Essentially, Wi-Fi Direct turns supporting devices into access points, allowing them to connect to one another without joining a traditional network. They’ll support typical Wi-Fi ranges and the same data-transfer rates, which in the case of 802.11n is some 30 times faster than the three megabits per second for Bluetooth.

“Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn’t available,” Wi-Fi Alliance Executive Director Edgar Figueroa said in a statement. “The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise.”

And Bluetooth inevitably less so. Especially since Wi-Fi Direct will be available as a software upgrade for existing Wi-Fi devices. Why wait around for high-speed Bluetooth, which itself will rely on Wi-Fi for high speed data transfers, when you can use Wi-Fi Direct for your personal area network?

Now this is just getting silly.

Pali Research says sales of the Palm Pre are slowing. RBC’s Mike Abramsky says they aren’t and claims 325,000 to 375,000 have been sold to date, ahead of his expectations.

Citing some decidedly unscientific poll data, Jesup and Lamont analyst Kevin Dede suggests the device is plagued by build-quality issues and a high exchange/return rate, potentially 40 percent. Abramsky says it’s between two and three percent and calls BS on the build-quality issue.

“Most buyers appear delighted with their new Pre user experience,” Abramsky said in a research note Friday. “Pre satisfaction appears higher than legacy Palm devices (e.g., Treo), affirming improved execution from the ‘New’ Palm, including engineering, manufacturing, quality and process improvements.”

So, Pre sales are slowing. Or, they’re not.

And exchange/return rates are high.

Unless they’re not.

And these analysts are on point.

Unless, of course, they’re not. Too bad it’s impossible to tell without official numbers from Palm (PALM) or Sprint (S).

Why the discrepancy? RampRate says Credit Suisse vastly overestimated YouTube’s bandwidth, storage, and data center costs. Worse, it failed to account for Google’s peering agreements, which significantly reduce Internet transit costs by exchanging traffic locally with other large networks. RampRate figures Google (GOOG) pays for about 27 percent of YouTube’s bandwidth. It trades for the remaining 73 percent through peering deals.

Beyond this, Google finds savings in other ways. It’s likely able to negotiate a lower rate for 27 percent of YouTube bandwidth it pays for simply by virtue of the sheer amount of business it’s able to bring to the table. And it keeps hosting costs low by maintaining servers in out-of-the-way locations. Says RampRate, “Regardless of what you may hear, YouTube costs are a fraction of any other company running similar operations. Most of Google’s bandwidth is free or near-free; its hardware is cost-optimized; and its data center costs are mostly committed or sunk.”

If that’s the case, why didn’t Google take issue with Credit Suisse’s (CS) projections? Why does it allow this perception of YouTube as money pit to persist? Well, silence is golden, is it not? “Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content,” Ramprate explains. “An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let rumors of YouTube’s losses grow and compound….

“The trail for this strategy was blazed long before YouTube. Apple’s poor-mouthing of iTunes served it exceptionally well for years in holding back the tide of higher revenue share demands (even as labels privately suspected the service was much more profitable than reported). The apparent stability and maturity of the business finally culminated in recent price increases. Google can only hope that its run with YouTube lasts as long as Apple’s luxury of $.99 pricing.”

In the past, Apple (AAPL) has said that many more songs will be priced at 69 cents than at $1.29. But that 69-cent bargain bin is viewed as little consolation to some who question the wisdom of introducing what amounts to a 30 percent price increase with the economy in recession and online piracy an easy option.

Said Nine Inch Nails manager Jim Guerinot, “Wouldn’t it make sense to try to price it cheaper instead of squeezing the handful of people who are still willing to pay for music?”

Perhaps. But when has the recording industry ever done anything that made sense?

The last time the unemployment rate was this high was in July 2004, following the dotcom bust. Seems even the high-tech world is becoming more fiscally cautious as the economy crumbles around us. We’ve seen layoffs at Yahoo (YHOO), Motorola (MOT), Applied Materials (AMAT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Sun (JAVA), Nortel (NT) … even Google (GOOG), which announced the first major cuts in its 10-year history.

What was it Mark Twain once said? “By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again and again–and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s, and each obeying its own law.”