Doesn’t the icon that in this case, the milk case, says “open this way” remind you of something? Something that you thought was out of your life, and then it all of a sudden invades your Saturday morning coffee. It’s profane. That dear innocent milk, i hope it is - I’m giving the best of credits till it’s guilt has been proven, has been infected by the beast. It has come to my home, it has chosen a soft and holy moment for it’s Trojan invasion. God damn it.
While the Medison Celebrity $150 laptop was obviously a good idea, it was — as some have noticed — very, very poorly executed. While debates on whether or not it’s actually at all possible to produce a laptop that cheap are still heated, I don’t think anyone disagrees that a $150 laptop would be nothing but great.
In a recent article on Slashdot is given yet another reason — actually two reasons — to not use MSN (not even just the Microsoft client, but the entire protocol). Apparently Microsoft is aware that malicious URLs can be sent through MSN, so they figured they’d better block some of them. Actually, they’re blocking the sub-strings, which means that .scr will catch not only http://example.com/file.scr but also http://example.com/my.screenshot.png and everything else containing the string .scr. The blocking is done server-side, so it doesn’t matter if you use the official Microsoft MSN client or Pidgin (The IM Client Formerly Known as Gaim), Adium or whatever’s available out there.
Now, what’s really retarded is that each and every TinyURL still gets through just fine (but probably not for long now) and now Microsoft has to play catch-up to maintain that list of blocked sub-strings. This is really, really stupid, because the poor end-user will never know why their link to http://cutesie.example.com/pics.php isn’t sent — just that it’s not. And most people will probably never see the list and know which words they can’t use, hence confusion. Besides, the fact that Microsoft choose to “solve” problems in this way instead of fixing the vulnerabilities in their software, just makes me wonder how common this practice is to them and how many other problems they’ve “fixed” in a similar manner.
I finally got the stuff moved to another and better web server (very kindly provided by my dad) so hopefully response times will be quite a bit lower than before. I must say, WordPress requiring more than what the old server was capable of delivering was somewhat of a disappointment, but hell, one’s got to get with the times. Standardization over bastardization, glossy gradients over semi-transparency and squircle is the new rounded rectangle!
All this server-raum means a couple of things besides response times. First of all, there may be problems that I haven’t discovered, so let me know if you encounter some. Second, in my experience webmail, ViewVC and stuff has gotten a lot more responsive to the point of actually being usable, so to those affected by that, do enjoy!
The Medison Celebrity appears to be too good to be true. It’s cheap, comes with Linux preinstalled (Fedora, according to the FAQ) and ships in only 4–6 weeks! We all know, that on the internet, when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.
If we look a little into this, the domain seems to be registered via Surftown A/S and if we look up the server hosting the site, we get:
madsen ~ $ host medisoncelebrity.com
medisoncelebrity.com has address 212.97.132.106
medisoncelebrity.com mail is handled by 10 mail4.surftown.nu.
madsen ~ $ host 212.97.132.106
106.132.97.212.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ws6.surf-town.net.
The same is the case for medison.se, which is the Medison company web site.
All this seems kinda weird, since Medison states in their FAQ:
Q: Why is the laptop much cheaper than other laptops?
A: We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop. The other reason is that we have our own plants where we assemble our laptops.[Emphasis mine.]
They have their own plants for assembling the laptops, but they don’t have a web/mail server and need hosting from Surftown? Maybe one could argue that it’s all to keep the laptop cheap, but I still think it’s fishy. Besides, their first reason for the low price is ridiculous — not a single company has ever survived on a business model based on charity.
Apart from that, their web sites (medison.se and medisoncelebrity.com) look really, really unprofessional and are really sparse on specific information except that they claim to have been doing some designs of different sorts, but apparently they weren’t able to transfer even the smallest amount of those skills to their web sites. Also, it seems strange that their contact address is in Kent, UK while the company claims to be Swedish, but there may be perfectly good reasons for that, I guess.
Furthermore, it appears that a second Medison exists — also a technology firm, this one is Korean though, but active all over the world. I find it hard to believe that both have existed alongside each other since 1996 (when the Swedish Medison claims to have been founded) without any legal clashes about the name and one of them being forced to take another name.
On top of it all, it seems really, really odd, that this completely obscure Swedish company all of a sudden offers some of the cheapest laptops in the world.
However, should this turn out to be true, then it’s absolutely great and I’d definitely recommend it to a lot of people. Let me know if you have any experience (good or bad) with them.