How long can it take for package maintainers to update the source and run the package-assembly scripts.
I mean, it is automated, isn't it?
Yes. A good way to reduce even more the "when to notify" problem may be an automated security patch distribution protocol. Vendors sign up for security patches that they can then use to automatically create their own repackaged security updates in minutes. Vendors then vet in a few minutes (if at all) or whatever schedule they want. This should be much faster than a blackhat could get an exploit out and make the window of vulnerability small.
The security patch distribution protocol could be as simple as a defined email body, subject and attributes (priority, impact, affects-binary-directory-structure, may-affect-branding etc.) with OSS project public key signing. What types of patches are distributed this way would be precisely defined so vendors could automate with confidence. Optionally, if the vulnerability/patch isn't in the wild yet the contents could be encrypted so only trusted vendors could read it.
Much better to automate to reduce the need for a delay than to create a deliberate delay.
---
Are you thinking long term? Saving money by buying-of-the-shelf in the short term doesn't necessarily mean you'll save money in the long term.
Programming what? I suspect you're writing a lot of glue code.
My experience has been that many closed source shops spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel because OSS solutions they could adapt in much less time are not on their radar. This is at least partly because they have the expectation that they can't modify existing software, that being the rule in the closed source world.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
It's not "great lengths". It's a few people out of billions. By the standards of society as a whole it's nothing.
That's the beauty of IP: A few people can help millions and the cost/benefit is extraordinary.
Something that commercial IP vendors would like people to forget so they can maximise their profit.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Users should just let Windows Automatic Update download security updates for them. It takes place in the background non-intrusively...
This is worse than useless on a dialin line. Still the majority of users.
Any significant update can occupy the line for minutes at a time, sometimes hours. Pretty useless when you're trying to access a web site right now. Web access so slow it times out.
The M$Windows developers seem to have a blind spot when it comes to dialin users. To be fair, OSS developers often do as well.
---
I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
And this is like the zillionth time I've said that patent "experts" have completely missed the point about complaints about the US Patent system.
Try to understand: The patent statutes could've been put together by the tooth fairy. It simply doesn't matter. Either what they say or where they came from.
What's relevant are the results. And the results are TRASH, as even a cursory examination of recent software patents shows.
The USPTO have been complicit in promoting these bogus statutes and are largely responsible for the current mess, despite their typical public service finger pointing effort "it's not my fault". Bullshit. They could've done one hell of a lot more than they are doing to fix the problem.
Like a lot of government departments they've been captured by industry interests and forgotten the fact that they are public servants.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Tell you what, if you walked into an interview with me with that sort of attitude theres is not a snowballs chance in fucking hell of you getting hired.
Excellent, I get him.
This 'coding is a destiny' and cant be learned crap
He didn't say that, you're just creating a straw man. All he said was people should get a broad education, probably so they can adapt to a changing industry, and that interest only in money is the sign of a limited person.
is just a self comforting excuse for saddos who dont have the requisite skillset to actually get a job or compete in the job market.
Gosh, then why is it that I for one am turning potential employers away and getting paid well while doing it?
Maybe it's because I got a good, broad education and am interested in my work and can think laterally. Unlike the drones with tunnel vision getting a fraction of what I do and getting bored to tears while doing it, such as those who think java is the be-all and end-all because they've never been exposed to anything else.
Heck, my cell phone has a USB plug, but I'll be damned if I can't use it for more than just synchronizing my address book.
On Linux check out Gnokii and Gammu. I have a cheap phone and I've been using a combination of Gammu, ImageMagick, and Sox to upload/download my own pictures and sound. MIDI sites and software can be handy also.
Agree with you about the wasteland that is the mobile ringtone/media industry.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
If we're going to argue effectively against software patents, then we need to back up our arguments with solid reasoning.
Stop right there. It's the opposite, we don't need to demonstrate anything. It's up to the pro-patent lobby needs to demonstrate with real, not anecdotal, evidence that in a democracy software patents actually help and justify massive interference by the government in the citizen's business. I've never seen that evidence.
Remember, every new patent is a new law and new opportunity for a lawyer to make money off the general population. That's a fact and a cost. The benefit of software patents is almost entirely speculative.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
backdoors into Windows to be used in times of war.
Not just war. The NSA spooks have been accessing and passing on significant commercial data for years. A backdoor in M$Windows would have huge strategic significance. They just need to disguise the backdoor as a network related security flaw. Non-US organisations would be foolish not to consider that possibility. Yet another reason to go open source.
---
If you haven't tested your code under heavy load on an SMP machine then you haven't tested it.
Profits from CSIRO patents are reinvested into research. This in turn lowers the required government funding thus saving Aussie taxpayers quite a bit of money.
How does this save the Australian public any money? It's just taxes by another name when the Australian public have to pay extra for products because they contain CSIRO patent costs.
Charging for government services is just a way for public servants to increase taxes without accountability.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
The problem is that DRM is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once a company is allowed to assert that level of control the free market is dead.
First sale doctrine? Dead. Fair use? Dead. Compatible competition? Dead. Transfer between unapproved devices? Dead. Backup? Dead. Long term use? Dead. Fair reviews with excerpts? Dead. The vendor doesn't like you? Your content is dead. Contract terms stay the same after delivery? Dead. Reverse engineering? Dead. Copyright expiry and the public domain? Dead. Hidden manipulation of the consumer? Very much alive (e.g. Belkin router's "accidental" web page redirects).
DRM gives the vendor unlimited powers to manipulate the terms of the contract to the detriment of the consumer. And don't think for one minute that, over the long term, they won't do exactly that to maximise their revenue while minimising the net benefit to the consumer. Coupled with the IP economic network effect, where every IP market eventually gains a monopoly/oligopoly player due to-cost-per-copy being essentially zero and development costs being amortised over the number of copies sold, it's bad news all round.
I would support DRM (and the DMCA) if their were strong legal safeguards in place to ensure the free market (capitalism!) was not going to be hindered in any way.
Unfortunately, since history shows that the legal system is completely incapable of dealing with DRM because of the technical complexities involved and the ease with which baffle-them-with-bullshit works then I currently cannot support DRM in any form.
Not disagreeing with you but one arguable interpretation (not factual description) of group dynamics from a pro-leadership site is not good evidence for the necessity of group leadership, particularly in an area as hard to quantify as this.
Major and minor opinion leaders in a group have complex interactions in different forums within their own group and with other groups. No simple description is appropriate when group membership is fluid and ill-defined, opinion leaders can and do change and large groups have varying degrees of communication active internally and externally.
In any case OSS leadership overlaps with business leadership. Stallman and Gates are just the extremes of one spectrum.
I've used, not just played with, RedHat, Mandrake, Novell/SuSE Pro and Ubuntu in that order.
I'm currently using Ubuntu and strongly prefer it to the others.
It's a single CD install, fast and lightweight, and, with one or two minor glitches, it just works. One roadblock I had is that root access is based on sudo and requires editing of/etc/sudoers before the GUI tools will work. A broadband link is really needed for updates and to get less mainstream packages. Documentation is much better organised compared to the others e.g. search is actually useful, man pages are more complete and the online support wiki answered all the questions I had. Under the hood configuration is also better organised and documented. Debian based package management with the Synaptic GUI is great and superior to RPM based YaST and M$/Windows update. The default GUI is less day-glo and cluttered than SuSE or M$/Windows so it's probably a little more intimidating to the new user however it's likely to be less confusing once they make the leap.
I have no connection with Ubuntu other than as a satisfied user.
they lose when people realize that these industry relics are no longer necessary.
One good way to fight them is to advertise and provide easy-to-use systems for broadcasting and paying for content on the internet. The problem at the moment is that most artists are exposed to RIAA/MPAA merchandising as a child and simply go with the flow when they grow up. Also, for most consumers going to a retail store to get CD's/DVD's is still more convenient than downloading. That needs to change.
People interested in fighting the RIAA/MPAA should be advertising and fighting for this big time. Word-of-mouth and the internet can compete with the mass media but it takes a concerted effort.
No it's not. That's obvious to any expert in the field. Man-in-the-middle atacks and data substitution is trivial and has been known for many years, including address substitution to redirect the victim to bogus data.
Yet another software patent that should not have been awarded. As usual an incompetent patent office can't tell the difference between a change in terminology and a new idea.
Compare that to a multi-million dollar budget needed for a top (non-pr0n) movie and you've got a pretty different deal there.
Maybe that says more about the efficiency of the non-pr0n movie industry than anything else.
I find it strange that Hollywood needs big budgets to put colored dots on a screen. Some of my favourite movies cost next to nothing to make. e.g. Aardman animation's The Wrong Trousers was basically a one man operation, every bit as entertaining as the big budget movies and better than the later Chicken Run from the same company but with a much bigger budget.
Hollywood needs some price discipline, they have excess money basically because of broken IP law. They're using that big money as much for market manipulation as for producing quality product.
---
90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
But no doubt you're the first to complain when things on the internet become subscription based?
Nice straw man. It never will because people have an obvious need to sound off. Supply and demand will do it's thing. Not to mention the fact that when a millions of people can read something one person wrote the cost/benefit is extraordinary.
Advertisers love to claim they're doing people a favour. Bullshit, they're largely parasites these days.
Just forcing consumers to pay twice, once in time to watch the ad and a second time in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
If I ran the world;-) I'd tax unsolicited advertising to death, paying for the huge theft of time. Classified advertising, including "surprise me" classifications, no problem.
---
90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
Yes. When one company can make 10,000 times the profit of another company making an identical product, and use that profit to manipulate and control the market then the free market is dead and we have nothing more than another variant on monopoly, with all the evils that entails.
The problem is intellectual property law that doesn't recognise the power of the economic network effect coupled with the necessity of interroperability, where having a majority of the market means you'll eventually have effectively all of the market with no realistic possibility of competition. Even when the competition gives it away isn't easy to resurrect the market because of switching costs.
People need to understand that it is necessary to take some short term pain (e.g. to switch from M$ to OSS) for long term gain, both for the economic benefit and for independence and control.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Yep, just another stalking horse to get plausible deniability for the anti-trust people. In addition the M$ funded SCO circus is running out of steam (M$ senior officers should've gone to jail for that one) so they're looking for something else to distract people with. Can't have consumers thinking for themselves and choosing alternatives!
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Are we approaching a tipping point in the perception of FOSS?
Yes, and maybe even passed it. See my sig. Linux topping Windows on google happened just in the last few months. Not scientific of course but good fun.
Most statistics that US'ians use to measure software dominance (e.g. revenue, stock price, US phone surveys, US sales) don't really apply to much of the rest of the world. Nobody knows what the Chinese and Indian statistics are (2B people versus 300M in the US), linux has no universal stock price. etc.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
Makes me wonder why I actually wanted to become a teacher.:-((
Do a bit of guerilla teaching. Get them on to the internet and make sure they find non-M$ approved sites. There are now more GNU/Linux sites than M$ windows sites, more open office sites than M$ office sites etc. It's unavoidable they are exposed to M$ products but make sure they're exposed to alternative viewpoints as well. No need to go overboard, just be a good teacher who expands a child's horizons.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a no-brain-no-headache copy-paste-failure troll you replied to.
Probably not a troll, a marketing parasite. The story's likely to be an outright lie trying to create FUD about using OSS.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
How long can it take for package maintainers to update the source and run the package-assembly scripts. I mean, it is automated, isn't it?
Yes. A good way to reduce even more the "when to notify" problem may be an automated security patch distribution protocol. Vendors sign up for security patches that they can then use to automatically create their own repackaged security updates in minutes. Vendors then vet in a few minutes (if at all) or whatever schedule they want. This should be much faster than a blackhat could get an exploit out and make the window of vulnerability small.
The security patch distribution protocol could be as simple as a defined email body, subject and attributes (priority, impact, affects-binary-directory-structure, may-affect-branding etc.) with OSS project public key signing. What types of patches are distributed this way would be precisely defined so vendors could automate with confidence. Optionally, if the vulnerability/patch isn't in the wild yet the contents could be encrypted so only trusted vendors could read it.
Much better to automate to reduce the need for a delay than to create a deliberate delay.
---
Are you thinking long term? Saving money by buying-of-the-shelf in the short term doesn't necessarily mean you'll save money in the long term.
I spend 90% of my time programming...
Programming what? I suspect you're writing a lot of glue code.
My experience has been that many closed source shops spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel because OSS solutions they could adapt in much less time are not on their radar. This is at least partly because they have the expectation that they can't modify existing software, that being the rule in the closed source world.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
It's not "great lengths". It's a few people out of billions. By the standards of society as a whole it's nothing.
That's the beauty of IP: A few people can help millions and the cost/benefit is extraordinary.
Something that commercial IP vendors would like people to forget so they can maximise their profit.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Users should just let Windows Automatic Update download security updates for them. It takes place in the background non-intrusively ...
This is worse than useless on a dialin line. Still the majority of users.
Any significant update can occupy the line for minutes at a time, sometimes hours. Pretty useless when you're trying to access a web site right now. Web access so slow it times out.
The M$Windows developers seem to have a blind spot when it comes to dialin users. To be fair, OSS developers often do as well.
---
I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
And this is like the zillionth time I've said that patent "experts" have completely missed the point about complaints about the US Patent system.
Try to understand: The patent statutes could've been put together by the tooth fairy. It simply doesn't matter. Either what they say or where they came from.
What's relevant are the results. And the results are TRASH, as even a cursory examination of recent software patents shows.
The USPTO have been complicit in promoting these bogus statutes and are largely responsible for the current mess, despite their typical public service finger pointing effort "it's not my fault". Bullshit. They could've done one hell of a lot more than they are doing to fix the problem.
Like a lot of government departments they've been captured by industry interests and forgotten the fact that they are public servants.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Tell you what, if you walked into an interview with me with that sort of attitude theres is not a snowballs chance in fucking hell of you getting hired.
Excellent, I get him.
This 'coding is a destiny' and cant be learned crap
He didn't say that, you're just creating a straw man. All he said was people should get a broad education, probably so they can adapt to a changing industry, and that interest only in money is the sign of a limited person.
is just a self comforting excuse for saddos who dont have the requisite skillset to actually get a job or compete in the job market.
Gosh, then why is it that I for one am turning potential employers away and getting paid well while doing it?
Maybe it's because I got a good, broad education and am interested in my work and can think laterally. Unlike the drones with tunnel vision getting a fraction of what I do and getting bored to tears while doing it, such as those who think java is the be-all and end-all because they've never been exposed to anything else.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Heck, my cell phone has a USB plug, but I'll be damned if I can't use it for more than just synchronizing my address book.
On Linux check out Gnokii and Gammu. I have a cheap phone and I've been using a combination of Gammu, ImageMagick, and Sox to upload/download my own pictures and sound. MIDI sites and software can be handy also.
Agree with you about the wasteland that is the mobile ringtone/media industry.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
If we're going to argue effectively against software patents, then we need to back up our arguments with solid reasoning.
Stop right there. It's the opposite, we don't need to demonstrate anything. It's up to the pro-patent lobby needs to demonstrate with real, not anecdotal, evidence that in a democracy software patents actually help and justify massive interference by the government in the citizen's business. I've never seen that evidence.
Remember, every new patent is a new law and new opportunity for a lawyer to make money off the general population. That's a fact and a cost. The benefit of software patents is almost entirely speculative.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
It's flamebait. Like a lot of trolls he pretends that OSS people have a monolithic opinion so he can create a straw man to rubbish.
His posting history shows he's been round here long enough to know better.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
backdoors into Windows to be used in times of war.
Not just war. The NSA spooks have been accessing and passing on significant commercial data for years. A backdoor in M$Windows would have huge strategic significance. They just need to disguise the backdoor as a network related security flaw. Non-US organisations would be foolish not to consider that possibility. Yet another reason to go open source.
---
If you haven't tested your code under heavy load on an SMP machine then you haven't tested it.
Profits from CSIRO patents are reinvested into research. This in turn lowers the required government funding thus saving Aussie taxpayers quite a bit of money.
How does this save the Australian public any money? It's just taxes by another name when the Australian public have to pay extra for products because they contain CSIRO patent costs.
Charging for government services is just a way for public servants to increase taxes without accountability.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
I'd much rather have DRM
The problem is that DRM is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once a company is allowed to assert that level of control the free market is dead.
First sale doctrine? Dead. Fair use? Dead. Compatible competition? Dead. Transfer between unapproved devices? Dead. Backup? Dead. Long term use? Dead. Fair reviews with excerpts? Dead. The vendor doesn't like you? Your content is dead. Contract terms stay the same after delivery? Dead. Reverse engineering? Dead. Copyright expiry and the public domain? Dead. Hidden manipulation of the consumer? Very much alive (e.g. Belkin router's "accidental" web page redirects).
DRM gives the vendor unlimited powers to manipulate the terms of the contract to the detriment of the consumer. And don't think for one minute that, over the long term, they won't do exactly that to maximise their revenue while minimising the net benefit to the consumer. Coupled with the IP economic network effect, where every IP market eventually gains a monopoly/oligopoly player due to-cost-per-copy being essentially zero and development costs being amortised over the number of copies sold, it's bad news all round.
I would support DRM (and the DMCA) if their were strong legal safeguards in place to ensure the free market (capitalism!) was not going to be hindered in any way.
Unfortunately, since history shows that the legal system is completely incapable of dealing with DRM because of the technical complexities involved and the ease with which baffle-them-with-bullshit works then I currently cannot support DRM in any form.
---
Keep your options open!
Not disagreeing with you but one arguable interpretation (not factual description) of group dynamics from a pro-leadership site is not good evidence for the necessity of group leadership, particularly in an area as hard to quantify as this.
Major and minor opinion leaders in a group have complex interactions in different forums within their own group and with other groups. No simple description is appropriate when group membership is fluid and ill-defined, opinion leaders can and do change and large groups have varying degrees of communication active internally and externally.
In any case OSS leadership overlaps with business leadership. Stallman and Gates are just the extremes of one spectrum.
---
Keep your options open!
I've used, not just played with, RedHat, Mandrake, Novell/SuSE Pro and Ubuntu in that order.
I'm currently using Ubuntu and strongly prefer it to the others.
It's a single CD install, fast and lightweight, and, with one or two minor glitches, it just works. One roadblock I had is that root access is based on sudo and requires editing of /etc/sudoers before the GUI tools will work. A broadband link is really needed for updates and to get less mainstream packages. Documentation is much better organised compared to the others e.g. search is actually useful, man pages are more complete and the online support wiki answered all the questions I had. Under the hood configuration is also better organised and documented. Debian based package management with the Synaptic GUI is great and superior to RPM based YaST and M$/Windows update. The default GUI is less day-glo and cluttered than SuSE or M$/Windows so it's probably a little more intimidating to the new user however it's likely to be less confusing once they make the leap.
I have no connection with Ubuntu other than as a satisfied user.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
they lose when people realize that these industry relics are no longer necessary.
One good way to fight them is to advertise and provide easy-to-use systems for broadcasting and paying for content on the internet. The problem at the moment is that most artists are exposed to RIAA/MPAA merchandising as a child and simply go with the flow when they grow up. Also, for most consumers going to a retail store to get CD's/DVD's is still more convenient than downloading. That needs to change.
People interested in fighting the RIAA/MPAA should be advertising and fighting for this big time. Word-of-mouth and the internet can compete with the mass media but it takes a concerted effort.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
That's pretty clever,
No it's not. That's obvious to any expert in the field. Man-in-the-middle atacks and data substitution is trivial and has been known for many years, including address substitution to redirect the victim to bogus data.
Yet another software patent that should not have been awarded. As usual an incompetent patent office can't tell the difference between a change in terminology and a new idea.
---
Keep your options open!
Compare that to a multi-million dollar budget needed for a top (non-pr0n) movie and you've got a pretty different deal there.
Maybe that says more about the efficiency of the non-pr0n movie industry than anything else.
I find it strange that Hollywood needs big budgets to put colored dots on a screen. Some of my favourite movies cost next to nothing to make. e.g. Aardman animation's The Wrong Trousers was basically a one man operation, every bit as entertaining as the big budget movies and better than the later Chicken Run from the same company but with a much bigger budget.
Hollywood needs some price discipline, they have excess money basically because of broken IP law. They're using that big money as much for market manipulation as for producing quality product.
---
90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
But no doubt you're the first to complain when things on the internet become subscription based?
Nice straw man. It never will because people have an obvious need to sound off. Supply and demand will do it's thing. Not to mention the fact that when a millions of people can read something one person wrote the cost/benefit is extraordinary.
Advertisers love to claim they're doing people a favour. Bullshit, they're largely parasites these days.
Just forcing consumers to pay twice, once in time to watch the ad and a second time in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
If I ran the world ;-) I'd tax unsolicited advertising to death, paying for the huge theft of time. Classified advertising, including "surprise me" classifications, no problem.
---
90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
Yes. When one company can make 10,000 times the profit of another company making an identical product, and use that profit to manipulate and control the market then the free market is dead and we have nothing more than another variant on monopoly, with all the evils that entails.
The problem is intellectual property law that doesn't recognise the power of the economic network effect coupled with the necessity of interroperability, where having a majority of the market means you'll eventually have effectively all of the market with no realistic possibility of competition. Even when the competition gives it away isn't easy to resurrect the market because of switching costs.
People need to understand that it is necessary to take some short term pain (e.g. to switch from M$ to OSS) for long term gain, both for the economic benefit and for independence and control.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Yep, just another stalking horse to get plausible deniability for the anti-trust people. In addition the M$ funded SCO circus is running out of steam (M$ senior officers should've gone to jail for that one) so they're looking for something else to distract people with. Can't have consumers thinking for themselves and choosing alternatives!
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
I hope so. It might lead some decent programs not destroyed by advertising.
I work in advertising. ... Personally, I don't watch TV, ...
Why TV advertising is so bad - not even the advertising industry is watching!
---
90% of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race and so purely parasitic.
Are we approaching a tipping point in the perception of FOSS?
Yes, and maybe even passed it. See my sig. Linux topping Windows on google happened just in the last few months. Not scientific of course but good fun.
Most statistics that US'ians use to measure software dominance (e.g. revenue, stock price, US phone surveys, US sales) don't really apply to much of the rest of the world. Nobody knows what the Chinese and Indian statistics are (2B people versus 300M in the US), linux has no universal stock price. etc.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
Congratulations everybody, world domination. ;-)
run Excel?
Why should they want to?
Exactly. There are a dozen open source spreadsheet programs available, including text mode ones like sc that should run just fine on this computer.
Makes me wonder why I actually wanted to become a teacher. :-((
Do a bit of guerilla teaching. Get them on to the internet and make sure they find non-M$ approved sites. There are now more GNU/Linux sites than M$ windows sites, more open office sites than M$ office sites etc. It's unavoidable they are exposed to M$ products but make sure they're exposed to alternative viewpoints as well. No need to go overboard, just be a good teacher who expands a child's horizons.
---
Keep your options open!