I can imagine a handful of huge telecommunications corporations are making huge profits on almost useless pieces of strange teleconferencing solutions that they sell to high level managers in big organizations.

Yes, I'm looking at you Konftel (and glancing at you Sonera).

If we'd all just jump to the internet age and use skype, or better yet, ekiga, or wengophone.

About two weeks ago I ordered a Dell XPS M1330. It's obviously a very popular laptop abroad, but here in Finland I haven't seen anyone packing one. I guess the main reason is that you can't find it here anywhere in-store. You'll have to contact the corporate sales of Dell Finland and request one.

In the end it wasn't that difficult. Just build one from e.g. Dell Sweden, send the specs to your appointed seller (better call in advance to give your details) and then confirm the purchase.

I was harassing them with a lot of questions, such as "can I buy the laptop abroad and then order a sv-keyboard?" and "can I get the ubuntu laptop in Finland?". Both were answered "no". The price for my laptop was around 1300e for a system with 3GB RAM, 2.40GHz processor, Nvidia 8400GS, led-display, etc.. so it's no that bad for a Finn price.

Now I've installed Ubuntu Studio, which kicks butt. It's an artist version of Ubuntu with spiffy graphics and a lot of audiovisual content creation programs.

I'll write a short howto once I get the Dell Mediadirect working..