An interesting column by eWEEK columnist Rob Enderle is forecasting the death of Bluetooth now that tech giant Intel has abandoned the standard. Bluetooth, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, is a type of Personal Area Network, or PAN. In a nutshell, it allows wireless devices in close proximity to talk to each other.

While Enderle may feel that the time is right to move to Wireless USB, I’m a bit more skeptical. While the high bandwidths proposed are staggering, the spec is just a twinkle in the eyes of its engineers. In contrast, Bluetooth is widely deployed. Some devices include:

• PDAs,
• Wireless Phones,
• Apple computers,
• and more.

Yes, Intel may be a major force in the technology sector, but it’s not the most important. Despite its relatively small market share, Apple remains a trend-setter:

Apple was the first to build in Ethernet, one of the first to build in USB, the first to build in FireWire, and the first to build in 802.11 wireless networking. Now we’re offering a Bluetooth solution that actually works and is easy to use. (InfoSatellite, Mar 26 2002)

Sorry Intel, but you don’t make the rules.

(Original link via Slashdot.)

NASA‘s robotic Mars geologist, Spirit, hasn’t been very talkative recently, according to CNN, Slashdot, and others. The rover has missed several communications windows to Earth and the satellites, and this morning, only a warning tone was detected, indicating “a very serious anomaly on the vehicle,” according to Spirit manager Pete Theisinger.

Attempts to resurrect the lander will be difficult, since the scientists don’t know what’s wrong and need the missing telemetry to figure it out. Catch-22. Compounding the incredible stress that the JPL team must be facing is that Spirit’s sibling, Opportunity, is scheduled to crash-land on the other side of Mars on January 24^th.

I would imagine that the warning tone must be very encouraging – it probably means that not only is Spirit hearing Earth, it’s also understanding it, at least to some extent. Some kind of processing has to be going on to separate background noise from a real signal.

I wish the NASA team the best of luck. Even if they don’t save Spirit, its accomplishments in the past 18 days have been simply incredible. I hope one day a documentary gets released in theaters. I guarantee that I’ll see it. (Not in IMAX, though – our main theater closed shop.)

P.S. The Mars Scorecard hasn’t been updated as of this entry. They’ll probably count Spirit as a win, anyway. I’d tend to agree.

I try to think of myself as an advocate for freedom of speech. I’ll admit that I stumble all the time while trying to live up to this ideal, but I think the ability to say what you think, even when it’s not something I agree with, is very important to society, and an ideal I strongly believe in.

As you may be aware, trusted computing is being pointed to by many as the end of freedom of speech on the Internet. I’ve known about the danger for quite a while (it’s why my next computer will be a Mac, assuming Apple doesn’t botch up and start thinking about DRM).

John Walker, eloquent as always, has managed to make me aware of a fundamental trend in technology that I hadn’t noticed before. “The Digital Imprimatur,” a reference to the old English requirement of requiring printing presses to be licensed, points out that NAT devices, like my Linksys router, are a catalyst toward a fundamental distinction between publishers and consumers.

His argument, which is admirably solid, caught me completely off-guard. I’m exempt from Walker’s warning because I can and do open ports to my internal network, but at the same time, I can see how this would affect the ability of many to originate content. An argument he didn’t address, but a relevant one, is the increasingly common practice of restricting broadband Internet service to a single computer, or preventing servers from being run.

I don’t expect the implications from these problems to stop the march toward Internet tolls, however, which makes me increasingly nervous as we approach 2006.