Just a quick note on this, folks, because we have a low tolerance for inscrutable technojargony acronyms and this article in The Register boasts no fewer than eight such beasties in its first four sentences-- including one in which one letter stands for another acronym. (No, honestly; MBOA reportedly stands for "Multiband OFDM Alliance." No indication what OFDM stands for, however.) But as far as we can make out, a wireless version of FireWire is one step closer to becoming a commercial reality, and that's the important thing.

See, apparently the 1394 TA ("Trade Association") has voiced its approval of a newly proposed technology "to allow FireWire devices to communicate wirelessly across UWB links." UWB is "Ultra Wide Band," in case you were wondering. And the technology in question was proposed by the WMA, aka the "WiMedia Alliance." Clear so far? Good. Because you can skip all the stuff about the slowness of the IEEE to set a standard and the MBOA taking matters into its own hands by "defining the basic MAC and PHY specifications" necessary to form a wireless FireWire PAL. (Whew.) All you need to know-- we think-- is that a bunch of bigwigs have agreed on a technical approach to transfer FireWire data wirelessly at a rate of "up to 480 Mbps," which is even faster than plain vanilla wired FireWire. Sure, there's no mention of range, and we're guessing that in practice it may not be quite as quick as the numbers imply, but this is still some very cool stuff nonetheless.

Now, we could go on and on about the applications of such a technology, such as DV camcorders that can play back video on the living room TV at full, uncompressed quality without needing to be plugged in, or maybe one of those long-rumored Mac tablets with enough bandwidth to act as a remote screen and input device for a base Mac and with a screen refresh rate fast enough that it might even work with a few modest action games. Instead, though, we have to tackle the name; "Wireless FireWire" ain't gonna cut it in the marketplace unless the whole world decides to get drunk and stay that way. "FireWireless" seems to have a growing following among the tech set, but something about it bugs us a little. Besides, isn't wireless FireWire just... well... Fire?

That might be hard to trademark, though. Hmmm.

Say, even though wireless FireWire will most likely be used more as a peripheral interconnect architecture than for all-purpose high-speed networking (IP over FireWire notwithstanding), maybe Apple should just stick with its AirPort series of product names. Let's see, now... if 11 Mbps was "AirPort" and 54 Mbps is "AirPort Extreme," what would wireless 480 Mbps be? May we suggest either "AirPort Absurd," "AirPort Insane," or "AirPort YourFaceWillMeltOff"? Our vote's for the last one... because it yields yet another acronym, and hey, who doesn't need more of those? AYFWMO forever!