What do you think a shortage is? When crude oil tops $200/barrel, we don't say there is an abundance of high quality oil that costs more. We say there is an oil shortage. That is the nature of markets. It is a negotiation between what people are willing to work/sell for and what people are will to pay/buy for. When parties feel the balance is tipped too far in one direction, it is declared a "shortage" or a "surplus", depending on your perspective.
What peripheral drivers would you like to install? What is it about Linux that prevents you from installing them? Is it because they are not available? That would be the manufacturers fault. There really is no excuse for this. The facilities for producing userspace drivers for just about anything have been available in Linux for a long time. Manufacturers don't have to open source or submit them to upstream repositories, but they do have to write them. If they don't...who's going to write it for them? And no, just because it is bad for Aunt Tillie does not mean it is a fault with Linux, anymore than the D-Link DWA-130 not working on OS X is a problem with Apple.
(precisely how many sound subsystems has Linux had over the years?)
Uh, one: ALSA since the 2.6 kernel. I will agree that certain desktop distributions (I'm looking at you Ubuntu) like to beta-test and screw around for no apparent reason resulting in breakage, but you can easily install a Linux desktop and have the sound work out of the box with no messing around. For a period of time that wasn't Ubuntu, though.
A blind spot to anything that doesn't work very well. Anyone who's tried to do anything beyond a very vanilla setup knows all about this.
Define "work well." I mean we all have our own standards. Some things are just irritating because it may be bad scrollbar behavior, or something, but not everybody is bothered by these sorts of things. It's easy to criticize Ubuntu for the things they miss or break (because these irritate us the most) and forget the good things they have contributed (they were the first distribution to make a proprietary driver installer for the desktop, for example). I don't know, it's not perfect, but I've never used a desktop, Linux or otherwise, that was.
Doing a new genome is very hard and still quite expensive, although technology and techniques have improved things.
Yes, that and the quoted cost is, I'm assuming, $1000 for a single chip run, which gives you a maximum of 10 Gb or only ~3X coverage (actual will probably be less). That's usually how marketing blurbs work. Even for SNP analysis, you are going to need around 40X coverage, so the cost per genome is much higher than what they are saying, and is still at least an order of magnitude more expensive than Illumina.
The problem is somebody has to pay for the publishing. It's not free. It costs money to hire editors, typesetters, to print paper copies, to run servers, to solicit peer reviewers and make editorial decisions, to maintain archives, to maintain searchable databases, to electronically archive older papers, to do artwork (yes, I know, but it's still part of it), to solicit news/reviews/perspective articles. So where is that money going to come from? Right now a chunck comes from the researchers themselves. The rest comes from the subscription fees. You can argue that more tax money should go to support publication, so that there will be more open access. But either way, money is going to come from public pockets. The cost of publishing has to be borne somewhere. Do you want more of the NIH/NSF/DOE/DARPA/etc budget to pay for publishing instead of research? Or do you want to raise taxes to support a publishing fund of some type? What's the solution? Because I see a lot of griping, but no real solutions.
And why then can't you just go to your local university library to get access? I mean really, it's not that hard. I'm not a big fan of the publishing industry, but I've never had trouble getting access to an article I needed. If the library doesn't have a subscription, interlibrary loan works pretty well.
Still, I doubt it would really cost $1m. We've become surprisingly good, and clever, at discovering mutations in recent years. With the human genome we already have a pretty good scaffold. You would need high genome coverage. That is cheap these days. The expensive part is the analysis, but there is a lot of stuff out there to make this much easier than it used to be. I would be surprised if the cost is even $100k. If they are saying $1m, they are full of it.
It really depends on the nature of the mutation. If you're trying to identify a random mutation in single differentiated cells, like you describe, then it is hopeless. But in all likelihood it would be a more general mutation shared by all or a large number of cell types that happened pre-differentiation (ie: in the germ cell).
The summary and medicaldaily article are fairly horrid, so here is the abstract of the research article. The full article is also available for those who have access.
Misstatements of the posted summary/article, 1) Discovery is of a new antibiotic (an antimicrobial peptide), not antibody. 2) Statement in the article: "They cause much less drug resistance of microbes than conventional antibiotics.", referring to antimicrobial peptides is a ridiculous statement not substantiated by anything. 3) The "kinetics" of the antimicrobial activity, as published, is not particularly useful for determining efficacy in the clinic. Since the drug they compared against, clindamycin, is completely different in every way from their peptide, it doesn't really say anything at all. They probably screened a number of antibiotics for this "test" and cherry-picked this result to highlight their find. 4) Use of the term "conventional antibiotic" is misleading. This is a new member of a class of antibiotics (antimicrobial peptides) that are relative newcomers to the field, but is otherwise just another antibiotic. It is not a new mechanism of action, biosynthetic origin, class of molecule, or anything like that. In other words, it is about as conventional as they come, but perhaps useful because we do and will continue to need new antibiotics.
For anybody who is interested, here is an open access article on the subject of newly discovered mammalian antimicrobial peptides as potential new antibiotics.
The bar for legal US immigration is low and it is intentionally made easy to immigrate. That is why some people don't think we should be giving a free pass to the illegals. They essentially bypassed taking a couple days to learn the Constitution and a basic English test and an oath of loyalty to the US.
Interesting statement. It clearly indicates you know nothing about immigration to the US. While it is (relatively) easy to get a student visa to go to school in the US, it is far more difficult to get a resident-work visa. To get a resident-work visa, you first need to find an employer who is willling to sponsor you, fill out the paperwork, and pay the fee. Then you need a labor certification from the Department of Labor, more money and time. Then you can file the actual visa application (money) and wait for an eligible date (time). How long this takes depends on your visa category and the country you are applying from. If you are in the E3 category (Skilled Workers, Professionals, and Unskilled Workers (Other Workers)) and applying from an oversubscribed country (ex: Mexico), this can take a long time. Only 140,000 employment-based visas are granted for 2012. With a 7% cap on each country and an ~29% issuance to the E3 category, a restaurant worker from Mexico would be competing for one of ~2800 visas granted this year. They likely won't get it and will have to wait until the following year or longer.
That is the minimum required for immigration to work unless you are in the priority category or have some other kind of exemption. You could stop there. However, your visa will expire eventually and usually cannot be renewed. So if you want to stay in the US, you have to start applying for permanent residence, which is another big hassel that takes a lot of time and money. Without at least a Master's degree (PhD is better), you can be waiting for a lottery number for a very long time, and paying a lot of money in lawyer's and application fees.
So, no, it is not easy to immigrate to the US. It is arguably easy to figure out what forms to fill out and submit them, but it is not easy to get the actual visa that you need to get, which then allows you to get the permanent residence, which then allows you to apply for citizenship.
Gnome, etc are all pretty trivial to use until you get to things like adding printers
What the hell? GNOME definitely has some problems, but setting up printers is certainly not one of them, and that's been true for at least 6 or 7 years. Go to System Settings|Printers, click Add, type the ip address or hostname of the printer, maybe answer a question about some optional features that may be present (Duplexer, etc), done. If you are on a small enough network to be able to use mDNS/zeroconf and the printer is advertising itself, you don't need to type in the ip address or hostname, just select it from the list of network printers.
Meanwhile, even on OS X it isn't any easier. And when setting up non-postscript/pcl printers like the HP Color Laserjet 3600, it can be quite a pain, with each version of OS X having a slightly different workaround to make it work.
And Windows...the upside is the driver is certainly available, just download it and click through the installer. The downside, you have to download and install the driver. For the above mentioned HP on Windows 7, that's a 148 MB download, and it installs a bunch of crapware along with it.
Wow, TFS/TFS is terrible, and not at all an accurate description of TOR (the original research). For those too lazy to click the parent's link, here is the abstract of the article,
MicroRNA-mediated gene regulation is important in many physiological processes. Here we explore the roles of a microRNA, miR-941, in human evolution. We find that miR-941 emerged de novo in the human lineage, between six and one million years ago, from an evolutionarily volatile tandem repeat sequence. Its copy-number remains polymorphic in humans and shows a trend for decreasing copy-number with migration out of Africa. Emergence of miR-941 was accompanied by accelerated loss of miR-941-binding sites, presumably to escape regulation. We further show that miR-941 is highly expressed in pluripotent cells, repressed upon differentiation and preferentially targets genes in hedgehog- and insulin-signalling pathways, thus suggesting roles in cellular differentiation. Human-specific effects of miR-941 regulation are detectable in the brain and affect genes involved in neurotransmitter signalling. Taken together, these results implicate miR-941 in human evolution, and provide an example of rapid regulatory evolution in the human linage.
Now, I realize this might be a bit technical for the non-biologists. But suffice it to say, the article is about microRNA-mediated gene regulation (the first sentence). A microRNA is not the same thing as a gene. It is a regulatory RNA that influences transcription and post-transcriptional modification of SETS of genes. So in other words, a mutation event that resulted in the creation of a new microRNA resulted in changes in the regulation of genes linked to brain function, as well as some compensatory mutations that likely affected the extent of regulation of those and other genes by the microRNA.
I can only surmise from your comment that you must be using a distro like Suse or Fedora, which is the source of your problems. Suse I've used on and off over the years, and never have been happy with them. Just questionable decisions with regard to configuration, setup utilities, and buggy interfaces. Fedora is definitely not a desktop distro. Every time I give it a try, I run into some kind of ridiculous problem (crashy, graphics artifacts, broken packages) within the first couple of weeks. So if you really want a desktop distro, what you need is Ubuntu. It's the only distro, out of hundreds, that is really focused on desktop usability, and that is why people like me stick with it despite things like unity-lens-shopping. There just isn't a good alternative, or at least I haven't found one. With Ubuntu, most of your list goes away: 1) No RTFM on the ubuntuforums. I have never seen it. 2) No dependency hell. Ever. And the PPA respoitories are nice when you are looking for custom packages. 3) No binary blob or proprietary codec war. In older versions of Ubuntu these were opt-in, but now they are installed by default. So everything works pretty well out of the box. 4) For SAMBA, what is it you are trying to do? File sharing is pretty easy to setup in Ubuntu. If you are looking to join a domain, then SADMS is what you are looking for.
As for your other list: 1) What kind of RAW support do you need. Darktable supports pretty much everything. 2) Adobe yes, well, you can say the same thing about MS Office or any other proprietary software. Adobe isn't going to sink the development cost into supporting linux when the market just isn't there. So you'll just have to dual-boot for this if you really need it. Ditto for games. 3) Your embroidery software has a reasonably good chance of working with Wine. I've managed to get a number of simple Windows applications to work this way. 4) iPhone agreed. This is due to Apple suckiness mostly, though. The protocol has to be reverse-engineered to get it to work on linux. It's being worked on, but progress is slow. 5) Bravo SE, seems like they have some kind of linux support, but again, without the market they don't have the pressure to make it work. The upside is they do seem to have an SDK, so an interested linux developer could take it up as a project. 6) Which printer? A number of Brother printers are supported. 7) Silverlight? Don't expect MS to cooperate on this. They could and it would work with minimal effort, but they won't.
You need to install Kerberos. That is what Active Directory is, see: LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and file/print sharing, all rolled up into a nice package. It appears the Ubuntu package doesn't include it as a dependency, which it should, so I would blame the package manager.
I agree, the docs need to be better, but Samba4 hasn't officially been released yet.
Really? Mine just says " Generated by NetworkManager".
So then you do know what program is editing your resolv.conf.
How is preventing DHCP from writing resolv.conf "breaking DHCP"?
Preventing the DHCP client from doing what it is intended to do is breaking DHCP. You can achieve the result you want by just editing/etc/network/interfaces. It's in the man page.
Another way of doing it is editing the the connection in NetworkManager, and instead of selecting DHCP under ipv4 settings, select DHCP (addresses only).
Because it adds nothing but another layer of kruft to fail. Yes, I could jump through the hoops and overcome 15 years of habit to no good end,
Editing a different config file from the one you are used to is not "jumping through hoops."
or I could just sudo apt-get uninstall resolvconf every time, and after every upgrade, just in case it tries to put it back again (and it has, at times).
That, on the other hand, is. Why not just take the most painless route to get what you want? Seriously, it's not that big of deal. There have been tons of similar changes to the Debian userland over the years (pam.d, update-rc.d, modprobe.d,...). All of them entail moving config files and using scripts or includes to keep master copies up to date. Yes, it might be frustrating to find something you already know has been changed, but it usually takes only about 5 minutes to get up to speed with the new setup.
There is a pretty good rationale for resolvconf on the developer website, if you actually really care about the why.
You would know this if you had ever used it with a network configuration of any complexity.
As someone who uses NetworkManager all the time on simple to complex configurations, I can tell you that it works just fine. In fact, for the fairly complicated kind (static routes, custom dhclient hooks, vpns, etc), NetworkManager makes it a lot easier than it ever used to be. It seems to me, linux users should be more capable of learning and adapting to new things than a typical computer user, but from the comments in this thread that is obviously not the case. Everybody just learned how to manually use the ifup script back in 1995, and anything different is just too complicated. Oh noes they moved the config file? Too bad there isn't anything like a man page that might tell you where it is....
In short, NetworkManager is crude hack
Far from it. NetworkManager is an actual robust network management tool, unlike the init.d/ hacks that existed before.
I never know what utility is overwriting my resolv.conf but
Really? The first line of the file says "# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)". And if you just read the man page, you are told which files to edit to make changes to the resolver config.
The reason turning off write doesn't work is because resolvconf runs as root, of course. And it's not a good idea anyway unless you like breaking DHCP.
Servers, almost by definition, don't move around much, and those that do will need a slightly more robust configuration by an intelligent operator, rather than having the static (or semi-static) configurations clobbered by a "helpful" utility.
Perhaps you just need to learn how to work with said utility. I can complain that they screwed up apt because I can't edit/etc/apt/sources.list directly anymore. Or I can just realize that they moved custom configurations to/etc/apt/sources.list.d, which actually solves two problems. It allows you to more easily revert changes, and it prevents the package manager from clobbering the config file every time it updates the package. For system connections, NetworkManager does very little differently than the old/etc/init.d/networking script. It's just the config file that has moved to a different place.
but they replaced it with resolvconf, which makes a glorious pain in the ass out of itself by deciding it's smarter than you when it comes to your/etc/resolv.conf config file
And what's wrong with just editing the files in/etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/? That one's in the man page. You can also edit/etc/network/interfaces like you always have. You just can't edit/etc/resolv.conf directly.
I find NetworkManager annoying because I don't know how it works, and can't change it with a terminal
It depends. If it is a system-connection, you can edit in a terminal as normal (/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections). If it is a user connection, you have to use dconf. A little annoying, but not unbearable. Have a look at the gsettings tool. Makes it scriptable fairly easily.
Networking starts up only after someone logs in? Really?
Uh, no. A wired connection starts up the same way as it always has. A wireless connection can be configured to start up before login, easily. In addition, you have all of the extra features NM provides, like VPN and DSL dialing support, which you could conceivably need on a server. Sure you can do it manually, but NM makes it so much easier.
It's fixable -- just uninstall network manager (and resolvconf)
What's wrong with resolvconf? It's just a script that updates the resolver. No different really than a lot of the other maintenance scripts (ex: update-rc.d).
Sure sure, lots of cronyism to go around. Not arguing that. Just trying to say there was a technically superior product availble. Even joint-developed by MS as you point out! It failed, along with a number of other notables (WordPerfect, Novell, Netscape, Eudora), not because they were technically bad, but because of market manipulation by MS.
Though I am sure you'll find some nonsense revisionist reason to blame MS for CDE sucking
Um, no. CDE sucked yes, and no it wasn't MS fault. But CDE wasn't ever competition for Windows. It ran on the old proprietary Unices on custom hardware and was never in the running to be a consumer OS running on off-the-shelf x86 hardware. OS/2 was, though, and it definitely didn't suck.
MS did have market forces working for it, but you totally ignore the missteps, bumbling and stumbling by the competition while MS executed well, across DOS, Windows, Office etc.
There was far more of the former than you are acknowledging. IBM did, in some ways, have its head up its ass by not recognizing the potential for the x86 market much earlier, but they were responsible for the BIOS that made DOS possible. OS/2 failed because it was never bundled by OEMs and had limited native software (Lotus vs. Office). The early history of MS is characterized almost entirely by inferior, buggy, software replacing technically superior software, either because MS was able to get sweet bundling deals with OEMs, or because they were able to undercut their competition in price. And because they also made a strong effort to be incompatible with everything else, there was no turning back after you switched to MS.
Take Netscape for example, it was good the first few versions and then later IE 4-5 was actually objectively better.
IE did some things better than Netscape and Netscape did some things better than IE. It mostly came down to preference which one you would choose. And this would have been fine except for the fact that IE started implementing HTML behaviors in ways that weren't documented anywhere (standards-based or otherwise). So web developers, then, had to choose which browser to develop for (completely contrary to the principles of the web), and then market share suddenly became important (cue problems with bundling). If IE vs. Netscape had only been about technical merits, let the best browser win, nobody would have cared. But much like the Office file formats, MS became the de facto standard that nobody could compete against because it was intentionally incompatible with everything.
For the latest example of such a thing, see Sony stumbling with the PS3, while the XBox overtook it in sales.
And for another example, see MS stumbling with HD-DVD, while BluRay won the HD battle. I would say the PS3 is not doing badly. The division is profitable and total units sold is not far behind Xbox360. Meanwhile, PS3 has not suffered from things like the "bricking" issue. While Sony may have stumbled by committing to the Cell processor, I think their biggest problem is lack of good developer tools. You can't really criticize the hardware. It really is fantastic.
Actually, there was. OS/2 Warp, by many accounts, was superior to Win95 in every technical way. It even ran Windows software reasonably well. The major problem: it was never sold by OEMs bundled with PCs. You could buy it on the shelf and install it yourself, but most people wouldn't do that. And then later, the compatibility started to suffer as well, as the popular software (Office, IE) started using APIs that weren't implemented by OS/2. What OS/2 really needed was it's own software ecosystem (very similar to the challenges linux has today), but that never emerged.
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What do you think a shortage is? When crude oil tops $200/barrel, we don't say there is an abundance of high quality oil that costs more. We say there is an oil shortage. That is the nature of markets. It is a negotiation between what people are willing to work/sell for and what people are will to pay/buy for. When parties feel the balance is tipped too far in one direction, it is declared a "shortage" or a "surplus", depending on your perspective.
What peripheral drivers would you like to install? What is it about Linux that prevents you from installing them? Is it because they are not available? That would be the manufacturers fault. There really is no excuse for this. The facilities for producing userspace drivers for just about anything have been available in Linux for a long time. Manufacturers don't have to open source or submit them to upstream repositories, but they do have to write them. If they don't...who's going to write it for them? And no, just because it is bad for Aunt Tillie does not mean it is a fault with Linux, anymore than the D-Link DWA-130 not working on OS X is a problem with Apple.
(precisely how many sound subsystems has Linux had over the years?)
Uh, one: ALSA since the 2.6 kernel. I will agree that certain desktop distributions (I'm looking at you Ubuntu) like to beta-test and screw around for no apparent reason resulting in breakage, but you can easily install a Linux desktop and have the sound work out of the box with no messing around. For a period of time that wasn't Ubuntu, though.
A blind spot to anything that doesn't work very well. Anyone who's tried to do anything beyond a very vanilla setup knows all about this.
Define "work well." I mean we all have our own standards. Some things are just irritating because it may be bad scrollbar behavior, or something, but not everybody is bothered by these sorts of things. It's easy to criticize Ubuntu for the things they miss or break (because these irritate us the most) and forget the good things they have contributed (they were the first distribution to make a proprietary driver installer for the desktop, for example). I don't know, it's not perfect, but I've never used a desktop, Linux or otherwise, that was.
Did you happen to notice the statement,
The following is a list of genetic disorders and if known, causal type of mutation and the chromosome involved.
(emphasis added)
Yes, there are a lot of genetic disorders, but no, there are not many we can identify by simply looking at the genome.
Doing a new genome is very hard and still quite expensive, although technology and techniques have improved things.
Yes, that and the quoted cost is, I'm assuming, $1000 for a single chip run, which gives you a maximum of 10 Gb or only ~3X coverage (actual will probably be less). That's usually how marketing blurbs work. Even for SNP analysis, you are going to need around 40X coverage, so the cost per genome is much higher than what they are saying, and is still at least an order of magnitude more expensive than Illumina.
The problem is somebody has to pay for the publishing. It's not free. It costs money to hire editors, typesetters, to print paper copies, to run servers, to solicit peer reviewers and make editorial decisions, to maintain archives, to maintain searchable databases, to electronically archive older papers, to do artwork (yes, I know, but it's still part of it), to solicit news/reviews/perspective articles. So where is that money going to come from? Right now a chunck comes from the researchers themselves. The rest comes from the subscription fees. You can argue that more tax money should go to support publication, so that there will be more open access. But either way, money is going to come from public pockets. The cost of publishing has to be borne somewhere. Do you want more of the NIH/NSF/DOE/DARPA/etc budget to pay for publishing instead of research? Or do you want to raise taxes to support a publishing fund of some type? What's the solution? Because I see a lot of griping, but no real solutions.
And why then can't you just go to your local university library to get access? I mean really, it's not that hard. I'm not a big fan of the publishing industry, but I've never had trouble getting access to an article I needed. If the library doesn't have a subscription, interlibrary loan works pretty well.
Still, I doubt it would really cost $1m. We've become surprisingly good, and clever, at discovering mutations in recent years. With the human genome we already have a pretty good scaffold. You would need high genome coverage. That is cheap these days. The expensive part is the analysis, but there is a lot of stuff out there to make this much easier than it used to be. I would be surprised if the cost is even $100k. If they are saying $1m, they are full of it.
It really depends on the nature of the mutation. If you're trying to identify a random mutation in single differentiated cells, like you describe, then it is hopeless. But in all likelihood it would be a more general mutation shared by all or a large number of cell types that happened pre-differentiation (ie: in the germ cell).
The summary and medicaldaily article are fairly horrid, so here is the abstract of the research article. The full article is also available for those who have access.
Misstatements of the posted summary/article,
1) Discovery is of a new antibiotic (an antimicrobial peptide), not antibody.
2) Statement in the article: "They cause much less drug resistance of microbes than conventional antibiotics.", referring to antimicrobial peptides is a ridiculous statement not substantiated by anything.
3) The "kinetics" of the antimicrobial activity, as published, is not particularly useful for determining efficacy in the clinic. Since the drug they compared against, clindamycin, is completely different in every way from their peptide, it doesn't really say anything at all. They probably screened a number of antibiotics for this "test" and cherry-picked this result to highlight their find.
4) Use of the term "conventional antibiotic" is misleading. This is a new member of a class of antibiotics (antimicrobial peptides) that are relative newcomers to the field, but is otherwise just another antibiotic. It is not a new mechanism of action, biosynthetic origin, class of molecule, or anything like that. In other words, it is about as conventional as they come, but perhaps useful because we do and will continue to need new antibiotics.
For anybody who is interested, here is an open access article on the subject of newly discovered mammalian antimicrobial peptides as potential new antibiotics.
The bar for legal US immigration is low and it is intentionally made easy to immigrate. That is why some people don't think we should be giving a free pass to the illegals. They essentially bypassed taking a couple days to learn the Constitution and a basic English test and an oath of loyalty to the US.
Interesting statement. It clearly indicates you know nothing about immigration to the US. While it is (relatively) easy to get a student visa to go to school in the US, it is far more difficult to get a resident-work visa. To get a resident-work visa, you first need to find an employer who is willling to sponsor you, fill out the paperwork, and pay the fee. Then you need a labor certification from the Department of Labor, more money and time. Then you can file the actual visa application (money) and wait for an eligible date (time). How long this takes depends on your visa category and the country you are applying from. If you are in the E3 category (Skilled Workers, Professionals, and Unskilled Workers (Other Workers)) and applying from an oversubscribed country (ex: Mexico), this can take a long time. Only 140,000 employment-based visas are granted for 2012. With a 7% cap on each country and an ~29% issuance to the E3 category, a restaurant worker from Mexico would be competing for one of ~2800 visas granted this year. They likely won't get it and will have to wait until the following year or longer.
That is the minimum required for immigration to work unless you are in the priority category or have some other kind of exemption. You could stop there. However, your visa will expire eventually and usually cannot be renewed. So if you want to stay in the US, you have to start applying for permanent residence, which is another big hassel that takes a lot of time and money. Without at least a Master's degree (PhD is better), you can be waiting for a lottery number for a very long time, and paying a lot of money in lawyer's and application fees.
So, no, it is not easy to immigrate to the US. It is arguably easy to figure out what forms to fill out and submit them, but it is not easy to get the actual visa that you need to get, which then allows you to get the permanent residence, which then allows you to apply for citizenship.
Gnome, etc are all pretty trivial to use until you get to things like adding printers
What the hell? GNOME definitely has some problems, but setting up printers is certainly not one of them, and that's been true for at least 6 or 7 years. Go to System Settings|Printers, click Add, type the ip address or hostname of the printer, maybe answer a question about some optional features that may be present (Duplexer, etc), done. If you are on a small enough network to be able to use mDNS/zeroconf and the printer is advertising itself, you don't need to type in the ip address or hostname, just select it from the list of network printers.
Meanwhile, even on OS X it isn't any easier. And when setting up non-postscript/pcl printers like the HP Color Laserjet 3600, it can be quite a pain, with each version of OS X having a slightly different workaround to make it work.
And Windows...the upside is the driver is certainly available, just download it and click through the installer. The downside, you have to download and install the driver. For the above mentioned HP on Windows 7, that's a 148 MB download, and it installs a bunch of crapware along with it.
Wow, TFS/TFS is terrible, and not at all an accurate description of TOR (the original research). For those too lazy to click the parent's link, here is the abstract of the article,
MicroRNA-mediated gene regulation is important in many physiological processes. Here we explore the roles of a microRNA, miR-941, in human evolution. We find that miR-941 emerged de novo in the human lineage, between six and one million years ago, from an evolutionarily volatile tandem repeat sequence. Its copy-number remains polymorphic in humans and shows a trend for decreasing copy-number with migration out of Africa. Emergence of miR-941 was accompanied by accelerated loss of miR-941-binding sites, presumably to escape regulation. We further show that miR-941 is highly expressed in pluripotent cells, repressed upon differentiation and preferentially targets genes in hedgehog- and insulin-signalling pathways, thus suggesting roles in cellular differentiation. Human-specific effects of miR-941 regulation are detectable in the brain and affect genes involved in neurotransmitter signalling. Taken together, these results implicate miR-941 in human evolution, and provide an example of rapid regulatory evolution in the human linage.
Now, I realize this might be a bit technical for the non-biologists. But suffice it to say, the article is about microRNA-mediated gene regulation (the first sentence). A microRNA is not the same thing as a gene. It is a regulatory RNA that influences transcription and post-transcriptional modification of SETS of genes. So in other words, a mutation event that resulted in the creation of a new microRNA resulted in changes in the regulation of genes linked to brain function, as well as some compensatory mutations that likely affected the extent of regulation of those and other genes by the microRNA.
I can only surmise from your comment that you must be using a distro like Suse or Fedora, which is the source of your problems. Suse I've used on and off over the years, and never have been happy with them. Just questionable decisions with regard to configuration, setup utilities, and buggy interfaces. Fedora is definitely not a desktop distro. Every time I give it a try, I run into some kind of ridiculous problem (crashy, graphics artifacts, broken packages) within the first couple of weeks. So if you really want a desktop distro, what you need is Ubuntu. It's the only distro, out of hundreds, that is really focused on desktop usability, and that is why people like me stick with it despite things like unity-lens-shopping. There just isn't a good alternative, or at least I haven't found one. With Ubuntu, most of your list goes away:
1) No RTFM on the ubuntuforums. I have never seen it.
2) No dependency hell. Ever. And the PPA respoitories are nice when you are looking for custom packages.
3) No binary blob or proprietary codec war. In older versions of Ubuntu these were opt-in, but now they are installed by default. So everything works pretty well out of the box.
4) For SAMBA, what is it you are trying to do? File sharing is pretty easy to setup in Ubuntu. If you are looking to join a domain, then SADMS is what you are looking for.
As for your other list:
1) What kind of RAW support do you need. Darktable supports pretty much everything.
2) Adobe yes, well, you can say the same thing about MS Office or any other proprietary software. Adobe isn't going to sink the development cost into supporting linux when the market just isn't there. So you'll just have to dual-boot for this if you really need it. Ditto for games.
3) Your embroidery software has a reasonably good chance of working with Wine. I've managed to get a number of simple Windows applications to work this way.
4) iPhone agreed. This is due to Apple suckiness mostly, though. The protocol has to be reverse-engineered to get it to work on linux. It's being worked on, but progress is slow.
5) Bravo SE, seems like they have some kind of linux support, but again, without the market they don't have the pressure to make it work. The upside is they do seem to have an SDK, so an interested linux developer could take it up as a project.
6) Which printer? A number of Brother printers are supported.
7) Silverlight? Don't expect MS to cooperate on this. They could and it would work with minimal effort, but they won't.
You need to install Kerberos. That is what Active Directory is, see: LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and file/print sharing, all rolled up into a nice package. It appears the Ubuntu package doesn't include it as a dependency, which it should, so I would blame the package manager.
I agree, the docs need to be better, but Samba4 hasn't officially been released yet.
Really? Mine just says " Generated by NetworkManager".
So then you do know what program is editing your resolv.conf.
How is preventing DHCP from writing resolv.conf "breaking DHCP"?
Preventing the DHCP client from doing what it is intended to do is breaking DHCP. You can achieve the result you want by just editing /etc/network/interfaces. It's in the man page.
Another way of doing it is editing the the connection in NetworkManager, and instead of selecting DHCP under ipv4 settings, select DHCP (addresses only).
Because it adds nothing but another layer of kruft to fail. Yes, I could jump through the hoops and overcome 15 years of habit to no good end,
Editing a different config file from the one you are used to is not "jumping through hoops."
or I could just sudo apt-get uninstall resolvconf every time, and after every upgrade, just in case it tries to put it back again (and it has, at times).
That, on the other hand, is. Why not just take the most painless route to get what you want? Seriously, it's not that big of deal. There have been tons of similar changes to the Debian userland over the years (pam.d, update-rc.d, modprobe.d, ...). All of them entail moving config files and using scripts or includes to keep master copies up to date. Yes, it might be frustrating to find something you already know has been changed, but it usually takes only about 5 minutes to get up to speed with the new setup.
There is a pretty good rationale for resolvconf on the developer website, if you actually really care about the why.
You would know this if you had ever used it with a network configuration of any complexity.
As someone who uses NetworkManager all the time on simple to complex configurations, I can tell you that it works just fine. In fact, for the fairly complicated kind (static routes, custom dhclient hooks, vpns, etc), NetworkManager makes it a lot easier than it ever used to be. It seems to me, linux users should be more capable of learning and adapting to new things than a typical computer user, but from the comments in this thread that is obviously not the case. Everybody just learned how to manually use the ifup script back in 1995, and anything different is just too complicated. Oh noes they moved the config file? Too bad there isn't anything like a man page that might tell you where it is....
In short, NetworkManager is crude hack
Far from it. NetworkManager is an actual robust network management tool, unlike the init.d/ hacks that existed before.
I never know what utility is overwriting my resolv.conf but
Really? The first line of the file says "# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)". And if you just read the man page, you are told which files to edit to make changes to the resolver config.
The reason turning off write doesn't work is because resolvconf runs as root, of course. And it's not a good idea anyway unless you like breaking DHCP.
Servers, almost by definition, don't move around much, and those that do will need a slightly more robust configuration by an intelligent operator, rather than having the static (or semi-static) configurations clobbered by a "helpful" utility.
Perhaps you just need to learn how to work with said utility. I can complain that they screwed up apt because I can't edit /etc/apt/sources.list directly anymore. Or I can just realize that they moved custom configurations to /etc/apt/sources.list.d, which actually solves two problems. It allows you to more easily revert changes, and it prevents the package manager from clobbering the config file every time it updates the package. For system connections, NetworkManager does very little differently than the old /etc/init.d/networking script. It's just the config file that has moved to a different place.
but they replaced it with resolvconf, which makes a glorious pain in the ass out of itself by deciding it's smarter than you when it comes to your /etc/resolv.conf config file
And what's wrong with just editing the files in /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/? That one's in the man page. You can also edit /etc/network/interfaces like you always have. You just can't edit /etc/resolv.conf directly.
I find NetworkManager annoying because I don't know how it works, and can't change it with a terminal
It depends. If it is a system-connection, you can edit in a terminal as normal (/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections). If it is a user connection, you have to use dconf. A little annoying, but not unbearable. Have a look at the gsettings tool. Makes it scriptable fairly easily.
No it isn't. If you think it is, you obviously don't know anything about NetworkManager.
Networking starts up only after someone logs in? Really?
Uh, no. A wired connection starts up the same way as it always has. A wireless connection can be configured to start up before login, easily. In addition, you have all of the extra features NM provides, like VPN and DSL dialing support, which you could conceivably need on a server. Sure you can do it manually, but NM makes it so much easier.
It's fixable -- just uninstall network manager (and resolvconf)
What's wrong with resolvconf? It's just a script that updates the resolver. No different really than a lot of the other maintenance scripts (ex: update-rc.d).
Sure sure, lots of cronyism to go around. Not arguing that. Just trying to say there was a technically superior product availble. Even joint-developed by MS as you point out! It failed, along with a number of other notables (WordPerfect, Novell, Netscape, Eudora), not because they were technically bad, but because of market manipulation by MS.
Though I am sure you'll find some nonsense revisionist reason to blame MS for CDE sucking
Um, no. CDE sucked yes, and no it wasn't MS fault. But CDE wasn't ever competition for Windows. It ran on the old proprietary Unices on custom hardware and was never in the running to be a consumer OS running on off-the-shelf x86 hardware. OS/2 was, though, and it definitely didn't suck.
MS did have market forces working for it, but you totally ignore the missteps, bumbling and stumbling by the competition while MS executed well, across DOS, Windows, Office etc.
There was far more of the former than you are acknowledging. IBM did, in some ways, have its head up its ass by not recognizing the potential for the x86 market much earlier, but they were responsible for the BIOS that made DOS possible. OS/2 failed because it was never bundled by OEMs and had limited native software (Lotus vs. Office). The early history of MS is characterized almost entirely by inferior, buggy, software replacing technically superior software, either because MS was able to get sweet bundling deals with OEMs, or because they were able to undercut their competition in price. And because they also made a strong effort to be incompatible with everything else, there was no turning back after you switched to MS.
Take Netscape for example, it was good the first few versions and then later IE 4-5 was actually objectively better.
IE did some things better than Netscape and Netscape did some things better than IE. It mostly came down to preference which one you would choose. And this would have been fine except for the fact that IE started implementing HTML behaviors in ways that weren't documented anywhere (standards-based or otherwise). So web developers, then, had to choose which browser to develop for (completely contrary to the principles of the web), and then market share suddenly became important (cue problems with bundling). If IE vs. Netscape had only been about technical merits, let the best browser win, nobody would have cared. But much like the Office file formats, MS became the de facto standard that nobody could compete against because it was intentionally incompatible with everything.
For the latest example of such a thing, see Sony stumbling with the PS3, while the XBox overtook it in sales.
And for another example, see MS stumbling with HD-DVD, while BluRay won the HD battle. I would say the PS3 is not doing badly. The division is profitable and total units sold is not far behind Xbox360. Meanwhile, PS3 has not suffered from things like the "bricking" issue. While Sony may have stumbled by committing to the Cell processor, I think their biggest problem is lack of good developer tools. You can't really criticize the hardware. It really is fantastic.
There was no competition
Actually, there was. OS/2 Warp, by many accounts, was superior to Win95 in every technical way. It even ran Windows software reasonably well. The major problem: it was never sold by OEMs bundled with PCs. You could buy it on the shelf and install it yourself, but most people wouldn't do that. And then later, the compatibility started to suffer as well, as the popular software (Office, IE) started using APIs that weren't implemented by OS/2. What OS/2 really needed was it's own software ecosystem (very similar to the challenges linux has today), but that never emerged.