I want the authors to pretend to show interest in the things that they author:) I think i'm annoyed at the total lack of any evidence that the reporter asked any questions at all.
I can't expect everyone to get a twinkle in their eye if we come a little closer to colonizing other planets, but I can get pissed off occasionally when they don't I suppose, especially if its a reporter.
Mars isn't the only place (hopefully) that these investigations will take place. You don't need to understand the technology to appreciate its usefulness and ask a few questions.
But, good point. Its not (entirely) the BBC's fault.
The TFA is just long enough to piss you off that its not longer and more detailed. You walk away with a picture of lakes and possibly oceans iced over and covered up by a few million years of space dust.
Apparently, instead of using a spectrometer, he's comparing seasonal changes in thermal infrared patterns. It doesn't mention if he's comparing AGAINST spectrometer data, it doesn't mention how he's able to determine depth, and it doesn't mention why its any more accurate than just using a spectrometer.
I could tell that someone who knows much less than I do about how to find water on mars wrote the article, and I know next to nothing on the subject. After reading TFA, I still know next to nothing on the subject.
Well, is it the file system, or the file system manager?
I can't tell, the site is experiencing the/. effect.
Mirror of the patch (I grabbed it when I saw this in the firehose) can be grabbed here until my server gets sluggish too.
in/usr/src type : patch -p1 linux-2.6.20.3-ext3cow.patch
The site said its not been tested with other kernel versions, but if you feel brave just s/linux-2\.6\.20\.3/your-version/g. Haven't tried it, but should work.
It wen't dark just around the time I was getting the docs and utilities.
Did anyone happen to grab the utilities? Got a link?
Could be that someday, somebody is going to cobble together a P2P-style redundant agent that coulod convert a botnet into a big-assed torrent server.
Only if egress filtering were outlawed by congress, or a serious serious hole was found in the 2.6 Linux kernel. One of the other things that makes botnets yummy for spam is the fact that port 25 is often NOT filtered on egress, so if your able to escape / inject and get a shell, you're home free.
Bot's aren't so hot at accepting incoming connections because they need root priviliges to circumvent such firewalls. Servers behind anything serious do this at the switch/router level, so even a fully compromised server is only useful for so much.
Bots that can be controlled centrally are usually controlled via the same route that they came in. The hacker will just save the link to the weak forum script and use it to inject more code that forks their bot.
The really yummy servers to infest are the ones with 100+ meg connections, typically web hosting servers. Its usually desktops with significantly less bandwidth (and use) that don't filter egress. Once again, the most efficient and profitable way to use those is, well, sending spam.
Anyway you look at it, spam is the best option for them in most cases.
Speak for yourself. Some of us, who perhaps regard freedom as more significant than money, would consider Stallman's definition to in fact be the "normal" meaning.
Has there always been this many anti-RMS trolls on/.?
Supporters of the common good will always be targets for those who covet money in excess of their actual need.
Notice I said covet, not simply 'want', there is a big difference. I'm of a similar mindset, I step in piles of money much like I step in piles of dog shit. I try to avoid both.
When I have money, I give away what I don't need. When I need money, I always seem to find it. Works for me:)
Hmmmm... I would of thought some of the peeps at NASA could of thought of a more individual gesture than that. I realise he's not a REAL spaceman, but surely everyone at the big N A S A can tie a bit of their personal motivation back to good old Scottie....
Discovery channel (last year) did a special on Vitamin Trek, how ST changed and helped shaped technology. If you look at the Ion Propulsion lab at NASA, it looks quite a bit like the engine room of the NCC 1701.
He was of course an actor, but his acting was geek inspiring. I would have thought catapulting him to the sun or on a course likely to hit one of the gas giants would have been more fitting. I guess that costs money though:)
So in memorium I'd just like to say :
Up your shaft.
(no, not flame bait, he said that on the Excelsior when the turbo lift talked to him)
I picked up a handful of SCOX shares the last time they were in danger of delisting. The paper certificates, framed, make for one of the best white elephant gifts in the IT sector. Even more desired than the chia pet or the Apple II people were swapping for. You pay extra to get the paper version, but at least the stock itself is less than a buck.
I think socks would be more fun as a gift, unless you got one paper certificate and used it to have some toilet paper printed.
Wipe, send back to SCO , repeat. Wipe, send back to SCO, repeat. One more time : Wipe, send back to SCO, repeat.
personally i hate using an initrd.img and prefer to build ext2 & ext3 support right in the kernel making initrd unnecessary, if you compile file system support as a module you will need an initrd.img too so insetead of selecting an "M" select "*" you could try that...
Its not just the file system you need, its the ability to spin the drive containing said file system too:) Its legacy HW that's getting fuzzy , not file systems. Not really sure why you hate initrds so much?
The initrd does many more things than load drivers. What if you have an AoE based storage network with many disk-less stations needing to use an OCFS2 single system image? Initrd's can do neat things besides loading modules, have a look at linuxrc. You can bring network adapters to an up/link state, negotiate iscsi targets, download a boot config from a resource controller, all kinds of goodies. Complex networks need to do lots of things before pivot_root gets called, and we need complex networks.
piix hasn't been 'quite right' since 2.6.16.29 on most of the legacy servers using PATA (IDE) I still have up and working, many of us have been having a difficult time with it. But progress is progress, and this is good progress so I guess my move to all SAS will be sooner than later.
We need to help each other educate ourselves about the corruption. Here is my summary of U.S. government corruption. Where's yours?
When I learned that US Citizens were being abducted, taken to third world countries like Syria tortured and held for a year or more without seeing the light of day (much less a lawyer), I kinda lost the motivation to write mine for fear of ending up there too:) Its sad when our Government actually proves consipracy nuts right and makes its citizenry afraid for their physical well being.
Instead, I put my money, my servers and my time into organizations like Democracy Now who have remained the only media voice of reason throughout this entire Bush/Cheney nightmare. I remember Dennis saying "Courage America, Courage... " when he saw this coming after Kerry won the Democratic primary. Your document is very well written and I do admire you for publishing it.. some of us however saw quieter more subtle ways to do something.
Thanks, Dennis for sticking with us. Once again, he'll probably end up making himself the target of ridicule and Neo Con harassment just so someone 'finally said it', impeach the bastards. Real leadership is paving the way for others to succeed, Dennis would have made a decent President. Instead, I hope he's successful at GETTING us a decent President. These nutjobs have GOT to go.
Eventually the all-consuming nature of that kind of job is going to wear you down. Getting out before it breaks you into a thousand pieces and then remakes you into a twisted version of yourself you barely recognize seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Sometimes you can also be more effective as a heckler rather than the guy behind the wheel. I don't think this is any kind of farewell. GPL3 will be done far before he's done with it.
While this will eventually (years later) trickle down to average Iraqis, make no mistake; right now it's by westerners for westerners.
I think it will trickle sooner than you think. Developing countries and developing markets are targets for (and need) infrastructure that competes. Wireless carriers are going to need to be rebuilt, internet, cable, voip, phone, everything. This is a pie with a few million slices the westerners can carve up any way they wish, but the Iraquis need to hurry up and eat it. I think you'll see modern accessible infrastructure of all kinds sooner than you think.
Now, I should add, everything I just said depends on the country stabilizing. Nobody is sure when or if that will ever happen.
I thought to myslef "Not again.. What the fuck is wrong with people."
We're a species at the top of the food chain who only has two (real / constant) natural predators : ourselves and viruses. This is an ugly side to nature, but its going to continue.
Problems that have a reasonable chance of soliciting guilt from us when dealing with them are treated very uniquely, we go after the symptoms and stay blissfully ignorant of the problems. They don't get fixed, they fester, amplify and something like this happens all over again.
We ourselves are becoming less compassionate, nature of course is following suit. I have no idea what to do about this, quite frankly I'm just happy I can articulate the problem. This type of thing will continue until an answer to the problem, not subsequent symptoms can also be articulated.
People smart enough to use computers get so easily worked up over a few hundred pixels on their screen, but roll over and take things like the Patriot Act right up the pooper without even a "mmmph".
People are modding this as flamebait, but I've seen far, FAR too many IT professionals take that stance with Spyware / Malware. I've seen a system get all sorts of nasty winlogon-enabled Spyware within minutes of being hooked up to a network, with no action on the user's part. Not only that, in a world where banner ad companies can get infected with trojans the idea of people only getting infected if they're doing something "shady" on their machine is utterly absurd.
It was a joke, just a joke and only a joke.
The link given is to Microsoft Bob, which Microsoft gave up on shortly after launching it and (according to Wikipedia) later admitted the product was their single largest failure in their company history.
You'd need to remember Bob in order to appreciate that Vista is well on its way to being "Bob 2".
I suppose any joke could be taken as flamebait lol, but really, its just a joke. Better put in/. terms :
its funny, laugh... or perhaps not, since I had to explain it:)
What about Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for data security and integrity? Call me crazy, but being portable is somewhat at odds with the text of this law.
I got the same weird vision of a bunch of sea containers on wheels, too. So , the 'meet-me' room would be in the back of the Semi's cab where the driver sleeps? or will that be put in the passenger seat, instead?
# ping domain.com PING domain.com (x.x.x.x) 56(84) bytes of data. Reply From y.y.y.y : datacenter got a flat tire en route Reply From z.z.z.z : driver alcohol content exceeded
Is this implying that it could be done remotely? The product I work on supports JTAG access via software, but if you can do that, you already own the box. (And have our internal hardware specifications.)
If it's not remote, then what's the point? I though it was already well-established that if you have physical access to the device you can do anything you want.
The researcher discovered a vulnerability via JTAG, however a Boundary Scan is obviously not needed to use the exploit remotely. A Boundary Scan is what lead to the discovery, but now that its discovered, anyone can do it from anywhere, from what I gathered from TFA.
If it hadn't been Juniper doing it, I probably would not have submitted TFA because it is a little incoherent and inconsistent.
My worry is that this exploit becomes a mega dose of Tetra (or, Phish Food), I would hope (and am confident that) this has already been reported , released and patched before being publicised , else Juniper would become food for Visa and Mastercard due to an irresponsible disclosure.
I think their point is simple. Hardware can have bugs like software, we should be looking at hardware too and not just assume that things like this don't exist. I'm sure there is some commercial benefit for Juniper in all of this, but the intent of the researcher seems to be good natured.
Take it with a grain of salt. Was interesting enough to warrant sharing:)
Windows Genuine Rootkit Advantage Roots for Sure Clippy Boot: "You seem to be wanting to run as Admin, can I help?" C'mon folks help me out!
I think Vista could come out with "That's not a bug, its a feature.. so that fully virtualized instances of Vista can be modified by third party boot loaders for dynamic reprovisioning".
Actually, since local access to fully virtualized instances is a moot point, it would be (arguably) a feature in that respect.
disk = [ 'phy:/hasta/la/vista/baby,ioemu:hda,w' ]
I'm just wondering now at what point they'll open source the whole damn mess hoping a community forms around it to fix it. Seems like that's already happening to a degree.
Really, I like writing. I think a term paper provides a convenient package by which to express what one has learned over the course of a semester.
I don't disagree, and writing is in no danger of becoming a lost art. Teaching, however must become an art again and teachers themselves must stop preaching regurgitated curriculums.
Stop asking students to ingest and regurgitate information in favor of actually helping them to understand the given topic and it would not be such an issue.
Anyone plagiarizing should not be in class anyway.
We'd quickly run out of teachers by that logic. Just as there are only so many combinations of words available to demonstrate an understanding of the topic, there are only so many combinations of words available that you can use to teach the topic.
Its a double standard both sides of the fence need to address. What lacks first is passion for educating, evidenced by a lack of passion for learning.
The whole point of Ubuntu is that it's supposed to be all free software, and since the MP3 isn't an open codec, it's not supported. And I'm pretty sure you're not even allowed to distribute Ubuntu with closed formats enabled by default. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here...
Its a grey area for me too. I know they can't distribute Ubuntu with the codecs installed, however enabling the universe / multiverse repositories will make those codecs just an apt-get away. Or, something like VLC can fill most of the need.
Can Dell just show people how to do that for themselves without catching lawsuits?
I seriously doubt that Dell would offer Ubuntu as an option. No MP3 support out of the box? That would really kill off the casual adopter.
I think they could show people how to enable universe / multiverse and get things like VLC without offending too many powers that be. However this would be an interesting topic to see go across those who know more about such licensing than I care to.
I'm not 100% sure they can even suggest it without incurring some kind of outlandish liability in the people's republic of sometown, Idaho.. but only one case sets precedent. Either way, it takes a company of considerable size and legal talent to take the 'first steps' , Dell is just as good as any to be the one doing it.
The surveys I took for them while they were gearing up on this were all bent to the server market (mostly) with some thought given to laptops. Why pay for vista when you can get Ubuntu.. try it out, and just install XP if you don't like it? It does make sense and I'm glad they are easing into it.
I just hope to not see 'Ubuntu powered Dell Laptop burns down house' in the news, and I hope the support they offer for it is better than trivial.
Sooner quite the opposite! A (The) flood of support calls on Vista might have been the trigger.
I saw some links to surveys Dell was gathering to see if people would be interested in them supporting Linux on their servers, if so what would be the distro and inclined use? , was basically the gist of it.
They were pretty popular on some of the Linux usergroups. I guess in a round about way you could in fact speculate that dell thinks Ubuntu is easier to support than Vista. But shh, don't say that too loud, or they'll quit doing it.
Sun, incidently is doing the same thing.. "Don't like Solaris? They run Ubuntu nicely, too... "
Does this mean that Dell will have to stop selling Windows? Or that they'll go bankrupt? Or will their offices be burned down to the ground? What was the reason for this not happening before again?
All good questions.
I'm sure the lack of interest in Vista has something to do with this. When MS is about to release a new OS, they talk to hardware vendors and share some market predictions. They expected to sell XX copies, which in turn translated to Dell means "We'll sell xx new PC's due to Vista". Its not just Dell, it was everyone, but Dell is the example.
Dell of course did not sell nearly as many PC's as they expected, sees part of their market headed for Ubuntu and RHEL and needs to follow the trend.
I don't know, however if they are violating some part of their resale agreement with Microsoft and its a very good question. Is MS just 'staying' this because they know it was Vista that ultimately lead to this happening, or are they going to really bitch about it?
As for their offices burning down, I guess that depends on how many employees are using Dell Laptops.
As for why now? Why not a year ago? I think it was due to 2.4 and earlier 2.6 kernels not going so well on their hardware. I also think the growing server market had a bit to do with it.
Finally Yes Dell could go bankrupt, but I doubt offering Linux as an option will have contributed to that if it happens. After all, its not the condom's fault that you forgot to put it on:)
Slashdot Mirror
I want the authors to pretend to show interest in the things that they author
I can't expect everyone to get a twinkle in their eye if we come a little closer to colonizing other planets, but I can get pissed off occasionally when they don't I suppose, especially if its a reporter.
Mars isn't the only place (hopefully) that these investigations will take place. You don't need to understand the technology to appreciate its usefulness and ask a few questions.
But, good point. Its not (entirely) the BBC's fault.
The TFA is just long enough to piss you off that its not longer and more detailed. You walk away with a picture of lakes and possibly oceans iced over and covered up by a few million years of space dust.
Apparently, instead of using a spectrometer, he's comparing seasonal changes in thermal infrared patterns. It doesn't mention if he's comparing AGAINST spectrometer data, it doesn't mention how he's able to determine depth, and it doesn't mention why its any more accurate than just using a spectrometer.
I could tell that someone who knows much less than I do about how to find water on mars wrote the article, and I know next to nothing on the subject. After reading TFA, I still know next to nothing on the subject.
I can't tell, the site is experiencing the
Mirror of the patch (I grabbed it when I saw this in the firehose) can be grabbed here until my server gets sluggish too.
in
The site said its not been tested with other kernel versions, but if you feel brave just s/linux-2\.6\.20\.3/your-version/g. Haven't tried it, but should work.
It wen't dark just around the time I was getting the docs and utilities.
Did anyone happen to grab the utilities? Got a link?
Only if egress filtering were outlawed by congress, or a serious serious hole was found in the 2.6 Linux kernel. One of the other things that makes botnets yummy for spam is the fact that port 25 is often NOT filtered on egress, so if your able to escape / inject and get a shell, you're home free.
Bot's aren't so hot at accepting incoming connections because they need root priviliges to circumvent such firewalls. Servers behind anything serious do this at the switch/router level, so even a fully compromised server is only useful for so much.
Bots that can be controlled centrally are usually controlled via the same route that they came in. The hacker will just save the link to the weak forum script and use it to inject more code that forks their bot.
The really yummy servers to infest are the ones with 100+ meg connections, typically web hosting servers. Its usually desktops with significantly less bandwidth (and use) that don't filter egress. Once again, the most efficient and profitable way to use those is, well, sending spam.
Anyway you look at it, spam is the best option for them in most cases.
Supporters of the common good will always be targets for those who covet money in excess of their actual need.
Notice I said covet, not simply 'want', there is a big difference. I'm of a similar mindset, I step in piles of money much like I step in piles of dog shit. I try to avoid both.
When I have money, I give away what I don't need. When I need money, I always seem to find it. Works for me
Discovery channel (last year) did a special on Vitamin Trek, how ST changed and helped shaped technology. If you look at the Ion Propulsion lab at NASA, it looks quite a bit like the engine room of the NCC 1701.
He was of course an actor, but his acting was geek inspiring. I would have thought catapulting him to the sun or on a course likely to hit one of the gas giants would have been more fitting. I guess that costs money though
So in memorium I'd just like to say :
Up your shaft.
(no, not flame bait, he said that on the Excelsior when the turbo lift talked to him)
I think socks would be more fun as a gift, unless you got one paper certificate and used it to have some toilet paper printed.
Wipe, send back to SCO , repeat. Wipe, send back to SCO, repeat. One more time : Wipe, send back to SCO, repeat.
Its not just the file system you need, its the ability to spin the drive containing said file system too
The initrd does many more things than load drivers. What if you have an AoE based storage network with many disk-less stations needing to use an OCFS2 single system image? Initrd's can do neat things besides loading modules, have a look at linuxrc. You can bring network adapters to an up/link state, negotiate iscsi targets, download a boot config from a resource controller, all kinds of goodies. Complex networks need to do lots of things before pivot_root gets called, and we need complex networks.
piix hasn't been 'quite right' since 2.6.16.29 on most of the legacy servers using PATA (IDE) I still have up and working, many of us have been having a difficult time with it. But progress is progress, and this is good progress so I guess my move to all SAS will be sooner than later.
When I learned that US Citizens were being abducted, taken to third world countries like Syria tortured and held for a year or more without seeing the light of day (much less a lawyer), I kinda lost the motivation to write mine for fear of ending up there too
Instead, I put my money, my servers and my time into organizations like Democracy Now who have remained the only media voice of reason throughout this entire Bush/Cheney nightmare. I remember Dennis saying "Courage America, Courage
Thanks, Dennis for sticking with us. Once again, he'll probably end up making himself the target of ridicule and Neo Con harassment just so someone 'finally said it', impeach the bastards. Real leadership is paving the way for others to succeed, Dennis would have made a decent President. Instead, I hope he's successful at GETTING us a decent President. These nutjobs have GOT to go.
Sometimes you can also be more effective as a heckler rather than the guy behind the wheel. I don't think this is any kind of farewell. GPL3 will be done far before he's done with it.
I think it will trickle sooner than you think. Developing countries and developing markets are targets for (and need) infrastructure that competes. Wireless carriers are going to need to be rebuilt, internet, cable, voip, phone, everything. This is a pie with a few million slices the westerners can carve up any way they wish, but the Iraquis need to hurry up and eat it. I think you'll see modern accessible infrastructure of all kinds sooner than you think.
Now, I should add, everything I just said depends on the country stabilizing. Nobody is sure when or if that will ever happen.
We're a species at the top of the food chain who only has two (real / constant) natural predators : ourselves and viruses. This is an ugly side to nature, but its going to continue.
Problems that have a reasonable chance of soliciting guilt from us when dealing with them are treated very uniquely, we go after the symptoms and stay blissfully ignorant of the problems. They don't get fixed, they fester, amplify and something like this happens all over again.
We ourselves are becoming less compassionate, nature of course is following suit. I have no idea what to do about this, quite frankly I'm just happy I can articulate the problem. This type of thing will continue until an answer to the problem, not subsequent symptoms can also be articulated.
Sad but true, imho anyway.
God may prefer something of greater value. Try a doughnut.
People smart enough to use computers get so easily worked up over a few hundred pixels on their screen, but roll over and take things like the Patriot Act right up the pooper without even a "mmmph".
Well, you asked.
It was a joke, just a joke and only a joke.
The link given is to Microsoft Bob, which Microsoft gave up on shortly after launching it and (according to Wikipedia) later admitted the product was their single largest failure in their company history.
You'd need to remember Bob in order to appreciate that Vista is well on its way to being "Bob 2".
I suppose any joke could be taken as flamebait lol, but really, its just a joke. Better put in
its funny, laugh.
I got the same weird vision of a bunch of sea containers on wheels, too. So , the 'meet-me' room would be in the back of the Semi's cab where the driver sleeps? or will that be put in the passenger seat, instead?
# ping domain.com
PING domain.com (x.x.x.x) 56(84) bytes of data.
Reply From y.y.y.y : datacenter got a flat tire en route
Reply From z.z.z.z : driver alcohol content exceeded
The researcher discovered a vulnerability via JTAG, however a Boundary Scan is obviously not needed to use the exploit remotely. A Boundary Scan is what lead to the discovery, but now that its discovered, anyone can do it from anywhere, from what I gathered from TFA.
If it hadn't been Juniper doing it, I probably would not have submitted TFA because it is a little incoherent and inconsistent.
My worry is that this exploit becomes a mega dose of Tetra (or, Phish Food), I would hope (and am confident that) this has already been reported , released and patched before being publicised , else Juniper would become food for Visa and Mastercard due to an irresponsible disclosure.
I think their point is simple. Hardware can have bugs like software, we should be looking at hardware too and not just assume that things like this don't exist. I'm sure there is some commercial benefit for Juniper in all of this, but the intent of the researcher seems to be good natured.
Take it with a grain of salt. Was interesting enough to warrant sharing
I can't resist
I think Vista could come out with "That's not a bug, its a feature
Actually, since local access to fully virtualized instances is a moot point, it would be (arguably) a feature in that respect.
disk = [ 'phy:/hasta/la/vista/baby,ioemu:hda,w' ]
I'm just wondering now at what point they'll open source the whole damn mess hoping a community forms around it to fix it. Seems like that's already happening to a degree.
Vista : From the people who brought you edlin.
I don't disagree, and writing is in no danger of becoming a lost art. Teaching, however must become an art again and teachers themselves must stop preaching regurgitated curriculums.
Stop asking students to ingest and regurgitate information in favor of actually helping them to understand the given topic and it would not be such an issue.
We'd quickly run out of teachers by that logic. Just as there are only so many combinations of words available to demonstrate an understanding of the topic, there are only so many combinations of words available that you can use to teach the topic.
Its a double standard both sides of the fence need to address. What lacks first is passion for educating, evidenced by a lack of passion for learning.
Its a grey area for me too. I know they can't distribute Ubuntu with the codecs installed, however enabling the universe / multiverse repositories will make those codecs just an apt-get away. Or, something like VLC can fill most of the need.
Can Dell just show people how to do that for themselves without catching lawsuits?
I think they could show people how to enable universe / multiverse and get things like VLC without offending too many powers that be. However this would be an interesting topic to see go across those who know more about such licensing than I care to.
I'm not 100% sure they can even suggest it without incurring some kind of outlandish liability in the people's republic of sometown, Idaho
The surveys I took for them while they were gearing up on this were all bent to the server market (mostly) with some thought given to laptops. Why pay for vista when you can get Ubuntu
I just hope to not see 'Ubuntu powered Dell Laptop burns down house' in the news, and I hope the support they offer for it is better than trivial.
I saw some links to surveys Dell was gathering to see if people would be interested in them supporting Linux on their servers, if so what would be the distro and inclined use? , was basically the gist of it.
They were pretty popular on some of the Linux usergroups. I guess in a round about way you could in fact speculate that dell thinks Ubuntu is easier to support than Vista. But shh, don't say that too loud, or they'll quit doing it.
Sun, incidently is doing the same thing
All good questions.
I'm sure the lack of interest in Vista has something to do with this. When MS is about to release a new OS, they talk to hardware vendors and share some market predictions. They expected to sell XX copies, which in turn translated to Dell means "We'll sell xx new PC's due to Vista". Its not just Dell, it was everyone, but Dell is the example.
Dell of course did not sell nearly as many PC's as they expected, sees part of their market headed for Ubuntu and RHEL and needs to follow the trend.
I don't know, however if they are violating some part of their resale agreement with Microsoft and its a very good question. Is MS just 'staying' this because they know it was Vista that ultimately lead to this happening, or are they going to really bitch about it?
As for their offices burning down, I guess that depends on how many employees are using Dell Laptops.
As for why now? Why not a year ago? I think it was due to 2.4 and earlier 2.6 kernels not going so well on their hardware. I also think the growing server market had a bit to do with it.
Finally Yes Dell could go bankrupt, but I doubt offering Linux as an option will have contributed to that if it happens. After all, its not the condom's fault that you forgot to put it on