Massless

RollerBill (2001). (It wasn't easy to summarize today's post in a picture...forgive me.)

The 1970s film Rollerball attempted to provide commentary on violence in sports by constructing a link to the violence of a fictitious sport and the co-optation and organization of that sport by a conglomerate or multi-national corporation. I can't comment on whether the attempt was successful since, when I saw it, I was very young and all I remember about the experience was the blood draining from my face and feeling slightly ill. Rollerball has been remade (scheduled for release this summer) and the director of the original, Norman Jewison, feels pretty disgusted by the new version. [On a side note: since blanching at Rollerball (1975) I have enjoyed some very, very violent movies. Natural Born Killers, for instance.]

Get, ready, switching gears fast... Did you know (Of course you did, Dear Nerdly Reader) that Microsoft is planning on moving away from providing software you install on you computer to delivering that product as a service available via the internet. Seem weird? I think that's a reasonable reaction. Many people have a lot of reasonable questions about that strategy. Questions such as "how would a subscription-based office tool overcome bandwidth constraints?" Here's one of the concerns being raised out there:

A business traveler worries about .NET networking. (ZDNet) "Today, I carry the complete version of Office on my laptop...But in Microsoft's vision of tomorrow, I'll also need access to bandwidth wherever I happen to be...Microsoft's strategy, of course, assumes the ubiquitous network that will surely be a reality any day now. Are they smoking weird substances in Redmond, or do they just never leave the campus? As I travel around the country, throwing my lot in with millions of other victims of planes, trains, airports and hotels, the reality I'm discovering is the ubiquitous hassle."

I should mention that Microsoft's .NET white paper asserts that "Microsoft will also continue to offer and support versions of Office without .NET services."

Here's a shout-out to the nerds! InfoWorld warns that server-side VBScript and JScript may experience problems with any .NET upgrade. "The only potential issue we can see is .NET's replacement of Windows' Visual Basic Script (VBScript) and JavaScript (JScript) interpreters." You'll find more in the section of the article called Server planning.

The blog of Julius Caesar. [via david chess]

What is SmartJ? "The design goal of SmartJ is to make it about as transparently simple for Windows users to launch java-based programs (.class and .jar files) as it is to launch a native program (a .exe file). In this sense, it is still a work in progress, as there are many other features that could be added to promote this design goal."