Wolfenstein to smash its way to the box office

Throwing its name into the pot of video game-based slasher horror flicks, Wolfenstein is heading to a big screen debut, according to trade publication Variety magazine.

The magazine reports that writer Roger Avary and producer Samuel Hadida will team up for the film. The same duo also wrote and produced the recent Silent Hill movie based on the survival horror game series.

The picture has a tentative title of Return To Castle Wolfenstein, the same name as the most recent wave of games in the series, including an upcoming one for the PC and Xbox 360 that could potentially have a direct movie tie-in.

The flagship PC title, Wolfenstein 3D, celebrated its 15th anniversary in May. The game was introduced by Id Software, which also created the PC game Doom, inspiring the 2005 film of the same name.

Apache quickly surrenders web server market share to Microsoft, Google

Apache continues its rapid decline in web server market share. While Microsoft has reached a new record high in the segment, Apache also has to deal with advances of Google and has lost almost 10 market share points during the first seven months of the year.

According to Netcraft's August web server survey, 50.92% of the web's 128.0 million websites are currently running an Apache web server. This number is down from 52.62% last month. In the same time frame, Microsoft was able to gain almost 1.4 points from 32.84% to 34.28%, which is the highest share for the company recorded by Netcraft so far (surveys began at the end of 1995).

Since the beginning of this year, Apache has lost about 16% of its market share (9.72 points), which stood at 60.64% in January. Microsoft held 30.67% at that time. This development reveals that Microsoft gained a little less than half of the market shares surrendered by Apache. The lion's share of the other half can be found at Google, which becomes a more important force in the hosting market, mainly through its Blogger service. According to Netcraft, Google now hosts 5.70 million sites, or about 4.45% of all currently registered domains – a new record for Google. The remaining "lost" shares in this scenario were attributed to lighttpd, which is estimated to account for 1.17% of the market according to Netcraft.

Sun and Zeus hold a small portion of the market as this time. Sun has 1.72% and Zeus 0.44%, according to Netcraft.

Apache has seen several short term market share drops and recoveries over the past ten years, most notably a drop from close to 70% in May of 2001 to 57% in May 2002. The hosting market is especially vulnerable to strategy changes at large web hosting firms that can impact the web server software of hundreds of thousands of domains in a single month.

However, the current development is somewhat unusual, as Apache has been surrendering market shares over an extended period of time, a trend which began late in December 2005. In November of 2005, Apache recorded its all-time high of 70.98% (Microsoft: 20.24%). By January 2006, Apache had dropped to 67.11% and by January of this year to 60.64%. Microsoft increased its share in the same time frame to 20.64% and 30.67%.

Version 7 of Firefox Alpha 3 hits the scene

After a slightly sluggish delay, the latest preview build of Mozilla's next-gen browser is open to the public.

Expectedly, much of the update is technical in nature, adding things like cross-site XMLHttpRequest support. The big graphical change is the addition of backend support for full-page zoom. Also new is an extension for browser history from nine days to 180.

Other notes on the technical side include support for SVG lighting/tile filters and color management, and new XUL menus.

Firefox 3 Alpha 7 was originally planned for a late July release but was pushed back slightly due to development problems. The next alpha is expected to be available on September 18.