SOMEWHERE IN NEVADA — This month, we come to you from the fabulous New York, New York Hotel and Casino in fabulous Las Vegas. It's the annual Comdex editor's note!       One of the first things you notice about fabulous Las Vegas is the lack of any pretensions towards health. Smoking? It's required. Natural light and fresh air? They were banned years ago. Everyone walks around with this dour, life-sapping expression on their faces. That is, when they're not resting their cigarette on a slot machine to fill up a large cup with quarters and head off for an early breakfast. That breakfast, of course, will be served within seconds, and taste so bad that the person will immediately rush back to the gambling, uh, gaming floor. If it's between midnight and 7 AM, the slot jockey will likely also be carrying a small child who will be bleary with exhaustion. It was actually quite depressing watching all this, although not as bad as losing our home and stock options within 15 minutes at the FreeCell table.       When you get to the Comdex show floor, however, a new world opens up. From all the talk you've heard lately, you'd expect two things: Microsoft would be the only remaining software company, and at the same time there'd be thousands of major Java-based enterprise software innovations being shown. Strangely, neither one of these mutually exclusive scenarios came to pass this year. To be fair, Lotus was demoing a suite of Java-based programs. Finally, users of AIX will have a least common denominator word processor they can call their own!       Actually, since cross-platform compatibility means that some sections of code will have to be written to work on the worst supported platform, many people have been focusing on ways to get around this limitation. Sun's JNI and RMI are two possible choices, but both have their limitations. What is JNI? According to Sun, it's "a virtual machine interface for invoking native programming code." In other words, it's a way to write platform-specific code. Microsoft provides a more powerful interface called J/Direct for developers who want to call the Win32 API directly from Java code. The difference between J/Direct and JNI? J/Direct is more efficient. Plus, Microsoft offers RNI which, unlike JNI, is compatible with previous versions of the JDK. And RMI? Although it hasn't been included in Internet Explorer 4.0, it's downloadable from the Microsoft FTP site (ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/MSDN/UnSup-ed/RMI.ZIP).       You may have been thinking that there couldn't possibly be any more news than this, but you'd have been wrong. If you've been lucky enough to attend TechEd in the past, Microsoft is going it one better this year. Web TechEd is scheduled for January 24-28, 1998, in Palm Springs, California. In addition to the obvious benefits of being in a desert in mid-January, Web TechEd also offers you content developers and programmers an unparalleled chance to learn from the experts, get free t-shirts, meet others like yourselves, and steal their ideas. And the nice people running the show have even put an ad in this month's MIND! Well, they didn't exactly pay for it. See, we gave them a page, and in return we got three really nice MSDN pins. Lacquered enamel and everything! Except one of them didn't have the right back, so we just had to stick it on the MIND corkboard. Las Vegas Bonus Quiz       Each of the ten sentences below is either a) a cheap pickup line overheard at Comdex, b) a gambling advertisement, or c) scripted banter from a Las Vegas stage show. Can you identify which ones are which? Let me show you The Strip. Wanna make a side trip to Boulder City? We have the loosest slots in town! Gimme a lucky pull. 100X payout on craps! Could I have a volunteer from the crowd? Care to pick my numbers for me? Play Scratch Magic! Is that really a 4% vig? Hello, Siegfried! Hello, Roy! —J.T.

From the January 1998 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer