A late Feb. firmware upgrade released by Apple for the Apple TV has broken the Boxee install on Apple TV devices.  Talk in the nerd-o-sphere is that Apple is being hush hush on reasons.  Not much that I have seen will even speculate.  Others, like the lovely and talented Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV have flat out begged Apple to re-enable the functionality of the very cool Boxee open source software.

With a late Q1, early Q2 rumor about Apple releasing new hardware updates to a variety of their products, many of which are obviously overdue, I am willing to speculate that the reason Apple bricked Boxee is because of a potential relationship with Netflix.  Boxee ties directly to your Netflix account, a process I just completed within 1 minute.  Within the last 6 months, Apple and Netflix began to play nice, wen the Netflix streaming video functionality for their subscribers was brought to Safari.

So let's have a look.  Apple and Netflix are now smooching sisters.  "Sure, use our browser to stream your content."  "Hey thanks, this is working out well for us to deliver our stuff to your very loyal fan base."  Alright, so now lets toss Boxee into the mix.  "Hey, we're open source, we can put Boxee on anything."  Netflix says "Sure thing, butter cup.  This is a great idea because we, as Netflix, want our customers to be able to see our movies on any device.  We're even streaming to Microsoft XBox and some Blue Ray players, heck even some new LCD TVs!".

Apple takes a second look and low and behold, they are sort of taken out of the picture streaming Netflix to people's TV because Netflix is pushing the Roku player (oustanding device, video evidence).  If they are going to make a push to offer more Apple features on the upcoming release of Apple TV, wouldn't "Hey, stream Netflix too?" be a huge selling point?  YES.  But if you can stream Netflix without having to upgrade your current Apple TV hardware, why would anyone switch over?

I am convinced that Apple killed Boxee with the latest firmware because they have an Apple sanctioned Apple TV Netflix feature on the table and in an effort to sell the new, shiny hardware later this year, they had to disable Boxee on Apple TV in order to make their relationship with Netflix continue to grow positively, despite how such action might affect the Netflix / Boxee relationship.

Any thoughts are welcome.  I am not an Apple Insider, I'm a chubby guy on my recliner in Omaha....but this totally makes sense, correct?

Brian, my fellow Linux buddy at work, shot me over an email from his iPhone this morning with a photo attached.  He installed KDE4 on his Ubuntu 8.10 netbook, an Acer Aspire One that I have been jealous over for the last few months.  The device is cool as hell as is, but now he's got it dual booting between XP and Ubuntu 8.10 and he's got Gnome and KDE as options.

It is clear that the KDE4 desktop environment is much prettier than the 'poop' colored Ubuntu, as I have seen it referred to across the web.  The load screen changed to a pretty blue "Kubuntu" graphic instead of the orange Ubuntu one and following that, the loader has some cool fade-in effects as it comes up.  Overall it's got a very clean OSX-ish gloss to it.  It's a bit different to get used to KDE4 after having used GNOME for so long, but the prettiness of it outweighs the learning curve.

I told Brian that the last thing he needs to do on this netbook in order to become king of nerds, is to install OSX on the netbook, too.  If he does it, I'll let you know....in fact, if he does it, I'll video tape him triple booting the thing and stick it up on YouTube.