Just a round-up of some special moments from the history of “man driving a car”…

According to Netcraft it appears that Microsoft has been closing the gap between them and Apache over the last year and a half. This months web server survey reveals that Apache’s market share is now below 50% (48,4%) while Microsoft is at 34,2%.

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - August 2007

The open source Apache has been the leading web server software since the March 1996 Netcraft Web Server Survey. In November 2005, Apache was found on 71 percent of web sites, putting it more than 50 percentage points ahead of Microsoft IIS (20.2 percent). At the time, Apache’s market share advantage seemed insurmountable. But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent.

Apache’s lead remains substantial in both categories. It’s worth noting that Apache has lost market share to another open source server, lighttpd (1.2% of all sites), and Google (4.4%) as well as Windows. But if Microsoft continues to gain share at its current pace, it could close the gap on Apache sometime in 2008.

The survey doesn’t take global variations into account, which probably would give a slightly different picture. It’s a known fact that in Asia Microsoft’s IIS web server are overrepresented, mainly due to software piracy according to Google. The lack of software patches and updates not available for pirated versions of IIS allows for inclusion of malicious software, which in turn affects the overall statistics. In Western Europe and the US the numbers are reversed.

It will be interesting to see how the trends develops when Microsoft’s 2008 server edition hits the market…

View and Share Documents On-line

Get rid of attachments. Just upload your document, grab the URL and share it with your friends or post it in blogs / forums. No sign up required.

It may not be the safest way - as the files are available to anyone. However it makes it easy to share office applications cross platform as the files are available through the browser, and can be downloaded in several formats including PDF and HTML. More information is available in the FAQ.

As this is still a Beta version I suppose both security and file size allowed will see some improvements. This might make it a decent alternative to the other on-line storage services like Google’s Gmail “Beta” and Microsoft’s Windows Live Skydrive “Beta”.

Digression: The Beta appears to be a substitute for the old disclaimer - providing the necessary excuse when something/everything failes…

Giant update for Windows XP is on its way!

While previously denied by Microsoft, SP3 will be released sometime during the autumn. A test version released to a smaller group of beta testers reveals a “SP monster” of close to 350MB fixing 900 security issues, bugs and errors (problems). In comparison the recent update for Vista released a week ago was only 21MB.

The forthcoming Service Pack 3 (SP3) will cause headaches to all IT departments. Especially for the larger IT companies/users this update will cause some concern during the implementation as they have not yet upgraded to Vista.

Maybe this is just another attempt from Microsoft to force people to “upgrade” to Vista, as the task of updating and testing XP SP3 is almost as big as moving to Vista…

Jerry’s Breakdown composed by Jerry Reed, played by Antoine Dufour and Tommy Gauthier on a single guitar.

See myspace.com/antoinedufour and candyrat.com for more…