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An internal AOL memo reveals the Internet giant is looking to shed some extra weight as it gears up for a potential sale: XDrive, Bluestring, AOL Pictures, and others. Writers for some of its popular blogs have also been asked to post minimally until the end of the month. CNET News reporter Stephen Shankland tells Erica Ogg what AOL has up its sleeve.

Escaped ’spam king’ allegedly kills self, family

Report: Amazon could with with MySpace on music service

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Today’s stories:

Microsoft tries to one up Google PageRank

What’s behind those Northern Lights?

AOL to sell Xdrive, close mobile and photo sites

Report: Asus bringing ‘whole-day’ battery life to Eee PC

Tracking food safety with clean tech

Also in Friday’s podcast, Amazon and MySpace are looking to team up on music, a convicted spam king is found dead along with his wife and daughter, Microsoft flashes some new search algorithm technology, and NASA explains the Northern Lights phenomenon.

Video: waterproof your gadgets

He said the company is working with the disc makers to help make improvements.

Netflix’s streaming-video service will be frequently blocked from getting access to newly released films because the flicks might be locked up in exclusive agreements the studios have with pay channels such as HBO or other outlets.

Another interesting tidbit from Netflix’s investor day: Blu-ray Discs are more fragile than standard DVDs, according to Andy Rendich, Netflix’s vice president of operations. The next-generation movie discs are still a small part of Netflix’s business, Rendich said, but so far, the “break rates” are higher.

It’s important to note that Apple has cut deals that allows iTunes to rent movies from the top Hollywood studios without worrying about these exclusive deals. But it’s early yet, and Netflix hopes that it can establish a foothold in the still-untested streaming-movie sector. To do this, Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s chief financial officer, says the company is uniquely positioned to help movie enthusiasts transfer their rental dollars toward Web services.

SAN FRANCISCO–Netflix is banking on the belief that streaming movies to people’s living rooms is the future.

Hastings said that through streaming, Netflix could grow to 20 million subscribers worldwide. But the company cautioned that it will be some time before its streaming-movie service, which is offered free to consumers, will pay off big.

The company also plans to experiment with pricing, including both increases and decreases.

Some of the hurdles Netflix faces in Web delivery are competition from video-on-demand providers, as well as Internet services such as those from Apple and Amazon.com. The number of rival VOD players will likely grow, according to Netflix executives.

CEO Reed Hastings said during Netflix’s investor day here that he expects the business of renting physical DVDs to peak within the next five years. However, Netflix representatives later said they forecast that DVDs will remain strong for at least a decade.

Netflix, however, is already moving beyond DVDs. Its $99 set-top box for streaming movies came out earlier this month, generally to positive reviews.

It’s going to be hard for “a free-standing service to compete until it has enough content,” McCarthy told the crowd. The sector is in transition, and “Netflix is betting that during this time, we can establish ourselves as a leader in the space,” he said.

Apple users, meanwhile, should see several enhancements to the new beta, such as a similar look and feel of a native OS X application for toolbars, icons, and other interface items. Beta 5 also supports Growl for completed download notifications and updates, in addition to using OS X widgets. And a combined back-and-forth control has been added for toggling between Web pages.

Linux users will find a native GTK design for
Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menus.

While the latest Firefox beta has hundreds of changes, it’s still short of the 900 tweaks in beta 4.

Regarding performance, Beta 5 has souped up its JavaScript engine and profile-guided optimizations to double the speed in running Web applications, such as Google Mail and Zoho Office, Mozilla said.

Personalization also got a major enhancement with the new beta. Under the changes, users can view, organize, and search through bookmarks, tags, and browsing history via multiple views, in addition to storing frequent searches in smart folders.

Overall, Firefox 3 beta 5 includes 750 changes from the previous beta, focusing on enhanced stability, Web site compatibility, and platform and user-interface improvements.

Mozilla released its fifth beta version of Firefox 3 for Windows and the Mac on Wednesday, bringing a handful of improvements in ease of use to the open-source Web browser. A portable version is also available.

In the ease-of-use arena, Beta 5 is designed to offer improvements in integration with Windows,
Mac, and Linux. The beta aims to show improvements to Windows icons, as well as native user interface widgets in Web forms and the browser.

There are loads of CDNs out there: it’s an on-demand, business-focused offering for which companies are willing to pay good money. But because Amazon already has a big grip on the cloud with its existing Simple Storage Service, or S3, CloudFront is likely to be a power player from the start.

In conjunction with its S3 storage offering and other Web Services products, ever-expanding Web giant Amazon has launched a beta version of a content delivery network called CloudFront.

Amazon announced in September its intentions to launch a CDN, with a target date of the end of 2008. It also made clear then that pricing would be consumption-based. Amazon has declared that there is “no minimum fee” for CloudFront; customers pay only for what they use.

The service, which promises “low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments,” uses a global network of edge locations to keep the system humming.

RBC Capital, meanwhile, downgraded Apple’s stock based on “elevated risks” from a slowdown in consumer spending.

Morgan Stanley not only revised its recommendation for the stock, but also lowered its fiscal 2009 earnings estimate to $5.47 a share from $5.91 a share.

Apple’s shares fell 17.5 percent in early trading Monday, as two noted brokerage firms scaled back their recommendations to a “hold” from a “buy.”

RBC noted in its report that its September data showed the number of those intending to purchase a
Mac laptop within the next 90 days has dropped to 29 percent, compared with 34 percent in August, and those expecting to purchase a Mac desktop fell to 26 percent from 30 percent in the same period.

According to RBC’s research note:

Morgan added that it expects Apple to offer a more conservative guide to Wall Street and investors for the three-month period ending in December.

First, PC unit growth is decelerating and the remaining source of growth is increasingly in the sub-$1,000 market where Apple does not play. Second, even in the best of scenarios, Apple’s earnings per share growth will decelerate meaningfully from June quarter levels. A combination of tough compares (with the previous years figures) and investments in
iPhone growth drive our December quarter earnings per share to a decline of 8 percent year over year, down from +29 percent growth June.

In a worsening consumer spending environment we are downgrading from outperform to sector perform on: 1) reduced visibility growth, margins. 2) elevated risks to valuation.

In listing its reasons for its revisions, Morgan Stanley said in a research note:

Apple fell as low as $105.77 a share in intraday trading, down substantially from its close of $128.24 on Friday. Apple’s shares sold off sharply after Morgan Stanley and RBC Capital Markets downgraded the stock.

Instead, I’ll just tell you how to put all your keyboard shortcuts and Windows commands in a text file that you can open quickly via keystrokes, or keep minimized for even faster access. And you can do it all without grabbing your mouse.

Now open the file in Notepad and either make the Notepad window inconspicuous so it doesn’t block your work apps, or keep it minimized and Alt-Tab to Notepad when you need to refer to the file. To move or resize the Notepad window (without using your mouse, of course), press Alt-spacebar, S, and then use the arrow keys to adjust the window size.

Open Notepad by pressing the Windows key (or Ctrl-Esc) and N. You can also open it by pressing the Windows key and R (if necessary), typing notepad.exe, and pressing Enter.

Do it quick, before you forget where you put your spare mouse.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Start by finding a list of keyboard shortcuts. The one Microsoft put together works for me. Select all the text on the page from “General keyboard shortcuts” to just above “Other information.” Press Ctrl-C to copy the text to the clipboard. (That’s one of the few shortcuts I can actually remember.)

Save a list of keyboard shortcuts as a text file for easy access.

If I could remember any, I would begin this post with an anecdote about how wonderful a good memory can be.

Press Ctrl-V to paste the plain text into a blank file, and type Alt-F, A to open the Save As dialog box. Give the file a name–”shortcuts.txt” works for me. Just be sure to use the “.txt” file extension and save the file to your desktop or some other location that’s easy to access.

Tomorrow: use Gmail as a network drive.

If you need to create a custom keyboard shortcut to open Notepad, press the Windows key and use the arrow and Enter keys to navigate to the Notepad shortcut on the Start menu (All Programs > Accessories > Notepad). Press the context-menu–which is sometimes called the application key–and then type R. (Note that Shift-F10 opens this menu in some applications.)

Add Windows’ commands to the list
Be sure to add your custom keyboard shortcuts to your shortcuts.txt file. While you have the file open, add all those commands you always forget about when you want to use Windows’ command line to open a program or system tool. Microsoft provides a list of commands to open Control Panel applets. You’ll also find a bunch of Windows commands in an article I posted in January.

Use the Tab and arrow keys to navigate to the Shortcut keyboard text box under the Shortcut tab. Type the keystroke combination of your choice (Ctrl-Alt-N is one possibility), and press Enter.

So, I’ve come up with a list of free bandwidth monitoring software for Windows and
Mac that should tide you over until Verizon brings some Fios action to your hood.

Two other promising tools that I looked at were Axence NetTools and FreeMeter. Axence was the more advanced one by far, with a well-organized and professional-looking layout, but neither has bandwidth-monitoring capabilities that Comcast users will be looking for. Axence does have a “bandwidth monitor,” but it can only check on user-specified connections, not overall up/down traffic.

BitMeter offers a Web interface for tracking your traffic through a browser.

Despite the promising name, I found Bandwidth Monitor Lite to be a disappointment as far as monthly quotas were concerned. Similar to BitMeter in layout, although the look of its graph is slicker, the actual tools that the Lite version offered were slim. You can track the amount of data downloaded and set a day of the month to start counting, but there was no way to set the quota or configure an alert.

I did that find a little-known app called SurplusMeter does precisely what we need it to do. Like BitMeter for Windows, it gives users the ability to set a bandwidth limit, a start day of the month, and the connection type–PPP Modem or Network Card, for example.

Comcast has thrown down the bandwidth gauntlet. Starting in October, Comcast broadband users will be restricted to 250GB worth of downloads per month. When asked whether the cable company was planning on offering a bandwidth meter to customers, a Comcast representative stated that it hopes to, eventually, but until then Google would be a nice place to find one.

SurplusMeter also calculates a daily allowance, and reconfigures that depending on how much you’ve actually used for the month. It lacks the not-quite-fancy graphs that I encountered in its PC counterparts, but SurplusMeter also lacked something they had: an alarm or notification that would tell you when you were approaching your limit.

First off, let’s look at BitMeter. When running, it lives in your Windows Taskbar, so the features are accessible only through the context menu. Halfway down the lengthy list is the knockout punch: ISP Restrictions. This lets you set a limit that can be based on downloads only, or total traffic. It also offers notification based on the percentage of your quota that has been downloaded, and the start date of the quota.

For Macs users, iStat Menus and MenuMeters both sounded promising. Neither offer the robust bandwidth management tools that this Comcast problem is calling for, though.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The persistent emphasis on themes and skins was irritating, since the features that they were meant to put on display were less than stellar. The upgrade version does offer a lot more, but paying for a bandwidth tracker strikes me as a bit insulting, since we’re already throwing cash at Comcast that we might not have had we known there would be a post-contract download cap.

BitMeter's ISP Restrictions window.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Fortunately, the interface is dead simple. All the options are presented in an uncluttered layout–you’ll get exactly what you need from this app with a minimum of hassle. Handy progress bars give a slight visual flair to the days left in the month, the download megabyte count, and the total downloaded and uploaded.

It’s more than a one-hit wonder, offering a live graph of upload and download usage, a usage calculator that can work based on transfer time or file size, and hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly statistics. This data can also be exported and saved. However, BitMeter lacks polish in the interface. The main screen is a live usage graph. All features are hidden in the context menu, so it’s not going to win any design contests soon.

SurplusMeter offers Mac users a clean and simple traffic tracker.

Clearly, there’s no killer app for either operating system, but there’s at least one for each out there that most users should be able to get by on. It’s an imperfect stop-gap to a problem that has the potential for wide-ranging consequences far beyond mere file sharing.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

There are already products designed to stop the so-called phantom load of stand-by power. Smart power strips, for example, can tell when a TV peripheral is not being used and shut off.

In the U.S., “vampire energy” is about 5 percent of the energy consumed in the country and costs consumers $3 billion each year, according to the Department of Energy. Researchers at the University of California estimate that reducing stand-by power loss could save the U.S. $10 billion.

Improving energy efficiency by cutting standby power on individual devices makes sense, but there’s also a need to address networked devices, said Bruce Nordman, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Stand-by power levels have gone down significantly in past years yet energy efficiency for networked devices poses a different problem because they typically require continuous power.

“So, zero-power has a place in our array of goals and approaches, but it is just one of many, and we need to be sure that attention to it doesn’t detract from other approaches that may save more energy, more cost-effectively,” he said.

A Spanish company says it has developed a way to kill the vampires lurking in your living room–the numerous appliances that suck electricity even when they are not in use.

As electronic gadgets get more connected, consumers can connect different devices to the same screen. For example, multiple PCs or set-top boxes could share one screen, while future in-home displays could be both energy monitors and alarm system controls.

Good for You, Good For the Planet says that its technology can detect when a device has gone into stand-by mode and then cut the current entirely. To reawaken a device, a consumer presses a button, according to the product description.

“With our technology you can have different configurations, as a power supply or a power strip, (and) you can launch a range of products to fix all the needs around stand-by for all kind of appliances, and in a pretty cheap way,” García Alonso said.

Good for You, Good for the Planet received a patent for a microprocessor-based design that cuts an electronic machine’s electricity use to zero. It is now negotiating with several large manufacturers to incorporate the technology into power strips or into appliances, according to President Jorge Juan García Alonso.

(Credit:
Good Magazine)

Taking a bite out of electronic vampires could significantly reduce wasted energy. Good for You, Good for Planet says that a TV consumes more electricity per year when it’s off than when it’s on because the stand-by mode consumes electricity.

Test products are being used at customers, including at a hotel and office building in Spain, according to a report. Commercially available products could be made more broadly available in a matter of months if the company successfully licenses its patent, García Alonso said.

CardPress provides Web sites with a free (for low-volume usage) turn-key, hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The information cards are designed for associations, organizations, and merchants, and can enable one-click log-ins, phishing protection, and single sign-on (SSO) across multiple partner sites, and can eliminate costs associated with restoring lost or forgotten passwords. “We consider the service a tremendous building block for the information card ecosystem,” a Parity representative told CNET News.

Information cards are online equivalents of physical ID cards, such as a driver’s license. Online customers would have an electronic wallet with various information cards, bypassing the need to type in user names and passwords. A student accessing a university network, for example, would simply present his or her electronic student information card.

Imagine finding the perfect gift via Google and then purchasing it in one click without typing in your password or credit card information. On Thursday, Parity, an information management company, announced a new Web service called CardPress that makes issuing online information cards a little easier.

Unlike having a credit card number, which anyone on the Internet can use at anytime, the ID card model proposed by the ICF requires that all three players (user, provider, reliant party) be synced in real time before the transaction can proceed. A user would sync via encrypted connection with an ID provider (say a bank or credit card issuer), and also with a reliant party (a university network, a financial site, or an e-commerce site).

In June the Information Card Foundation (ICF) was created with the stated goal of increasing awareness of the use of electronic ID cards on the Internet, and encouraging interoperability in business around new standards. Member companies include Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and PayPal, plus nine leaders in the technology community. Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity, is the current chairman of the ICF.

Currently there are only two organizations offering or soon to offer CardPress cards. Boston Community Change, which rewards charitable donations to local schools, is only open to Boston-area residents. The Minuteman Library Network, a consortium of libraries in Massachusetts, also plans to offer the cards. The service would allow Minuteman Library members secure access to online resources. Both are available through an electronic wallet site called Azigo (currently in beta). In the coming days, Parity expects to add more associations.

Sirius XM Radio on Thursday announced that its Sirius side posted a 25 percent jump in second-quarter revenue and pared back its net loss as it closed its final quarter as a standalone company.

“Despite a tough economy and weak auto sales, gross additions set a new second-quarter record. In the second quarter, both revenue and subscribers grew 25 percent, compared with last year,” CEO Mel Karmazin said in a statement, adding that the company’s costs, meanwhile, remained essentially flat and aided in reducing its net loss.

“The combined company now has an annualized revenue run rate of over $2.4 billion, making Sirius XM Radio one of the fastest-growing and best positioned subscription media businesses,” Karmazin said. “With rapid integration efforts under way, we started realizing synergies on day 1.”

Revenues for Sirius Satellite Radio, which closed its long-awaited merger with XM Satellite Radio after the quarter ended, rose to $283 million for the three-month period ending June 30, up from $226.4 million a year earlier.

With the merger now complete, the combined company is expected to generate $400 million in cost savings next year and annualized revenues in excess of $2.4 billion.

Sirius posted a net loss of nearly $84 million, compared with a loss of $134.1 million a year ago.