Last updated:Thursday, May 15, 1997, 8:30 a.m.
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An encryption agreement between Republicans and the White House is nearing; the question is if the final compromise will allow the Net to grow and develop worldwide.

California is starting to grapple with the cost of the Year 2000 problem and current estimates say it will be a $187 million fix.

What's the Net's next step? The White House, which has not been known for being prescient on these matters, has prompted a conference on the Net's future, where a little bit of this and a little bit of that is offered as the solution to the current speed and overload crisis.

Amazon.com goes public today, with its initial stock offering priced at $18 per share, higher than expected.

Dell cuts prices on its PowerEdge network server computers, underpricing the competition by about 30 percent.

StarWave and Disney -- oh, yeah, and ABC TV news -- open their web site and some expect to see blood flowing as they take on MSNBC.

Having soothed developers, Apple now faces another potential uprising: Mac clone-makers, who are worried that lagging licensing discussions will cause them to delay new systems and miss the biggest selling season of the year.

Coming of age: The Internet is the fast-growing activity in the world, the Guardian in London reports. "The Internet will almost certainly be the 20th centuryÕs greatest technological legacy, comparable to, and maybe exceeding, the importance of electricity and even printing," the paper says.

Faster than the speed of typing: Can the Net's backbone handle the new, faster modems?

Hey Bill Gates: It doesn't pay to tick off better than half of the world's population. Women who work in technology are annoyed that you invited so few women (only two of more than 100 attendees) to your big summit last week.

Silicon Graphics, whose displays dazzle tech show attendees, is moving into software, SGI CEO Edward McCracken said. He expects its software sales to expand four to five times in the next few years.

Industrial espionage isn't limited to automakers stealing each other's latest design plans; it's out here in cyberspace, too, says an author of a book on the topic.

Hackers are said to be costing AOL "tens of millions" of dollars per month, but fixing the problem would cost "hundreds of millions" of dollars, MSNBC reports.

Good news if you're an IT service provider. Your business is going to explode (in a good way) in the near future as companies who have cut back on staffing panic at the Year 2000 problems, intranets, networking and all the related programming services.

Browser news: Is there a UNIX Internet Explorer browser on the way? It seems so; and if you want a sneak peek at Microsoft's plans for IE 4.0, check out the Mac version 3.01, just released -- it contains some features that will appear later this summer in the next version.

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