An analyst at the Gartner Group says that migration costs for moving to Windows 2000 could be as much as $3,100 per PC.

Remember the JavaStation? Sun’s latest glorified X terminal, Sun Ray, has been announced.

More hardware news: IBM is about to start selling thin servers that run Linux. Unfortunately, they’re going to cost about $4,000. When is someone going to come out with a tiny server for about $500 that I can use at home for IP masquerading and perhaps mail relaying? I could get a perfectly capable desktop PC for that price, but I want something really small I can stick on a bookshelf.

Handspring has finally announced their Palm clones. Of course, they haven’t yet met the vapor test, but they’re supposed to be cheap and really cool. They have an expansion slot too. No pictures yet.

This page keeps track of the ICQ protocol. It seems to be getting more and more difficult to reverse engineer.

ICQ is so lame that the contact list is stored on your local computer and isn’t stored on the ICQ server. I want to use the same ICQ account at home and at work, and I want to share the contact list between them. The solution? Copy the contact list and manually send it to the other computer. Weak. (By the way, Yahoo Messenger has this figured out already. Your contact list is stored on the server.)

America’s worst legislator, Tom DeLay, is trying to gut an important campaign finance reform bill with bogus amendments and scare tactics. Worse, he’s telling lies about what the campaign laws mean to Internet users to do it. Scumbag.

A scientist at Cryptonym corporation has discoverd that Microsoft has inserted a back door for the NSA into Windows NT 4.0. For a program to install encryption services under Windows NT, ordinarily it must be signed by Microsoft. However, the NSA back door will allow NSA-signed encryption providers to register themselves as well. Either they’re doing this so that the NSA doesn’t have to share their own encryption code with Microsoft for signing before deploying it, or they’re doing this so that the NSA can install encryption service providers with back doors on other computers for espionage purposes.

Here’s the Web Programming Topic Guide for Python.

I tried downloading Zope, a Python-based application server, but it doesn’t look like it plays nicely with Apache or standard relational databases, so I put it on the back burner for now. I think I’m going to try to just write some CGI scripts in Python.