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Issue 85

From Issue #85
May 2001

Dec 31, 1969  By Doc Searls
 in
Stop the Presses, LJ Index and more.
Public Execution

You arrive at the airport, in a hurry as usual. You look up at the flight departure screen and it says “A fatal exception OE has occurred at....The current application will be terminated...” You know the rest. This is the epitaph in blue that Windows issues for every application it terminates, also known as the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD.

Lately Matt Michie, a writer and Linux hacker, has been keeping a growing gallery of public BSODs at his site (http://www.daimyo.org/bsod/), which ranks high among the many thousands of pages that show up in searches for “BSOD” or “Blue Screen of Death”. From what we can tell, these include a giant Las Vegas billboard, an airport flight schedule display, an ATM machine, a casino game, a building marquee and public signage of various unknown, but not unembarrassing, sorts.

LJ Index—May 2001

  1. Number of e-mail packages other than Microsoft Outlook Express that could be infected by the Anna Kournikova virus: 0

  2. Number of e-mails carrying the Anna Kournikova virus received by one Linux Journal editor on February 11, 2001: 15

  3. Approximate number of people laid off by Eazel in March 2001: 40

  4. Approximate number of SuSE employees at the time, worldwide: 600

  5. Number of French schools now involved in the national Linux program: 350

  6. Number of Linux distributions: 188

  7. Number of embedded Linux OSes: 25

  8. Total number of embedded Linux OSes as of last August: 17

  9. Percentage increase in thin-client shipments during 1999: 90

  10. Percentage of Fortune 100 companies that use thin clients: 80

  11. Size of Amazon.com's announced layoffs in January 2001: 1,300

  12. Size in millions of dollars of Amazon's stock trust fund for laid-off employees in Janurary 2001: 2.5

  13. Percentage of internet usage within the US population in February 2001: 60

  14. Millions of people logging on to the Internet in the US in February 2001: 169

  15. Work access as a percentage of all net access in the US in February 2001: 14

  16. Billions of wireless messages sent per month by the end of 2004: 244

  17. Number of MP3s in the average peer-to-peer user's hard drive: 500

Sources:

  • 1: News.com

  • 2: Doc Searls

  • 3-4: Michael Hasenstein

  • 5: LinuxWorld

  • 6-8: TechWeb

  • 9: International Data Corp.

  • 10: Giga Information Group

  • 11-12: Moneybox

  • 13-15: News.com

  • 16: News.com

  • 17: Eric Garland of BigChampagne.com, from The Standard

LJ History

In the June 1996 issue of Linux Journal, we wrote that in addition to support for IA32, Amiga, and Atari, Linux is “being ported to several more platforms, including Alpha, ARM, MIPS and PowerPC.” Five years later, not only are these supported but also SuperH, SPARC and UltraSPARC, the S/390, VAX, PA-RISC, IA64, ColdFire, DragonBall, ETRAX, i960 and a host of others.

Microsoft and PHP gain in Netcraft survey

At this point it almost goes without saying that the predominant web server is Apache, which has had the top market share across all domains since early 1996, holding at better than 60% for the last year—according to Netcraft who has been studying the matter since September 1995. Back then the top server by a huge margin was NCSA's, which flatlined at approximately zero in 1999.

Apache is still doing fine, but it dropped by 1.29% in January of this year, Netcraft reports. Microsoft's IIS gained 1.82%, and Sun's iPlanet, the third-place server, dropped .29%. Both Apache, and Microsoft gained in absolute numbers. Netcraft found 16,207,982 domains served by Apache and 5,903,512 served by Microsoft. But there were other developments behind those details. Netcraft reports,

The relatively static market share for Microsoft on the Web as a whole contrasts sharply with its progress in our companion SSL Server survey where Microsoft makes consistent and relentless gains, month after month, and now accounts for 49% of the sites performing encrypted transactions on the Internet. Arguably, Microsoft's applications have made the difference, with there being no straightforward alternative to Microsoft's Commerce Server in the UNIX world.

Netcraft also reveals that PHP is being adopted at an extremely rapid pace:

The PHP module is compiled into the Apache server on over five million web sites, or approaching 40% of all Apache sites. Although PHP will only be in use on a fraction of these sites currently, it is regarded as easier to program than Perl or JSP and has created a broad developer community in a relatively short space of time. PHP, together with MySQL and Apache, has become the de facto way of developing web applications in the Linux environment, in a similar way to the IIS/ASP/SQL-server combination in the Microsoft world.

The Netcraft survey can be found at www.netcraft.com.

______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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