in C++ to me is that it is almost
like three languages in one, any one of which
can be used to build a solution, but the best
way isn't always obvious. [Well, and manual
garbage collection sucks!]
Eh, first they rip off perl (poorly) and now they're goign to rip off Java (probably poorly, given their track record).
Sorry to seem trollish, I've just written enough in all three languages (been writing web code for pay since '99) to notice that three quarters of PHP is a stripped-down, amateurishly implemented clone of features from other languages (an example that springs to mind is: copying visual signification of variables like perl, but not disambiguting singular and plural types (perl: $scalar and @array vs. php: $scalar and $array)). And whoever decided that it was ok for some array functions to use foo($var,$array) and others to use bar($array,$var) should just be slapped repeatedly with a dead trout. Also, anyone who has tried to use PHP's reference mechanism, usually ends up shocked at the number of bugs-by-design present in the language. I hope the Zend team has picked shallow or deep copy for PHP5 rather than just having the interpreter do an indeterminate mix of both like in PHP4...
I use PHP because the majority of the code at my workplace was written in it (by people who, imho, sucked) so the current devs have too much legacy code to feasibly port to something saner. Irritating sometimes, but it pays the bills.
*shrug* I guess PHP is what passes for language design these days, just like MySQL is what seems to pass for relational database management these days.
At the time I worked for ComSpace.com,
an IT consultancy in Houston, doing a lot
of work for the likes of ChevronTexaco.
Currently, I work for the number #1
interactive (i.e. web-related) ad firm
in the state, #19 in the nation (both
from a recent _Adweek_). Sure, I run
servers for people that want boutique
hosting, but I'm more of a custom-apps
guy than a huge-web-hosting guy.
In other words, in no way am I now or
have ever been a competitor to ev1. I
even use their cheapass dialup service
to give my out-in-the-boondocks mom
a dialup connection. I'm just a tech
professional that's had more than
one bad experience dealing with
(or *trying* to deal with) ev1's server
retards.
I suspect you're a bored server
grunt at EV1. Do me a favor and
slap the shit out of the next salesman
you see for your company.
I'll second that. For a while, a company I was the lead admin for was considering using their services. I was attracted by their price/performance ratio, but I found their sales staff to be ridiculously uninformed, arrogant, and god damned RUDE. If the *sales* staff are like that I don't want to even think about what their technical staff are like.
(An amusing side-note would be the description of one of their admins by a poster to (iirc) houston.internet as a "shit for brains, know it all, 20 y.o. l33t haxor punk", heh. apparently this twerp tried convincing a guy with (again, iirc) over fifteen years of unix experience that reverse dns was entirely without merit)
Unfortunately, the ad in question (some
flash monstrosity flogging GE's water
purification tech. I guess they want us
to forget they also make nuclear weapons?
*shrug*) crashes my browser like a three
ton male cow with BSE being dropped from
the top of the empire state building onto
a porcelain establishment. So i've watched
their fucking advert twice, vainly hoping
that I'd get to read the content. No such
luck, and I even happen to be using a gui
browser with flash. So thanks to the efforts
of a fellow slasher/ette I can read the article.
Just think, if I was blind and using a braille
device, that kind person's effort would be the
only think letting me read the article. Forced
delay ads authored in a proprietary plugin
environment are almost criminally stupid given
the recent legislation regarding web accessibility.
Oh, and feel sorry for commercial entities
trying to make old-tech biz models survive in
the digital realm? Hahahahahaha. Fuck them
and their cretinous, heavy-handed attempts
to make the web like teevee. The net was such
a nice place until the suits showed up to whore
it out.
"home software" means different things to different people. the canonical "big three" of home computer applications/uses:
Web usage (IE)
E-mail usage (Outlook/Outlook Express)
Office/Productivity Suite [word processing, spreadsheet, etc.] (MS Office)
That's pretty much all I ever see my non-unix-head/non-gamer friends using their machines for. Each of those categories has obvious, mature, and very functional replacements or analogs in the open source world (Mozilla, Mozilla, and OpenOffice, in order. or Firemumble, Thunderbird if you prefer that to the integrated moz). Heck, all of those even have windows ports that work very well, so you could give people a springboard to the world of software freedom without having to walk your non-technical friends and family members through hard disk partitioning or shell usage.;)
Now, if you mean games and stuff like tax programs or garden layout software, yeah, linux isn't there yet. I suspect it won't be long though before the linux market is large enough that small ISVs will be tempted by the low development costs to release programs like that. (The software overhead alone for a traditional programmer's workstation in the MSFT world can reach into the thousands rapidly. The software overhead for a linux development system is... however much a couple of CD-Rs is these days.)
I would not be at all suprised to see something akin to the shareware/micropublisher model bloom in the linux "space" as the desktop market grows. Personally I don't have much need for payware (almost everything I use and need is free), but if I can get, say, a $10-20 program to do my taxes with that runs on linux, I'd do it in a heartbeat. (That's not a terribly unreasonable pricepoint either, TaxCut basic is about $15.) I'm sure there are lots of other little niche products like that out there that could find a market with the open source community.
Is there a reasonably straight-forward way
to control the placement of "blobs" (charts,
pictures, tables, etc.) in the flow of text in (La)TeX? I looked through the TeXbook some for an answer, but didn't manage to find anything.
(I'm not a TeX expert by any means, just a chemistry major who wants to make pretty reports.)
Should I look at the LaTeX layer for this?
Some sort of gui like LyX? Thanks in advance to anyone with insights on this...
Dude, check the date on that. FreeBSD 2.x vs.
Solaris 7 vs. (some linux that might well have
been kernel 2.0 and libc5)? I know '99 isn't that
long ago in our time sense, but that's two, three, or more whole OS revisions since that article was published.
I've admin'd *BSD (free and open), Solaris, and Linux in corporate environments (as well as a bewildering array of freenixen at home). All the systems have advantages, all of them have disadvantages. Personally, I run debian by choice when I can get away with it because *BSD, Solaris, and most Linuxen just piss me off in various ways, but I still use BSD where it makes sense. Running around trumpeting this or that OS as being the end all and be all of existence for everyone just shows that you're a greenhorn.
On solaris up to and including 7, unless you
set some fiddly bits in the right way (which
I am at the moment forgetting), sending the
console a BREAK would halt the machine. Instantly. (not powered-off halt, but down
to the OpenBoot firmware, which meant the OS and everything above the level of the bios was off,
in pc terms). Thankfully, solaris 8 and later
don't have this "feature."
Re:Old laptops and video drivers
on
Linux Toys
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've seen old copies of commercial linux X servers
out there for stupidly cheap prices, that have better support for the laptop video cards found in old laptops. example: metro-x for three bucks.
The problem, and even calling it a problem is a subject of some debate, is that currently in American jurisprudence (and in many other jurisdictions, from what I understand) the status of source code in relation to speech is ambiguous at best. If source code is speech, then it is entitled to first amendment protections (as interpreted and understood through the framework of the various and sundry opinions of the Supreme Court, of course). Even what "speech" consists of in the traditional 1st amendment sense is ambiguous, from literally acoustic utterances, to the printed word, to potentially inflammatory apparel choices.
The problem is fundamentally perceptual. The H-Bomb article, being a journalistic work, is easily understood to be "speech" by the citizenry and government. Source code is a somewhat more ephemeral concept that your average FBI agent or federal judge, let alone your average citizen, will have a much harder time relating to conceptually.
To practitioners of the art, I think it is plainly self-obvious that source code is speech, as it is the creative work of a talented (or at least skilled;)) individual meant to acheive some action, in much the same way that an artful poem or editorial is written to acheive a conveyance of meaning. If only this was understood, many actions undertaken in the name of the DMCA et. al. would be invalidated by the 1st amendment...
If the word on the street is to be believed, Solaris 10 x86 will include support for AMD64 (Opteron et. al.). This is rumored to be targeted at a Q1-Q2 '04 release date (i.e. reasonably soon). It is true that some of the linux vendors/distributions are working on amd64 ports, but Solaris has been running on 64 bit cpus for years and years, so there are far, FAR fewer little "oops, you mean an int isn't four bytes????" bugs laying around to get tripped up on (I speak mainly in reference to userland here, given that it will go through a commericial QA process from a large vendor I'm not that worried about issues with the kernel itself;)).
Not that your average web or file server will need to care about 64bit anything, but it'll be nice for those of us running big databases or scientific/engineering codes.
Overall, what's the difference in flavor between Linux and Solaris? Not a lot, really. Solaris does "feel" much more integrated (man pages that don't suck, for example.) Now, you can throw that straight out the window if you insist on things like GNU utilities and such, but it's hardly Sun's fault if you don't like the 1970s versions of tar or vi or want a C compiler for free.;)
Possibly worth mentioning would be the solaris xfree86 driver kit, which allows Sun's X server to use xfree86's video drivers. (Video cards being one of the most frequent sources of hardware incompatibility...)
Slashdot Mirror
How recently have you tried Moz? Admittedly, it's not operating at *warp* speed but I find it completely usable on my laptop (which with a p3-500 and a slow laptop hd is hardly an all-devouring speed demon). Even with anti-aliasing and all that glitzy, shiny crap enabled, the only time I see noticeable slowdown is when I fire off my "news and blogs" group-of-tabs bookmark (which has 15+ entries). This is mozilla 1.6 from debian-testing.
That's great and all, but as a practicing web developer, I can assure you that dealing with MSFT's various idiocies as embodied in IE is a titanic pain in the ass. Just to pick one area where IE's stagnation is very much a big issue if you do this for a living: CSS support. They barely support CSSv1 correctly even in the latest IE, and anything later than that is totally haphazard. As for why CSS is a big deal, well, this comment box isn't big enough to contain all the reasons behind that. I'll leave aside for brevity all the other ways that IE makes our lives difficult at work!
As for the rest of your post, despite how much I'd love to use web-like tech to make traditional applications, I don't see that working. It's been tried before by quite a number of people unsuccessfully, and C#/.NET/blahblahblahbuzzwordsoup isn't different enough to really stand out. I find it ironic, to a degree, that you ask "how many technologies do you have to learn to build a simple app?" when you yourself list quite a number in relation to the MSFT development paradigm. .NET is a bit better
than the trainwreck that is traditional win32 development, but not by a whole lot (see Joel Spoelsky's writings on this topic, that I'm too
lazy to link at the moment). Fred Brooks said it best those decades ago, there is no silver bullet in computer programming, and there never will be.
How long will 55 billion USD last once you start paying dividends (as many investors both institutional and individual are clamoring for) and/or buying back stock to reduce the share price dilution due to employee stock options? The world of finance and corporate monetary structures is one just as detailed, subtle, and complex as that of code or computer architecture. Just becuase it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and would to a layperson appear to be a duck does not make it a 100% bonafide waterfowl...
Which replication mechanism would you (or anyone reading, for that matter) recommend? I'd like to bring up Pg as an alternative in a proposed application with a fairly high transactional load, which probably means that whatever DB we go with will need to support some sort of load-balancing/clustering/replication.
MSFT, Oracle, and others already argue that.
The commercial software vendors may be slovenly
about keeping up with security patches, but they
jump on extra money like rabid ferrets on raw meat.
So? They also eat things called "haggis" and "spotted dick." Please don't use the British as examples of sane behavior. ;)
Yeah, the petty tyrant you directly work for is the CEO, not a middle manager.
;) (I'm speaking of my last job, which sucked acres and acres of ass.)
IAAC. Most reagents are indeed rated rather precisely with respect to their purity. For example, "spectroscopic" grade toluene is different than "hplc" grade toluene, and they're both different from "reagant" grade toluene. (These are so-called "customary" names for different purity grades. It can be a little confusing even to practitioners, so typically something will be labeled like "Reagent Grade (95%) Foo.")
Those extra 9s frequently are important. For a plain synthesis reaction, 95% may be ok (you may just want to make some of product X to prove that it can be made, so if you have some miniscule fraction of an isomer of X due to that 5% similarly-reactive reagent impurity, it's not such a big deal). But if you're doing a really precise analysis (say ppt range), you don't want any peaks from chemically similar impurities crowding into the spectral range you're looking at.
But yeah, outside of the actual practice of science, most anything above 99% is speculative horseshit dreamed up by a marketer. _Proving_ that something is that pure is an expensive and time-consuming prospect.
(disclaimer: one of my livejournal interests is "informed dislike of c++". ;))
Bruce Eckel has written some fairly good (IMHO) books on c++ and Java. You can download them for free from here. The thing I like best about his approach is that it tries to teach you more than just the syntax, also (as the titles suggest) how to think in that language. The only con to his writting style is that his examples are sometimes a little contrived...
As other posters have said, do try to learn the STL as soon as possible. It makes C++ far less painful and more like Java. Of course, you could be stuck in a situation where your compiler is really old (bad templates support) and/or the environment doesn't have the STL, so as nice as std::vector is, you should probably learn how to use arrays too. ;) One of the
biggest flaws in C++ to me is that it is almost
like three languages in one, any one of which
can be used to build a solution, but the best
way isn't always obvious. [Well, and manual
garbage collection sucks!]
Good luck!
Eh, first they rip off perl (poorly)
and now they're goign to rip off Java
(probably poorly, given their track record).
Sorry to seem trollish, I've just written
enough in all three languages (been writing
web code for pay since '99) to notice that
three quarters of PHP is a stripped-down,
amateurishly implemented clone of features
from other languages (an example that springs
to mind is: copying visual signification of
variables like perl, but not disambiguting
singular and plural types (perl: $scalar and
@array vs. php: $scalar and $array)). And
whoever decided that it was ok for some
array functions to use foo($var,$array)
and others to use bar($array,$var) should
just be slapped repeatedly with a dead trout.
Also, anyone who has tried to use PHP's reference
mechanism, usually ends up shocked at the number
of bugs-by-design present in the language.
I hope the Zend team has picked shallow or deep
copy for PHP5 rather than just having the
interpreter do an indeterminate mix of both
like in PHP4...
I use PHP because the majority of the code at my
workplace was written in it (by people who,
imho, sucked) so the current devs have too much
legacy code to feasibly port to something
saner. Irritating sometimes, but it pays the bills.
*shrug* I guess PHP is what passes for
language design these days, just like MySQL
is what seems to pass for relational database
management these days.
Well, in their defense, RHEL also supports
;)
things that debian currently doesn't, such
as AMD64 and other "enterprise-level" stuff.
Mind you, I say this as somebody who is in
charge of a RH-heavy shop and is currently
in the process of giving RH the finger and
moving to debian.
At the time I worked for ComSpace.com, an IT consultancy in Houston, doing a lot of work for the likes of ChevronTexaco. Currently, I work for the number #1 interactive (i.e. web-related) ad firm in the state, #19 in the nation (both from a recent _Adweek_). Sure, I run servers for people that want boutique hosting, but I'm more of a custom-apps guy than a huge-web-hosting guy. In other words, in no way am I now or have ever been a competitor to ev1. I even use their cheapass dialup service to give my out-in-the-boondocks mom a dialup connection. I'm just a tech professional that's had more than one bad experience dealing with (or *trying* to deal with) ev1's server retards. I suspect you're a bored server grunt at EV1. Do me a favor and slap the shit out of the next salesman you see for your company.
I'll second that. For a while, a company
I was the lead admin for was considering
using their services. I was attracted by
their price/performance ratio, but I found
their sales staff to be ridiculously
uninformed, arrogant, and god damned RUDE.
If the *sales* staff are like that I
don't want to even think about what their
technical staff are like.
(An amusing side-note would be the
description of one of their admins
by a poster to (iirc) houston.internet
as a "shit for brains, know it all,
20 y.o. l33t haxor punk", heh. apparently
this twerp tried convincing a guy with (again, iirc)
over fifteen years of unix experience
that reverse dns was entirely without merit)
Unfortunately, the ad in question (some flash monstrosity flogging GE's water purification tech. I guess they want us to forget they also make nuclear weapons? *shrug*) crashes my browser like a three ton male cow with BSE being dropped from the top of the empire state building onto a porcelain establishment. So i've watched their fucking advert twice, vainly hoping that I'd get to read the content. No such luck, and I even happen to be using a gui browser with flash. So thanks to the efforts of a fellow slasher/ette I can read the article.
Just think, if I was blind and using a braille device, that kind person's effort would be the only think letting me read the article. Forced delay ads authored in a proprietary plugin environment are almost criminally stupid given the recent legislation regarding web accessibility.
Oh, and feel sorry for commercial entities trying to make old-tech biz models survive in the digital realm? Hahahahahaha. Fuck them and their cretinous, heavy-handed attempts to make the web like teevee. The net was such a nice place until the suits showed up to whore it out.
- Web usage (IE)
- E-mail usage (Outlook/Outlook Express)
- Office/Productivity Suite [word processing, spreadsheet, etc.] (MS Office)
That's pretty much all I ever see my non-unix-head/non-gamer friends using their machines for. Each of those categories has obvious, mature, and very functional replacements or analogs in the open source world (Mozilla, Mozilla, and OpenOffice, in order. or Firemumble, Thunderbird if you prefer that to the integrated moz). Heck, all of those even have windows ports that work very well, so you could give people a springboard to the world of software freedom without having to walk your non-technical friends and family members through hard disk partitioning or shell usage.Now, if you mean games and stuff like tax programs or garden layout software, yeah, linux isn't there yet. I suspect it won't be long though before the linux market is large enough that small ISVs will be tempted by the low development costs to release programs like that. (The software overhead alone for a traditional programmer's workstation in the MSFT world can reach into the thousands rapidly. The software overhead for a linux development system is... however much a couple of CD-Rs is these days.)
I would not be at all suprised to see something akin to the shareware/micropublisher model bloom in the linux "space" as the desktop market grows. Personally I don't have much need for payware (almost everything I use and need is free), but if I can get, say, a $10-20 program to do my taxes with that runs on linux, I'd do it in a heartbeat. (That's not a terribly unreasonable pricepoint either, TaxCut basic is about $15.) I'm sure there are lots of other little niche products like that out there that could find a market with the open source community.
Thank you! :)
Is there a reasonably straight-forward way to control the placement of "blobs" (charts, pictures, tables, etc.) in the flow of text in (La)TeX? I looked through the TeXbook some for an answer, but didn't manage to find anything. (I'm not a TeX expert by any means, just a chemistry major who wants to make pretty reports.) Should I look at the LaTeX layer for this? Some sort of gui like LyX? Thanks in advance to anyone with insights on this...
Yes, and i run them on BOXEN. HTH, HAND. :)
Dude, check the date on that. FreeBSD 2.x vs. Solaris 7 vs. (some linux that might well have been kernel 2.0 and libc5)? I know '99 isn't that long ago in our time sense, but that's two, three, or more whole OS revisions since that article was published.
I've admin'd *BSD (free and open), Solaris, and Linux in corporate environments (as well as a bewildering array of freenixen at home). All the systems have advantages, all of them have disadvantages. Personally, I run debian by choice when I can get away with it because *BSD, Solaris, and most Linuxen just piss me off in various ways, but I still use BSD where it makes sense. Running around trumpeting this or that OS as being the end all and be all of existence for everyone just shows that you're a greenhorn.
On solaris up to and including 7, unless you set some fiddly bits in the right way (which I am at the moment forgetting), sending the console a BREAK would halt the machine. Instantly. (not powered-off halt, but down to the OpenBoot firmware, which meant the OS and everything above the level of the bios was off, in pc terms). Thankfully, solaris 8 and later don't have this "feature."
I've seen old copies of commercial linux X servers out there for stupidly cheap prices, that have better support for the laptop video cards found in old laptops. example: metro-x for three bucks.
The problem, and even calling it a problem is a subject of some debate, is that currently in American jurisprudence (and in many other jurisdictions, from what I understand) the status of source code in relation to speech is ambiguous at best. If source code is speech, then it is entitled to first amendment protections (as interpreted and understood through the framework of the various and sundry opinions of the Supreme Court, of course). Even what "speech" consists of in the traditional 1st amendment sense is ambiguous, from literally acoustic utterances, to the printed word, to potentially inflammatory apparel choices.
;)) individual meant to acheive some action, in much the same way that an artful poem or editorial is written to acheive a conveyance of meaning. If only this was understood, many actions undertaken in the name of the DMCA et. al. would be invalidated by the 1st amendment...
The problem is fundamentally perceptual. The H-Bomb article, being a journalistic work, is easily understood to be "speech" by the citizenry and government. Source code is a somewhat more ephemeral concept that your average FBI agent or federal judge, let alone your average citizen, will have a much harder time relating to conceptually.
To practitioners of the art, I think it is plainly self-obvious that source code is speech, as it is the creative work of a talented (or at least skilled
If the word on the street is to be believed, Solaris 10 x86 will include support for AMD64 (Opteron et. al.). This is rumored to be targeted at a Q1-Q2 '04 release date (i.e. reasonably soon). It is true that some of the linux vendors/distributions are working on amd64 ports, but Solaris has been running on 64 bit cpus for years and years, so there are far, FAR fewer little "oops, you mean an int isn't four bytes????" bugs laying around to get tripped up on (I speak mainly in reference to userland here, given that it will go through a commericial QA process from a large vendor I'm not that worried about issues with the kernel itself ;)).
;)
Not that your average web or file server will need to care about 64bit anything, but it'll be nice for those of us running big databases or scientific/engineering codes.
Overall, what's the difference in flavor between Linux and Solaris? Not a lot, really. Solaris does "feel" much more integrated (man pages that don't suck, for example.) Now, you can throw that straight out the window if you insist on things like GNU utilities and such, but it's hardly Sun's fault if you don't like the 1970s versions of tar or vi or want a C compiler for free.
Possibly worth mentioning would be the solaris xfree86 driver kit, which allows Sun's X server to use xfree86's video drivers. (Video cards being one of the most frequent sources of hardware incompatibility...)