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SDF, Silence is Defeat, and other providers that come up if you search for "public access unix" should fit the bill. The price for basic E-mail should range from free to a few dollars a month, and other services like DNS and domain registration should be pretty easy to set up. The best thing of all is that these systems usually have a nice community of users and one or more admins who can give personal attention to whatever services you're paying for. I have some personal experience with SDF, so I can say with some assurance that it is a nice community, the way more of the Internet used to be.

This happens with several of my laptops. It stings a little if you touch it and are well grounded (i.e. barefoot, resting feet on a desktop computer case and an arm on the laptop case). It is understandable with the unpolarized, ungrounded, PSUs. I'm not an SMPS designer, but IIRC the situation is that the power supplies provide an RF ground through low value capacitors to reduce EMI since they can't have a real ground. This will result in some leakage current, which can be enough to be felt but shouldn't be dangerous. Personally I think it is really annoying.

I was surprised to see it with some of my supposedly grounded Dell PSUs though. I still don't know the reason for that. Here's the laptop case voltage as seen on one of my scopes.

That said, if you want to prepare yourself for a switch in general, the best thing to do is replace as many of your current apps with crossplatform and/or opensource apps, and open or standard file formats for all your documents- OpenOffice.org, gAIM, Firefox for more common stuff; xchat ( http://silenceisdefeat.org/~b0at/xchat/win32/ [silenceisdefeat.org] - several builds don't have the $20 fee), and so forth for less common apps. Mostly, applications are interchangeable, files may not be. You need to identify any sticking points first, before the switch- this applies to any platform.

Unfortunately there's one app that doesn't run in Linux and there is not a FOSS app that does what it does, Photoshop. GIMP is good but they're still working on a 16 bit version. Nor can it do some of what PS can do. You can run PS in Crossover Linux but not CS, only PS 7 runs well.

Linux works fine on the laptop. Use an Ubuntu livedisc (dapper or edgy- dapper has Long Term Support, whereas Edgy is more up to date) to test it out to make sure it works before installing, and when installing do a dualboot- it's not hard to do (literally all you have to do is check the radio button to partition the hard disc and select the percentage of the HD to give the preexisting OS) and that way if things don't work out in ubuntu your windows install is safe and sound, leaving you free to try out another distro.

I specify Ubuntu because it has a livedisc installer, and I know the partitioning on the installer is extremely easy to do- doesn't hurt that Ubuntu is also a fairly newbie-friendly distro.

That said, if you want to prepare yourself for a switch in general, the best thing to do is replace as many of your current apps with crossplatform and/or opensource apps, and open or standard file formats for all your documents- OpenOffice.org, gAIM, Firefox for more common stuff; xchat ( http://silenceisdefeat.org/~b0at/xchat/win32/ - several builds don't have the $20 fee), and so forth for less common apps. Mostly, applications are interchangeable, files may not be. You need to identify any sticking points first, before the switch- this applies to any platform.

Don't blame linux or os x for being "broken" when "broken" really just means "different". This is generally more a problem with old geezers/technophobes, but also a problem with people who are used to Windows's way of doing things.

It's been said by some that the people who have the hardest time switching are the "power users", because they have a lot of knowledge of "how to do *somewhat advanced thing*" that isn't the same across OSes. An example would be something like changing the screen resolution, or maybe a bit more advanced, setting up a printer; or adding/removing users.

Wow, terrible example and one that actually damages Open Source on Windows. X-Chat Windows blatantly violates the GPL and LGPL The code needs to be tweaked to build on Windows, and he won't make those changes public even though he'll sell you the binary. It's not like it's all his code to dual-license. Plenty of people have contributed patches, of which he'll "remove if they request" but he feels free to include them wtihout asking anyway because they "didn't specify a license" (hmm, how about the GPL you're distributing it under, dumbass!). Finally, he's statically linking to the GTK libs which are LGPL. His excuse if that it's a lot of work to create Windows builds. I'm sure it is, but that doesn't give him some magic license exception. Not to mention plenty of people are willing to do it for free anyway.

my copy/paste works correctly

Oh and I don't get this at all. Copy/paste for me is better with Linux than Windows. Windows doesn't have the middle button functionality that Linux does.

Mirror here: http://www.silenceisdefeat.org/mirrors/www.smh.com .au/articles/2004/03/28/1080412234274.html