Apple's Cook to top CEO pay list

Tim Cook could well end up being the highest paid CEO in America in 2011, after Apple granted him a million restricted stock units last August for taking the reins shortly before co-founder Steve Jobs died, writes the Associated Press.

An Associated Press review of a securities filing shows Cook's pay package was valued at $378 million. The vast majority came in a grant of a million restricted stock units worth $376 million at the time.

Half of the stock units will vest in August 2016, the other half in August 2021. His salary and performance bonus, about $900 000 each, made up much of the rest.

Google is profiting from ads for illegal products generated by its flagship automated advertising system, the BBC has found.

The ads include unofficial London 2012 Olympics ticket resellers, as well as cannabis and fake ID card sellers.

These ads were promptly removed by Google after the BBC brought them to the company's attention.

Victorinox is making a Swiss Army penknife with a 1TB USB stick inside it, claiming it's the world's highest USB stick capacity, according to The Register.

It's being shown at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. Users can either buy the stick on its own - the airline-friendly version swings out from a standard-looking Swiss Army penknife container, coloured red or black - or they can get one with a pair of scissors and a knife.

Victorinox has been running the product line for some years; there was a 1GB version in 2008, meaning a 1 000X capacity improvement in four years.

Microsoft has revealed details of its next-generation storage capabilities, dubbed Storage Spaces, which will be released with Windows 8, states Computing.co.uk.

A Microsoft blog details how Storage Spaces will improve on its Next Technology File System (NTFS), which was released pre-2000 and only allows storage on physical disks in isolation, making management more difficult.

With NTFS, if additional physical disks are added to increase storage, users would need to format the storage space as a drive and potentially move files across from other drives that were reaching capacity.