Our thanks go out to Register reader Gunnar Isaksson who wrote in to inform us of the "unscientifical investigation" he has carried out into the growing popularity of Linux.

The unstoppable OS machine has been gunning for Windows for some time now and despite the small – but perfectly formed – market share Linux lays claim to it looks like it has reached an important milestone. Or maybe not.

Isaksson's research was simple – he ran the word Linux through the AltaVista search engine and then he did the same with the word Windows. The results were, erm, well they were as follows.

There were 11,313,520 Web pages found for the Linux search but only 10,755,265 found for Windows.

So there you have it, inconclusive proof that Linux is now more prevalent/important/hyped* than Microsoft Windows.

But worse is yet to come from Isaksson's research. When he put the word sex into the AltaVista search engine, only 9,589,620 were found.

So, could it be that not only is Linux becoming more popular than Windows and a real threat to Microsoft, but it is also becoming more popular than sex and that the human race might be facing extinction unless we abandon the open source OS?

Probably not, no. ®

*Take your pick.