Inktomi has a page showing some statistics for the pages that they index. According to their statistics, Apache has a 60% market share. Awesome!

The Canadian federal government is going to subsidize the Canadian teams in the National Hockey League so that they can compete with the US teams.

There’s a syndicated New York Times story that would appear to be ripped from the pages of the Onion. The headline: Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find.

The recent round of crypto deregulation has spawned the latest wave of crypto-related civil disobedience. In order to test the limits of the new law, John Young has posted a copy of PGP on his Web site for anyone on the Internet to download.

Jack Tapper explains in a Salon article why I live in fear of George Bush, Jr. being our next president. For all of Clinton’s flaws, at least he’s a thinking person. The idea of having another hollow-headed servant of corporate America (a la Ronald Reagan) in the White House is depressing. I’m not a big fan of the Republican party, but can’t we at least have a brainy Republican if we must have one?

Have you noticed that the number of gigantic movie theaters has grown rapidly in the past few years? Guess what, now it looks like a bunch of them will probably go out of business.

InfoWorld polls the analysts for reactions to the change at the top at Microsoft. One analyst speculates (accurately, I’m sure) that once Windows 2000 is released there will be a wave of executive departures at Microsoft. Could Jim Allchin be the next big name Microserf to hit the dusty trail?

The government is making a half-assed effort to ease up on crypto in order to get rid of some pesky lawsuits, but it seems like the plaintiffs are going to press on. I fall firmly into the camp that believes restricting the distribution of cryptography software is a clear violation of our first amendment rights, and so far the courts have agreed. Why give up now?

Joyce Millman has a preview of the new season of the Sopranos, which begins on Sunday night. If you don’t have HBO yet, it’s probably too late for you. Definitely start asking around the office to find somewhere to watch the show.

Several readers have written in describing awful experiences with RealPlayer to compare with my miserable ordeal with QuickTime. In the previous item, I made a general comment about all streaming media players because they’re all very obnoxious. RealPlayer does all sorts of weird stuff to your system when you install it, and even puts crap in your system tray, which I hate. There definitely aren’t any good guys to be found in this case. I also received a link to a site critiquing the QuickTime interface.