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 REDHAT

history

HISTORY(5)							File Formats Manual							HISTORY(5)

NAME

       history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The  file  <pathdb in inn.conf>/history keeps a record of all articles currently stored in the news system, as well as those that have been
       received but since expired.  In a typical production environment, this file will be many megabytes.

       The file consists of text lines.  Each line corresponds to one article.	The file is normally kept sorted in the order  in  which  articles
       are  received,  although  this  is not a requirement.  Innd(8) appends a new line each time it files an article, and expire(8) builds a new
       version of the file by removing old articles and purging old entries.

       Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown below as 	:
	      [Hash]	     	   date
	      [Hash]	     	   date	 	   token

       The Hash field is the ASCII representation of the hash of the Message-ID header.  This is directly used for the key of the dbz(3).

       The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde.  All sub-fields are the text representation  of  the  number  of  seconds
       since  the  epoch -- i.e., a time_t; see gettimeofday(2).  The first sub-field is the article's arrival date.  If copies of the article are
       still present then the second sub-field is either the value of the article's Expires header, or a hyphen if no expiration date  was  speci-
       fied.   If  an article has been expired then the second sub-field will be a hyphen.  The third sub-field is the value of the article's Date
       header, recording when the article was posted.

       The token field is a token of the article.  This field is empty if the article has been expired.

       For example, an article whose Message-ID was <7q2saq$sal$1@isrv4.pa.vix.com>, posted on 26 Aug 1999 08:02:34 GMT and  recieved  at  26  Aug
       1999 08:06:54 GMT, could have a history line (broken into three lines for display) like the following:
	      [E6184A5BC2898A35A3140B149DE91D5C]  	
		  935678987~-~935678821  	
		  @030154574F00000000000007CE3B000004BA@

       In  addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3) database associated with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the
       offset in the text file where the associated line begins.  For historical reasons, the key includes the trailing    byte  (which  is  not
       stored in the text file).

HISTORY

       Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.  This is revision 1.12.2.1, dated 2000/08/17.

SEE ALSO

       dbz(3), expire(8), inn.conf(5), innd(8), makehistory(8).

																	HISTORY(5)