In a move that's been expected for some time, Dell has announced that for the first time, it will offer PCs with Linux pre-installed. The move makes sense for a few reasons. For one thing, Dell has always touted itself as having the most customizable computers, so giving users their choice of operating systems would seem to fit with the company's ethos. A more important factor may have been the growing Microsoft tax. As many people have pointed out, as hardware prices continue to drop, proprietary software accounts for a larger and larger slice of the cost of a computer. Thus it makes sense for computer makers, which compete intensely on cost, to offer equivalent solutions that don't require them to hand a big chunk over to Microsoft. Dell's entry into the desktop Linux market probably won't do a whole lot to stem its recent woes, but the company needs all the help it can get as it deals with a surging HP, and a computer market that isn't seeing any tailwind from the release of Vista.

A few years back there was a study saying that sending SMS text message reminders to smokers helped them quit. Unfortunately, as you started to dig into the study, there were some problems with it. It was still only a minority of folks in the program who quit (28%), and the researchers hadn't been able to follow up with patients just six months later to see if they had remained free of cigarettes. Now there's a new study out about SMS and smoking -- but it's a lot less ambitious. It just says that doctor's who send text messages to people to ask if they're smoking get a much better response than sending traditional letters. That's not much of a surprise, but it hardly means that the people responding to these text messages from their doctors are any more likely to quit smoking.