Cringely On Microsoft Settlement

sandalwood writes: "Robert X Cringley has a new article about the proposed settlement in the Microsoft antitrust case. He includes information on where to write to make your views known (the 'proposed Final Judgement' accepts comments from the public for a period of 60 days after it's been published)."

Comments

Re:Not a troll, but useless

[edhall]

If you don't like the way the editors run the site, start your own. If you can do it better than the Slashdot folks, maybe people will switch to using your site instead.

You'll get "Slashdotted" to oblivion in a minute if you even tried; Slashdot puts serious iron behind their site, well beyond the reach of an upstart competitor. Part of the reason is Slashcode itself -- dynamically generating each page in PERL from database queries may be flexible, but it chews CPU for breakfast. Although there are some PHP messageboards around that do better, you'll still need a lot of grunt for the database server. And that's not even considering the bandwidth required (expensive!) to put up a busy message board, especially one constantly hit by first-post robots and the like. And then there are all the half-brained DoS attacks that board kiddies will throw at you.

In brief, someone would need a corporate parent like Shashdot has to have even a chance at competing. No hobbyist on a cable modem has a chance. Not even a smalltime entrepreneur with a few servers in a colo has much of a chance unless they can come up with a much more efficient way of generating the pages while preserving the features Slashcode provides. (And they'd need a very tolerant, well-connected ISP, besides.)

No, Slashdot can continue its decline for a long time before a real competitor emerges. That competitor probably already exists, in relative obscurity. With luck it will have grown to the point that it can take the load when it starts getting popular, and will have achieved some of the credibility and community that Slashdot had and is slowly squandering.

-Ed