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The Quiet Man Who May Become Apple King Posted: 11 Nov 2008 08:30 AM CST Fortune's Adam Lashinsky has written a fascinating article on Tim Cook, the quiet Apple's Chief Operating Office unknown by most of the public, but a key member of the Dream Team that helped Steve Jobs to turn the company around during its dark ages. Why now? I can't help to think that this is related to Steve Jobs' potential farewell and Apple's future transition of power. But while that's probably my tinfoil hat in action, Lashinsky asks himself the same question I did: Can Cook become Apple's CEO? Reading the events and third-party comments portrayed in his article, it feels like this may very well be the case. Even while he recently declared that "[Steve] is irreplaceable" and that he saw "Steve there with gray hair in his 70s, long after I'm retired", Cook has been showing more at Apple events recently. He is right that Steve Jobs is irreplaceable: Nobody can match his charisma and vision in the industry, as he has demonstrated again and again during this years. But Cook has other qualities that match those of Jobs. And coupled with abilities of the rest of the Dream Team (Ive, Schiller, Serlet, Johnson et al), he may well the best guy to get into the iCEO's chair as Steve takes a more laid back role in the company. • Like Jobs, Cook is extremely demanding and passionate about work and doing things right. In a meeting back in 1998, when he arrived to Apple, he had a meeting about a problem in manufacturing in China. He suggested that someone should be there "driving this". Thirty minutes later into the meeting, he looked at one of his lieutenant and asked him emotionless: "Why are you still here?" • He is an extremely hard worker and is devoted to Apple, coming earlier and going out later than anyone else. Reportedly, he "genuinely" loves the company. • He has run much of the company for years and has been responsible for making everything run like clockwork. Because of this, and the things above, Cook is the highest paid person at Apple and is the only... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

How To: Max Out Apple TV’s Potential With Boxee Posted: 10 Nov 2008 01:00 PM CST digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/How_To_Max_Out_Apple_TV_s_Potential_With_Boxee'; This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee. Boxee can be installed fairly easily via the ATV's USB port to bring Hulu and Comedy Central streaming, playback of any video or music file anywhere on your network in virtually any file type imagineable, and a bevy of internet A/V sources like Flickr, Last.fm, NPR and BBC podcasts and tons of others—all upping the usefulness and fun of Apple's notoriously underachieving box by a factor of 10, easily. If you have an ATV, Boxee is a must-install, and it's 100% free. Let's get started. The stock Apple TV has never been able to decide what it's supposed to do. Is it a device to store all your videos? Its built-in hard drive would suggest yes, but the fact that everything needs to be piped through iTunes makes this a hassle if you store your videos in any other way. And why are we downloading and storing anyway? Streaming is the way things are headed, and for streaming, Apple TV doesn't make a ton of sense, especially when a box a quarter its size and a less than half its price can bring Netflix's massive library into your living room with zero download delays and zero added cost, soon in HD, even. Aside from adding the golden goose of Hulu streaming, Boxee's other main advantage is freeing your Apple TV from its direct connection with your iTunes library. No longer will it be necessary to convert all of your video files into iTunes compatible formats to get them to your TV—Boxee will let your Apple TV read just about any video codec you can throw at it (full list of codecs here) from any computer or network-attached storage device on your network, or read files off the Apple TV's own hard... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Windows 7’s New Geolocation Service Introduces Privacy Problems Posted: 10 Nov 2008 12:58 PM CST Cnet's Ina Fried is covering WinHEC, Microsoft's Hardware Engineering Conference, and has discovered that Windows 7 has a new system-wide service that will offer very easily accessible geographical location services for all devices and programs. Unfortunately, their implementation seems half-baked in the security front, opening the door to privacy problems that even Microsoft program manager Alec Berntson didn't have a convincing answer for. What is worse: They don't plan to fix them for the final release. In previous versions of Windows, users didn't have a way to turn geolocation services on or off, since the hardware was accessed on an application by application basis. However, the user was able to launch the application—which usually came with his GPS device—knowing that it was a "good" program. Having no easy-to-use API also made it more difficult for programmers (good ones and evil ones) to create software for GPS hardware and grab the geolocation data. In Windows 7, the new system-wide GPS service can be turned on and off by the user, who has the option to make it available only to applications as opposed to background processes. However, once you turn the service on, there's no way to limit access to specific programs: Anything that you launch will be able to access the GPS information without even warning you. Berntson admitted that this is problematic, because it opens the door for spoofing programs that could use this information mischievously. We only promise the control that we can realistically give to them, rather than trying to promise more than we can deliver, Application-based control would be great to have and it is certainly on our Christmas list for future stuff. On top of that, following a question by an attendee, Berntson pointed out that there will be no way to give a warning to the user when an application tries to access the GPS. He said that, even while this is technically possible, it's not in their roadmap for Windows 7. As a... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Google CEO Won’t Become Nation’s First Chief Tech Officer Posted: 08 Nov 2008 06:15 PM CST I'm kinda disappointed Google CEO Eric Schmidt really won't be the country's first ever chief tech officer after all. Despite rumors and (fairly reasonable) speculation he was not-so-subtly campaigning for the position (and Obama), yesterday he definitively said that he wouldn't take the position if offered: "I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no." His experience and knowledge of all kinds of tech—he's really into green energy, for instance—made him one of my personal favorite choices for the position. And Google mojo is a plug by itself. So who do you want whispering in the president-elect's ear about new solar power technologies, the effect of YouPorn HD on our nation's broadband infrastructure and revamping kids' education to make them more prepared in a world that revolves around bits as much as bullets? [Reuters via Neowin] [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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