Jim Morris's Thought of the Week (or month, or year, ...)
Friday, January 26, 2007
Bluetooth Makes a Cable Look like an Elegant Solution
When my Treo 600 finally died, I bought a Bluetooth-equipped phone and looked forward to joining all those hip people with flashing blue lights in their ears. After slogging through an incredible maze – get the earpiece to sniff around, burrow into the MS menus on the phone to find “Add Device,” and give the “0000” password – I finally got to listen to my phone through an earpiece. Who were the clowns that created this labyrinth? I had always just assumed that Bluetooth would use Ethernet rules: Connection is trivial, many-to-many, and service might require negotiation. I can’t imagine why there’s all the setup hassle imposed upon a very local, lightweight system. I’m told Bluetooth is intrinsically insecure anyway.
Now that I know the nonsense one must endure to use a Bluetooth device, I’m afraid wearing one brands me as a geek.
Here’s an alternate design: Any device would have a small receptacle into which you can insert the end of a copper wire. Putting the opposite ends of a wire into two devices connects them. You can tell what is connected to what by visual inspection. Security is not a problem if nobody is tapping the wire.
posted by Jim Morris @ 11:06 AM
1 Comments:
Previous Posts
I thought you wanted to look like a geek. Isn't that really why you bought it?