But when it starts telling me the C:\ drive on my Linux box is infected it's hard to stop laughing.
You moron, it was complaining about your.wine directory!
It's an even bigger giggle for those who don't have wine installed, and still get that ludicrous C:\ drive is infected message. I got one a few weeks ago, and it even listed a bunch of Windows DLLs (which I obviously don't have) as being infected. It was potentially a nasty one also, since clicking anywhere on the pop-up - even cancel or close - would have downloaded the malware on a Windows box.
"The Taurus 2010 will average 17mpg in the city and 25mpg on the motorway, on a par with the competition"
WTF? I've had two Tauruses, and both had 3L V6 motors with automatic, air, cruise, etc. My average with the 1986 model was about 32 mpg for mostly city/suburban driving. With the 1997 model, it was a bit worse, about 29 mpg. BTW, these are imperial gallons, but multiplying by 0.833 to convert to US gallons still gives 24-26 mpg for city/suburban driving. On long trips by highway, the 1986 model could average 45-50 mpg (around 37-41 mpg/US).
Admittedly, it's not a compact car, but what exactly have the marketing geniuses done to ruin its fuel economy like that? Mere engineers could not have accomplished it unaided.
Charge your Google account with $10, spend that, a penny every few clicks, charge it again.
Sounds like a Murdoch wet dream...
As soon as you start doing that, just watch the price ratchet go into action: the micropayment amount increases per page, stories split over more and more pages (each paid, but still with advertising), pop-ups tempting you with related stories or with premium versions of the stories with more details and higher prices.
That crap is not for me. I'll stick with news that's paid for in other ways (news.bbc.co.uk, yle.fi/uutiset, etc.) and is more reliable and trustworthy than anything from the Murdochs of the world. And I'll limit my subscription for news to just The Economist, thank you very much.
Most universities/polytechs/etc. are quite Linux-friendly here. They generally have a mix of machines, and avoid doing anything particularly hostile to any one platform.
Really? So why post like just another spotty-faced AC?
I would like to join in with the Linux community
You're looking in the wrong place. There are many "linux communities", but this is not really one of them. This is/. which is infested with opinionated fanboi-types (linux & mac more than windows). And a few voices of reason, often drowned out.
There are no IQ's "over 170" IQ is a statistical measure conforming to a standard bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Like all such measures, any value beyond 3 standard deviations is an outlier and can not be considered accurate.
My "MENSA ego stroking BS IQ for people stupid enough to pay to be told how smart they are" is 186, my real IQ is 143.
Well, IQ categories are defined for the range above 175 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_reference_chart, but IQ is a rather dodgy metric per se. In fact, I'd argue that a person does not have a single IQ score, but rather a broad range of test outcomes, depending on which test is actually selected.
When I was in senior high school (about 35 years ago), I was given a few IQ tests, taken some weeks apart over a period of about three months. The range of scores was remarkable, partly being explained that each test was considered "valid" only for some range of outcomes. My highest score was 193, the lowest was barely 130, the other two were spaced between those extremes. So, what was my IQ at that time? I have no idea, but the scores were somehow important to me, since I was merely a schoolkid with no real accomplishments. What's my IQ now? Probably lower due to age, but I really have no idea and don't much care - I have my degrees in two engineering disciplines (one a PhD), numerous patents and technical publications, family, houses, and so forth. Accomplishments count for more than an ability in crosswords and pattern recognition and the like.
Presumably, there would be a mechanism for extracting a tolerable atmosphere for breathing and for growing food, and equipment for turning Martian dirt into agrochemicals.
We've never successfully maintained a closed, artificial environment for any length of time. Some of the attempts were not completely closed systems, and others experienced huge problems in maintaining a liveable atmosphere. So the bottom line is that you'd either have to bring enormous quantities of life support material (oxygen, water, food, etc) with you, or have some reliable method of manufacturing them on site. The first is obviously out of the question for a mission of any length. And we don't really have the technology down to do the second.
Uh, why do you say it's a "huge presumption" and talk about a closed system, when I actually presumed an open system (do you attack strawmen often?). I'm aware of the several attempts at closed habitats here on Earth and their dismal results.
That's why I presumed we would NOT try to have a closed system on Mars, but one which could take mostly local inputs, be capable of only partial recycling, and which would produce a considerable amount of unrecycled waste. The more raw materials are at hand (quantity and variety), the less pressure for recycling. However, I agree that we don't yet have the requisite technology mastered.
"If God wanted us to be naked, we'd be born that way." - Oscar Wilde
Presumably a prude who objects even to simple nudity must have had a mother who kept her pants on through the entire birth, and insisted on the baby closing its eyes before being allowed to suckle her breast.
Food, drinking water, and oxygen will be the major limiting factors. That's assuming you can take along a habitat to mitigate the temperatures and dust storms. If the team lasts say 10 years, you'll run into other problems, like clothing and maintaining the shelter.
Presumably, there would be a mechanism for extracting a tolerable atmosphere for breathing and for growing food, and equipment for turning Martian dirt into agrochemicals. Essentially, Martian raw materials will be processed into food for plants, which will convert it into food for humans, who will convert it into shit. Only some of the shit can be recycled back into the soil (human shit is not as good for plants as horse shit is). After 10 years of dumping the surplus shit outside, you'll have made a good start on terraforming the local surroundings...
After sufficient time, Mars would be knee-deep in shit, and look just like Earth.
And pay how much for shipping when your local record store doesn't carry a given artist?
There's a point the media companies don't seem to grasp somewhere in here.
I have bought several CDs from the UK or from the US, and paid postage (and import duty & taxes on the US CDs) to get them to Finland. This was because they were "not available" from the distributor with the Finland monopoly on importing the label in question, even though the CDs were in production. So, visiting several local music stores, I could not even order the CDs I wanted, despite having the full catalog information including ASIN.
I'm willing to pay for music I want, in an amount that depends on how much I want it. I'm not willing to pay for music I don't want, and refuse to do so. Streaming music has to be essentially free, just like FM radio, and luckily it is far more eclectic. I'll occasionally buy something I hear, if I like it enough. However, what I buy is rarely the "hit" of the moment or anything from the "star" of the moment. Since I already have a library of about 300 CDs (which are all ripped onto our home LAN and our MP3 players), the amount of new music I buy is rather limited, but not necessarily cheap.
Over the course of a year, you would spend $60 for unlimited streaming of whatever songs / media they offer.
There's the flaw in this logic for many of us. The selection offered may have gaping holes, or may be dominated by trash from a few "favoured" labels. It may also remove music after a while, when it becomes "old" and unhyped.
Sorry, but my MP3 player has 15GB of music I legally own, in genres from classical to jazz to pop to rock to reggae to salsa to metal, and including performances from the 1950s to the present. This has been accumulated over years, and represents most of the roughly 300 CDs that my wife and I own, plus a small amount of non-DRM music purchased online (e.g. American Baroque). Streaming via internet "radio" etc. is good for getting exposure to new music, but anything worth keeping for repeated listening is probably worth buying.
They went RAID 6, even though it is slow as shit, for the added failsafe mechanisms.
How long does it take to rebuild the array if a disk has to be replaced? Each RAID 6 volume is 15 disks of 1.5TB each (19.5TB data + 3TB parity). So either they'd have to take a real performance hit during a relatively short rebuild period, or a smaller hit over a longer rebuild period. Longer rebuild periods increase the odds of further failures before the rebuild is complete.
Here are some results from a Linux box:
Arora 0.8.0 - OK
Chromium 4.0.205 - OK
Dillo 0.8.6 - Complete failure. Dillo does not appear to support div at all (it's a fast, but feature-poor browser).
Epiphany 2.26.1 - OK
Firefox 3.0.13 - OK
Firefox 3.5.2 (Shiretoko) - OK
Galeon 2.0.6 - OK
Opera 10.0 - Dragging the lower edge of the window: Works fine on reducing window height up to a point, and thereafter the divs don't resize. Divs are unchanged in size on increasing window height. Dragging upper border of window: Divs do not resize on increasing or reducing the window height.
SeaMonkey 1.1.17 browser - OK
I don't have Conkeror or Konqueror installed, so they weren't tested. For obvious reasons, I also did not test Lynx or elinks (or wget or curl)... Dillo and Seamonkey were installed temporarily just for this test, then removed.
FWIW, I tend to use Epiphany/Firefox/Opera about equally, but for different purposes, and Arora/Chromium/Galeon not at all (installed out of curiosity, never removed).
In ye goode olde days, even just a "Microsoft exists" would generate a flurry of pure hate
The problem with this was that the two minutes hate often didn't last much more then two minutes, and was a bit repetitive and superficial. For recidivist agents of spiteful malevolence such as Microsoft, even a detailed two decades hate would not suffice.
My E71 has a 3.2 MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash. It's also SHIT. Really, unusably shit. Google "E71 Camera" if you don't want to take my word for it.
The E71 is the shittiest shit that a shitter ever shat. Shitty battery life, shitty camera (with a shitty non-Zeiss lens, BTW), and a shitty UI. The internal qwerty keyboard was OK for a few months, now one key is dead, and another two are jammed. The external telephone keypad has a major design failure - the keys used in combination to lock/unlock the keypad stick up further than the others, guaranteeing that the combo is pressed with the phone in your pocket, with variable results (black photos or videos, inadvertent outgoing calls, drained battery). My employer inflicts this shit on me, alas. A couple of colleagues "lost" or "accidentally broke" their E71s, to find the replacement was a brand new E71.
Well, the competition for that title is pretty stiff. While GIMP's UI is different to Photoshop's, it is no more so than, say, that of Picture Window Pro (if you don't know it, check it out - it's comparable to Photoshop and had full 16bit image handling before Photoshop did). UI in graphics tools appears to be a matter of preference, with opinions formed strongly by one's first powerful tool.
Inkscape produces some of the shittiest SVG files I've ever see, its the IE of SVG,
Please explain. Inkscape's SVG appears to be as compliant with the standard and certainly does not break anything. What's shitty with that? However, I agree that IE is rather shitty, being noncompliant/subversive with standards among other things.
I've not used Scribus, but considering what you're touting as replacements for the other options I'm going to safely assume that its absolute shit as well.
As you say, you have not used Scribus, so your assumtion is uninformed speculation. I have used Scribus for a few years, and it's a capable substitute for PageMaker, which I have also used. You should try Scribus out; it's quite a nice program.
Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.
Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.
What exactly is it preventing?
I use Scribus a bit, and it lets me input text in bold etc. Just select the face you want from the Style menu, and start typing (with cursor in a suitable place for text). I have not used InDesign, but did endure PageMaker 6.5 on XP, and I'd rank Scribus on Ubuntu as nicer to work with.
While they're at it they should vote to make PI equal to three.
But pi is three, according to the bible. And since US courts require witnesses to swear at the bible (or on it, perhaps by sitting or standing on it), there can be only one outcome in this case.
It is mumbled in 1 Kings 7:23 He made the sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.
Note that for a diameter of 10 the circumference is 30 (so pi=3.0), not 31 or 31 and a little bit as the atheists and infidels claim. Alternatively, the Earth was much smaller when this particular biblical passage was written, the whole planet having a diameter of just 19 cubits...
A lot of this is done by the GOES satellites already. They are in polar orbits, so they pass about every 90 minutes over each pole. Having ground stations means more continuous coverage (maybe at lower cost), but there's a lot of Eatmosphere in the way, often murky...
Except one doesn't have to go through those extra steps when using Windows which is kind of the point.
Your point is correct, too.
There are some Linux distros which are quite battery-friendly, but the more popular/capable ones (Suse, Ubuntu, etc.) leave quite a few daemons running which should be shut down to preserve battery. Prime candidates are some network services (but perhaps not all of them), and optical disk polling. Here's a link to a script which allows you to stop/start a few specific groups of services, giving a notable effect on battery life. http://unksi.kapsi.fi/powersave.sh I am not the author of the script.
But you are right (FWIW we're Linux-only at home). Linux should include a few start/stop options for services in a simple power management GUI for laptops. It should not be necessary to write shell scripts, or to become an expert in configuration files, just to get decent battery life.
Slashdot Mirror
But when it starts telling me the C:\ drive on my Linux box is infected it's hard to stop laughing.
You moron, it was complaining about your .wine directory!
It's an even bigger giggle for those who don't have wine installed, and still get that ludicrous C:\ drive is infected message. I got one a few weeks ago, and it even listed a bunch of Windows DLLs (which I obviously don't have) as being infected. It was potentially a nasty one also, since clicking anywhere on the pop-up - even cancel or close - would have downloaded the malware on a Windows box.
"The Taurus 2010 will average 17mpg in the city and 25mpg on the motorway, on a par with the competition"
WTF? I've had two Tauruses, and both had 3L V6 motors with automatic, air, cruise, etc. My average with the 1986 model was about 32 mpg for mostly city/suburban driving. With the 1997 model, it was a bit worse, about 29 mpg. BTW, these are imperial gallons, but multiplying by 0.833 to convert to US gallons still gives 24-26 mpg for city/suburban driving. On long trips by highway, the 1986 model could average 45-50 mpg (around 37-41 mpg/US).
Admittedly, it's not a compact car, but what exactly have the marketing geniuses done to ruin its fuel economy like that? Mere engineers could not have accomplished it unaided.
Charge your Google account with $10, spend that, a penny every few clicks, charge it again.
Sounds like a Murdoch wet dream...
As soon as you start doing that, just watch the price ratchet go into action: the micropayment amount increases per page, stories split over more and more pages (each paid, but still with advertising), pop-ups tempting you with related stories or with premium versions of the stories with more details and higher prices.
That crap is not for me. I'll stick with news that's paid for in other ways (news.bbc.co.uk, yle.fi/uutiset, etc.) and is more reliable and trustworthy than anything from the Murdochs of the world. And I'll limit my subscription for news to just The Economist, thank you very much.
Most universities/polytechs/etc. are quite Linux-friendly here. They generally have a mix of machines, and avoid doing anything particularly hostile to any one platform.
Hi. I'm an adult.
Really? So why post like just another spotty-faced AC?
I would like to join in with the Linux community
You're looking in the wrong place. There are many "linux communities", but this is not really one of them. This is /. which is infested with opinionated fanboi-types (linux & mac more than windows). And a few voices of reason, often drowned out.
It would be nice to have the option to mark the post as "flame-bait" but not subtract rating points.
Indeed. Sometimes, modding "+1 flame-fu" would be appropriate, if it were possible.
Your neighbors will probably ignore the Windows 7 and spend their time on the couch, having an in-depth demonstration of birth control options.
Fixed that for you... assuming you've got sensible neighbours, of course.
There are no IQ's "over 170" IQ is a statistical measure conforming to a standard bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Like all such measures, any value beyond 3 standard deviations is an outlier and can not be considered accurate.
My "MENSA ego stroking BS IQ for people stupid enough to pay to be told how smart they are" is 186, my real IQ is 143.
Well, IQ categories are defined for the range above 175 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_reference_chart, but IQ is a rather dodgy metric per se. In fact, I'd argue that a person does not have a single IQ score, but rather a broad range of test outcomes, depending on which test is actually selected.
When I was in senior high school (about 35 years ago), I was given a few IQ tests, taken some weeks apart over a period of about three months. The range of scores was remarkable, partly being explained that each test was considered "valid" only for some range of outcomes. My highest score was 193, the lowest was barely 130, the other two were spaced between those extremes. So, what was my IQ at that time? I have no idea, but the scores were somehow important to me, since I was merely a schoolkid with no real accomplishments. What's my IQ now? Probably lower due to age, but I really have no idea and don't much care - I have my degrees in two engineering disciplines (one a PhD), numerous patents and technical publications, family, houses, and so forth. Accomplishments count for more than an ability in crosswords and pattern recognition and the like.
Presumably, there would be a mechanism for extracting a tolerable atmosphere for breathing and for growing food, and equipment for turning Martian dirt into agrochemicals.
We've never successfully maintained a closed, artificial environment for any length of time. Some of the attempts were not completely closed systems, and others experienced huge problems in maintaining a liveable atmosphere. So the bottom line is that you'd either have to bring enormous quantities of life support material (oxygen, water, food, etc) with you, or have some reliable method of manufacturing them on site. The first is obviously out of the question for a mission of any length. And we don't really have the technology down to do the second.
Uh, why do you say it's a "huge presumption" and talk about a closed system, when I actually presumed an open system (do you attack strawmen often?). I'm aware of the several attempts at closed habitats here on Earth and their dismal results.
That's why I presumed we would NOT try to have a closed system on Mars, but one which could take mostly local inputs, be capable of only partial recycling, and which would produce a considerable amount of unrecycled waste. The more raw materials are at hand (quantity and variety), the less pressure for recycling. However, I agree that we don't yet have the requisite technology mastered.
"If God wanted us to be naked, we'd be born that way." - Oscar Wilde
Presumably a prude who objects even to simple nudity must have had a mother who kept her pants on through the entire birth, and insisted on the baby closing its eyes before being allowed to suckle her breast.
Food, drinking water, and oxygen will be the major limiting factors. That's assuming you can take along a habitat to mitigate the temperatures and dust storms. If the team lasts say 10 years, you'll run into other problems, like clothing and maintaining the shelter.
Presumably, there would be a mechanism for extracting a tolerable atmosphere for breathing and for growing food, and equipment for turning Martian dirt into agrochemicals. Essentially, Martian raw materials will be processed into food for plants, which will convert it into food for humans, who will convert it into shit. Only some of the shit can be recycled back into the soil (human shit is not as good for plants as horse shit is). After 10 years of dumping the surplus shit outside, you'll have made a good start on terraforming the local surroundings...
After sufficient time, Mars would be knee-deep in shit, and look just like Earth.
I'd rather buy music on physical CDs
And pay how much for shipping when your local record store doesn't carry a given artist?
There's a point the media companies don't seem to grasp somewhere in here.
I have bought several CDs from the UK or from the US, and paid postage (and import duty & taxes on the US CDs) to get them to Finland. This was because they were "not available" from the distributor with the Finland monopoly on importing the label in question, even though the CDs were in production. So, visiting several local music stores, I could not even order the CDs I wanted, despite having the full catalog information including ASIN.
I'm willing to pay for music I want, in an amount that depends on how much I want it. I'm not willing to pay for music I don't want, and refuse to do so. Streaming music has to be essentially free, just like FM radio, and luckily it is far more eclectic. I'll occasionally buy something I hear, if I like it enough. However, what I buy is rarely the "hit" of the moment or anything from the "star" of the moment. Since I already have a library of about 300 CDs (which are all ripped onto our home LAN and our MP3 players), the amount of new music I buy is rather limited, but not necessarily cheap.
Over the course of a year, you would spend $60 for unlimited streaming of whatever songs / media they offer.
There's the flaw in this logic for many of us. The selection offered may have gaping holes, or may be dominated by trash from a few "favoured" labels. It may also remove music after a while, when it becomes "old" and unhyped.
Sorry, but my MP3 player has 15GB of music I legally own, in genres from classical to jazz to pop to rock to reggae to salsa to metal, and including performances from the 1950s to the present. This has been accumulated over years, and represents most of the roughly 300 CDs that my wife and I own, plus a small amount of non-DRM music purchased online (e.g. American Baroque). Streaming via internet "radio" etc. is good for getting exposure to new music, but anything worth keeping for repeated listening is probably worth buying.
They went RAID 6, even though it is slow as shit, for the added failsafe mechanisms.
How long does it take to rebuild the array if a disk has to be replaced? Each RAID 6 volume is 15 disks of 1.5TB each (19.5TB data + 3TB parity). So either they'd have to take a real performance hit during a relatively short rebuild period, or a smaller hit over a longer rebuild period. Longer rebuild periods increase the odds of further failures before the rebuild is complete.
Actually, Rule #1 says that only Bill can show the Monkey Dance video at internal MS meetings.
Here are some results from a Linux box:
Arora 0.8.0 - OK
Chromium 4.0.205 - OK
Dillo 0.8.6 - Complete failure. Dillo does not appear to support div at all (it's a fast, but feature-poor browser).
Epiphany 2.26.1 - OK
Firefox 3.0.13 - OK
Firefox 3.5.2 (Shiretoko) - OK
Galeon 2.0.6 - OK
Opera 10.0 - Dragging the lower edge of the window: Works fine on reducing window height up to a point, and thereafter the divs don't resize. Divs are unchanged in size on increasing window height. Dragging upper border of window: Divs do not resize on increasing or reducing the window height.
SeaMonkey 1.1.17 browser - OK
I don't have Conkeror or Konqueror installed, so they weren't tested. For obvious reasons, I also did not test Lynx or elinks (or wget or curl)... Dillo and Seamonkey were installed temporarily just for this test, then removed.
FWIW, I tend to use Epiphany/Firefox/Opera about equally, but for different purposes, and Arora/Chromium/Galeon not at all (installed out of curiosity, never removed).
In ye goode olde days, even just a "Microsoft exists" would generate a flurry of pure hate
The problem with this was that the two minutes hate often didn't last much more then two minutes, and was a bit repetitive and superficial. For recidivist agents of spiteful malevolence such as Microsoft, even a detailed two decades hate would not suffice.
My E71 has a 3.2 MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash. It's also SHIT. Really, unusably shit. Google "E71 Camera" if you don't want to take my word for it.
The E71 is the shittiest shit that a shitter ever shat. Shitty battery life, shitty camera (with a shitty non-Zeiss lens, BTW), and a shitty UI. The internal qwerty keyboard was OK for a few months, now one key is dead, and another two are jammed. The external telephone keypad has a major design failure - the keys used in combination to lock/unlock the keypad stick up further than the others, guaranteeing that the combo is pressed with the phone in your pocket, with variable results (black photos or videos, inadvertent outgoing calls, drained battery). My employer inflicts this shit on me, alas. A couple of colleagues "lost" or "accidentally broke" their E71s, to find the replacement was a brand new E71.
Hold both the home button and the sleep/wake button for ~15 seconds. That should solve your problem.
So that's what makes them explode!
GIMP has the worst UI known to man.
Well, the competition for that title is pretty stiff. While GIMP's UI is different to Photoshop's, it is no more so than, say, that of Picture Window Pro (if you don't know it, check it out - it's comparable to Photoshop and had full 16bit image handling before Photoshop did). UI in graphics tools appears to be a matter of preference, with opinions formed strongly by one's first powerful tool.
Inkscape produces some of the shittiest SVG files I've ever see, its the IE of SVG,
Please explain. Inkscape's SVG appears to be as compliant with the standard and certainly does not break anything. What's shitty with that? However, I agree that IE is rather shitty, being noncompliant/subversive with standards among other things.
I've not used Scribus, but considering what you're touting as replacements for the other options I'm going to safely assume that its absolute shit as well.
As you say, you have not used Scribus, so your assumtion is uninformed speculation. I have used Scribus for a few years, and it's a capable substitute for PageMaker, which I have also used. You should try Scribus out; it's quite a nice program.
Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.
Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.
What exactly is it preventing?
I use Scribus a bit, and it lets me input text in bold etc. Just select the face you want from the Style menu, and start typing (with cursor in a suitable place for text). I have not used InDesign, but did endure PageMaker 6.5 on XP, and I'd rank Scribus on Ubuntu as nicer to work with.
"exceptable" indeed! Thanks for the giggles - that link was quite funny in a mildly tortured way. Now here's a funny one in return http://gospelofreason.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/god-said-pi-3-stand-by-your-beliefs-dammit/
While they're at it they should vote to make PI equal to three.
But pi is three, according to the bible. And since US courts require witnesses to swear at the bible (or on it, perhaps by sitting or standing on it), there can be only one outcome in this case.
It is mumbled in 1 Kings 7:23 He made the sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.
Note that for a diameter of 10 the circumference is 30 (so pi=3.0), not 31 or 31 and a little bit as the atheists and infidels claim. Alternatively, the Earth was much smaller when this particular biblical passage was written, the whole planet having a diameter of just 19 cubits...
A lot of this is done by the GOES satellites already. They are in polar orbits, so they pass about every 90 minutes over each pole. Having ground stations means more continuous coverage (maybe at lower cost), but there's a lot of Eatmosphere in the way, often murky...
Except one doesn't have to go through those extra steps when using Windows which is kind of the point.
Your point is correct, too.
There are some Linux distros which are quite battery-friendly, but the more popular/capable ones (Suse, Ubuntu, etc.) leave quite a few daemons running which should be shut down to preserve battery. Prime candidates are some network services (but perhaps not all of them), and optical disk polling. Here's a link to a script which allows you to stop/start a few specific groups of services, giving a notable effect on battery life. http://unksi.kapsi.fi/powersave.sh I am not the author of the script.
But you are right (FWIW we're Linux-only at home). Linux should include a few start/stop options for services in a simple power management GUI for laptops. It should not be necessary to write shell scripts, or to become an expert in configuration files, just to get decent battery life.