Rob Weir Exposes an Anti-ODF Whisper Campaign

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Special Forums News, Links, Events and Announcements UNIX and Linux RSS News Rob Weir Exposes an Anti-ODF Whisper Campaign - Updated Post 302324318 by Linux Bot on Wednesday 10th of June 2009 12:30:03 PM

06-10-2009

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Rob Weir Exposes an Anti-ODF Whisper Campaign - Updated

Alex Brown, the convenor of the OOXML BRM, has been editing Wikipedia's article on ODF. That strikes me odd, like finding out Steve Jobs had been editing the Microsoft Zune page. Some things are simply inappropriate. It puzzles me why Wikipedia allows it, frankly.
If you read the talk page on ODF, you'll see that there are others there trying mightily to spin the article on ODF more negatively than is factual. And such rudeness! Plenty of smears against Groklaw too, I couldn't help but notice. It does seem to me that there is a marked increase in what I view as a concerted submarine marketing effort. Some of it is subtle. Most of it is not. A fair measure of it is mean-spirited. Some of it is lies, pure and simple.
In the good old days, dead people supported Microsoft, if you remember that funny headline about a pro-Microsoft astroturfing campaign, but at least it wasn't a smear campaign, just pro-Microsoft. Nowadays, I think I would have to rewrite the headline to read, "Mean People Support Microsoft." Or worse. You see, Groklaw has been visited recently by several OOXML types, including Alex Brown, Doug Mahue of Microsoft, and Rick Jelliffe, all singing pretty much the same songs, posting on our ODF articles, so I got to watch it close up. I puzzled over it, because they seemed so deliberately rude. Why come here just to be offensive? So I'd remind them that we have a comments policy here, including no ad hominem attacks on anyone. And they would continue on. It was so odd. The last one went away when I told him that if he wished to make a permanent record of how horribly Microsoft supporters conduct themselves, he could post to his heart's content.
It turns out it's not just here, and there is evidently a point to it. Wikipedia is apparently the epicenter. And what is being posted there is reportedly being used in an anti-ODF FUD campaign by guess who.

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LEARN ABOUT BSD

pnews

PNEWS(1)						      General Commands Manual							  PNEWS(1)

NAME

       Pnews - a program for posting news articles

SYNOPSIS

       Pnews newsgroup title
	 or
       Pnews -h headerfile [oldarticle]
	 or
       Pnews

DESCRIPTION

       Pnews  is  a  friendly  interface for posting news articles.  It will ask several questions, then allow you to enter your article, and then
       post it using the inews(1) program.  If you type h and a carriage return at any point, Pnews will tell you what it wants to know.

       The -h form is used when invoked from rn.  If your editor can edit multiple files, and you want the article to which you  are  replying	to
       show up as an alternate file, define the environment variable NEWSPOSTER as "Pnews -h %h %A".  You can also modify the the NEWSHEADER envi-
       ronment variable to change the header file that rn passes to Pnews.

ENVIRONMENT

       AUTHORCOPY
	       If defined, contains the name of a file to which the finished article will be appended.

	       Default: article not saved

       DOTDIR  Where to find your dot files, if they aren't in your home directory.  This is primarily for accounts which are shared by more  than
	       one person.

	       Default: $HOME

       EDITOR  The editor you want to use, if VISUAL is undefined.

	       Default: whatever your news administrator installed, usually vi.

       HOME    Your home directory.

	       Default: $LOGDIR

       LOGDIR  Your home directory if HOME is undefined.

       LOGNAME Your login name, if USER is undefined.

	       Default: value of "whoami".

       NAME    Your full name.

	       Default: name from /etc/passwd, or ~/.fullname.

       ORGANIZATION
	       Either the name of your organization, or the name of a file containing the name of your organization.

	       Default: whatever your news administrator chose.

       USER    Your login name.

	       Default: $LOGNAME

       VISUAL  The editor you want to use.

	       Default: $EDITOR

FILES

       $DOTDIR/.article
       ~/dead.article

SEE ALSO

       rn(1), Rnmail(1), inews(1)

DIAGNOSTICS

BUGS

       Not the speediest program in the world, but maybe that's a blessing to the net.

								       LOCAL								  PNEWS(1)