Finance ministry officials told a cabinet meeting that Russia needs at least $187 million to prepare its computers for the year 2000.

That money will be hard to find, and Moscow will probably have to give priority to defence and security sectors while withholding money from other agencies, finance minister Mikhail Kasyanov said.

The defence ministry needs $13 million to fix the problem, and the interior ministry needs $6 million, Kasyanov said. He gave no figures for other security institutions.

The new estimates were dramatically lower than previous figures, which said the government would need $1 billion to $3 billion to fight the bug. The finance ministry did not explain the discrepancy, and has never given details on how it arrives at the cost of fixingthe bug.

Russian government agencies have 28,000 vital computer systems, one-third of which is ready for the Year 2000 changeover, said Alexander Ivanov, head of the State Communications Committee.

He said many of Russia's government agencies do not fully appreciate the risks. ``The situation with resolving the Y2K bug in Russia provokes concern,'' Ivanov said.

Since the glitch is not likely to be fixed in time, Russia will cut the number of airplane flights on 31 December, halt some hazardous industrial processes and switch others to manual control, ``just in case'' anything goes wrong, Ivanov said.

The Russian Central Bank and most fuel and energy companies are prepared for the bug, he said.

Online fever

Investors would flock to anything online. Writes Washington Post that the Internet and electronic commerce have become such potent stock market stimulants that investors will flock to the stock of any company that announces plans to put its business online.

Internet-induced investmentlust can turn a vitamin vendor that has a World Wide Web site into an e-commerce entrepreneur. Going on the Net might morph a mundane mail-order retailer into an online superstore.

For instance, simply signing an advertising contract with America Online Inc. last week was enough to double the stock price of Drkoop.com's electronic medicine show. Point-and-shop start-ups are the seasonal fare of point-and-click investors, but there are better ways to capitalise on the e-commerce craze. Investing in companies that stand to benefit from the growth of e-commerce looks to be more lucrative -- and less risky -- than finding bargains in the stocks of Web merchants.

Buying stock in any of the two dozen online drugstores, vitamin shops and cosmetic parlours is a long shot, compared with investing in Internet infrastructure stocks such as Cisco Systems Inc., which makes the ``routers'' that control traffic on the Net. Cisco's stock is selling closer to its all-time high than most of the Internet commerce andcontent companies. It's up 44 per cent so far this year, on top of a 150 per cent gain last year and 31 per cent appreciation in 1997, before the Net boomed.

The e-commerce explosion is driving demand not only for Internet hardware, but also for other ingredients that are essential for doing business on the Web, such as the security systems needed to protect online transactions.

A pair of Maryland companies, both considered leaders in their particular aspects of computer security, are cited by analysts as examples of firms that benefit from electronic commerce without actually doing it.

Lots in a name

Some domain names mean money. Take for instance JewelersMallofAmerica.com -- its owner is asking for $2 million on an Internet auction site. Another one - ad.com has an asking price of only $500,000, hispanics.com $5,100.

The rush to register Internet addresses a few years ago produced a horde of speculators eager to cash in on the appreciated -- or busted -- values of their virtual realestate, writes New York Times.

Thousands of Internet addresses are being offered for sale daily at auction sites like Ebay, Amazon.com and Yahoo. The most popular themes for sale involve the 2000 election, assorted body parts and the stock market.

If auctions are the fairest way to assess market value, then most of the domains appear worthless - attracting bids that fall short of the $70 initial registration fee required by Network Solutions, the Internet domain registration body that once had exclusive control over .com, .net and .org domains.

JewelersMallofAmerica.com and ad.com did not receive any bids in their first four days of being listed on Ebay. In fact, a search of current and completed auctions revealed that more than 90 per cent of domain names offered for sale on the sites receive no bids. Many names have awkward `e' and `i' prefixes like eBillionaires.com and iWimbledon .com, or are strung together by unappealing hyphens like cowboys-r-us .com.

Some domain name sellers neverintended to start Web businesses. Others had business plans that never got off the ground. In some cases, the Internet addresses became obsolete when the company's name changed. Todd Bernhard, the president of Internet headquarters, registered memo.com in 1993 after he left Sun Microsystems to start a company called Memorandom. When the company changed its name to Internet Headquarters and its Internet address to hq.net, Bernhard found himself with a valuable piece of Internet real estate.

``Ebay seemed like a good way to market our domain to a high-tech audience,'' Bernhard said. The domain name was recently bid up to $50,000 on Ebay. But he sold it later for an undisclosed amount. A popular way for owners to test the value of domain names is to put them on sale with high reserve prices that are not disclosed. If the test run is encouraging, owners will frequently offer the item for auction again.

Rick Schwartz a self-proclaimed virtual real estate developer who owns more than 3,000 names, browsesauction sites daily, looking for good deals. In one day he bid on pennsylvania.com, dailystockpick.com, digitalnews.com and faithful.com.

Before domain name auctions took off a few months ago, Schwartz searched registration databases and made offers to owners through e-mail. Now, he says, the auctions have brought sellers out in the open.