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Saturday, September 24, 2011
Want Facebook’s new Timeline profile? Here’s how to enable it right now
During yesterday’s f8 keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new redesign for the site’s profiles coming soon called “Timeline.” A beta version is available for developers now, but for the rest of us, it seemed that we’d have to wait a few weeks before we were able to use Timeline.
It’s not necessarily the easiest process. You basically have to become a developer and make a fake app so that Facebook will give you access to the new feature. But if you really want to be the first of your friends to have a Timeline profile, here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Log into your Facebook account. Click here, and give permission to the Developer app to access your basic info.
- Click “Create New App.”
- Give it a random display name and namespace, and click the “I Agree” box.
- You’ll be directed to the Facebook Developers main page. Here, click on “Open Graph” on the left-hand column.
- Fill in whatever you want in the following fields. You’ll need to pick an action for the first box and an object in the second box — like a Mad Libs! It really doesn’t matter what you put in the fields, but we’re assuming it’s probably best to choose SFW actions and objects. Then click “Get Started.”
- Scroll to the bottom of the next page and click “Save Changes and Next.” Repeat that step for the next page.
- You may have to wait a bit for your app to be processed. Just go back to your homepage and wait for your invite to enable Timeline.
- You’ll then be greeted with a window that says “Introducing Timeline — A New Kind of Profile.” Click “Get it Now,” and that’s it.
Unless you’re actually a developer, you might not want to waste your time with all of this since the new profile layout will sure to be a bit buggy. Let us know if you end up going through the steps and getting early access to Timeline.
Alternatively, check out this video:
Facebook changes creeping out some customers
Mark Zuckerberg showing off Timeline at F8.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET) At the F8 conference yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off some of the most drastic changes ever made to the company's service. And though Zuckerberg is excited by those changes, many folks across the Web aren't so quick to celebrate.The fear among some users relates to what some say could become a potentially worrisome privacy situation on the social network, led by Timeline and changes to Open Graph.
Timeline provides users with a way to view "the story of your life," according to Zuckerberg, including a collection of all the "stories" uses have shared on Facebook over the years, as well as the pictures they've posted and the applications they've used.
Facebook's updated Open Graph will make the social network far more "sticky." Zuckerberg said users will have the ability--thanks to Timeline and a new addition, Ticker--to see what a friend is doing, like watching a movie on Netflix or listening to a song on Spotify, and engage in that same activity from within the social network. The Facebook CEO said he believes the improvements will help create "a completely new class of social apps" that will let users share every single facet of their lives on the social network.
"All those activities people perform with these apps--listening to a Bjork tune, reading about same-sex marriage laws, cooking Arroz con Pollo, running four miles, donating to Amnesty International--will be stored permanently and made accessible (if the user allows it) on a greatly enhanced profile page that will essentially become a remote-control autobiography," Wired's Steven Levy wrote about the update.It's that concept of Facebook becoming an "autobiography" that's scaring some folks.
"Is there any way I can upload my browser history, bank statements, and medical records to Facebook?" Twitter user @adrianshort asked today. "Might as well do this properly."
Those sentiments were echoed earlier today by CNET commenter "OneAmazedHuman" who said that the social network's additions are making some people consider leaving the site.
"Frankly, after this last round of messing around with Facebook, there are a whole lot of us thinking seriously about dumping it," OneAmazedHuman wrote. "[I] hate everything they threw at us lately. What happened to 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it?'
"Facebook is getting too intrusive and sneaky," OneAmazedHuman continued. "If I can find another place to play Scrabble, I'm probably out of there. I can live without it nicely. When it was fun, it was fun. It isn't that anymore. Thanks, Zuckerberg. Why didn't you just create something new to mess around with and leave Facebook as is?"
Mark Zuckerberg talks about Ticker and the Open Graph at F8 yesterday.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET) Drastic measures aside, there are some who are taking a wait-and-see approach to Facebook's changes. Twitter user @JulesHanna tweeted yesterday that the F8 presentation "reinforced my belief that Facebook's becoming the operating system of the human Web. Brilliant, yet alarming in its implications."
Though the outcry over Facebook's changes is strong, the company has survived such complaints in the past. In 2009, following a major redesign of the site, the social network was hit hard by users who complained about the changes. At the time, a Facebook app that polled users on their thoughts about the changes found that hundreds of thousands of users were upset by the move. And like now, many of those folks said that they would leave the social network.
That said, at that time, Facebook had more than 175 million users. At the F8 conference yesterday, it was revealed that Facebook now has over 800 million members worldwide. So if those departures did, in fact, occur, they certainly weren't crippling to the social network.
Also playing into Facebook's favor this time around, there isn't near-universal outcry over the changes like there was in 2009. In fact, there are some people that are quite pleased with the company's modifications.
"Got my new Facebook timeline looking good," Twitter user @angelarenee09 tweeted today. "Love these fun changes!"
So, while that might just be one opinion, it's quite clear that in the social world, everyone has a different idea of what's good and bad. And Facebook--for better or worse--is learning that all over again today.
Benchmark tests offer first hints of Windows 8 performance
Microsoft released a freely available developer preview of its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system last week. Our own Seth Rosenblatt has a video below offering an overview of the new OS. What we haven't seen yet is an overview of Windows 8's impact on general computing performance.
A first, rough look at Windows 8
Microsoft has promised improved efficiency in Windows 8, due at least in part to the new OS relying on fewer background operations sucking up memory and processing power. A look at the process tab in Windows 8's new task manager bears this out. With Windows 8, we see 21 operating system processes running. With Windows 7 we count 31.
That slimming down alone should help overall performance. If Microsoft has done more to improve Windows 8's operating speed in this developer build, we haven't been told about it. We'll rely on our benchmark tests to bear that out.
Caveat time. Know that the version of Windows 8 we tested is a 64-bit developer's preview build. Any test results below could very well look different from results when the final version ships. Consider our performance comparison, like the operating system preview itself, a look at a work in progress.
Our test bed is a hand-built Intel Core i3-based desktop. Specs include a 3.1GHz Intel Core i3 2105; 8GB of 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; an Intel DZ68D8 motherboard; a 500GB, 7,200rpm Western Digital SATA II hard drive; and a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card (for 3D gaming tests).
Application tests
We wanted to test the Windows 8 preview not just for its performance but also to check its compatibility with our current suite of benchmark applications, and unfortunately both 32-bit and 64-bit Photoshop CS5 crashed every time we tried to load an image file. That's unfortunate, since that test can be a good indicator of memory performance.
Instead, our iTunes/QuickTime multimedia multitasking test was the only case where we saw Windows 8 make a noticeable impact on speed. We welcome any speed improvement, and it shows that at least in this build, Microsoft appears to be on the right track for providing some noticeable application performance benefits, at least where memory utilization plays a role. We'll have a better idea once (or if) we can test out 64-bit Photoshop CS5.
Gaming tests
In addition to our CS5 difficulties, we were also unable to run 3DMark 11, and we had difficulty with Far Cry 2. The latter wouldn't run our lower-resolution test, and the scores between the operating systems on the higher-resolution test are wildly divergent. Our problems with both programs could be because of the operating system, the individual applications, the graphics card drivers, or a combination.
For the games that did work, we were most impressed by Windows 8's handling of the original Crysis. That game is notoriously hard for PCs, in part because it's a known system-memory hog. We'd expect a Core i3-based desktop with 8GB of RAM and a decent midrange graphics card to handle Crysis reasonably well, but even at high resolution, the Windows 8-based test bed showed impressive frame rate gains over the Windows 7-based system. Crysis is not the most relevant title anymore, but the fact that this build of Windows 8 makes easy work of this memory-chewing game suggests again that Microsoft's new OS does indeed bring with it some noticeable benefits to memory efficiency.
For newer games, don't take the Far Cry 2 scores seriously. We show them only to demonstrate the disconnect between operating systems with that game. The Metro 2033 results are more encouraging for gamers. We ran that test in DirectX 11 mode with full detail and at the highest resolutions we could muster on a single display. We didn't expect to see much of a performance boost between operating systems, but at least for this game, and with this OS build, Windows 8 doesn't seem to have lost a step on more-demanding 3D workloads. It's not surprising that we had some problems with certain programs in Windows 8, and it's reasonable to expect that most issues will be resolved as Microsoft and application developers update their code. What we did not necessarily expect is the noticeable performance boost between operating systems to applications and tasks that depend on system memory.
Most of the talk about Windows 8 thus far has centered around its new Metro touch interface and its potential as a cross-platform operating system. We're also interested to see how the mouse-driven interface develops over build iterations, because right now it feels too heavily touch-centered. But even if Windows is undergoing an interface identity crisis, based on what we've seen in our testing, computing traditionalists should look forward to the streamlining Microsoft has achieved in Windows 8's memory utilization. Let's hope Microsoft can hang on to those performance gains when it ships final code.
A first, rough look at Windows 8
Microsoft has promised improved efficiency in Windows 8, due at least in part to the new OS relying on fewer background operations sucking up memory and processing power. A look at the process tab in Windows 8's new task manager bears this out. With Windows 8, we see 21 operating system processes running. With Windows 7 we count 31.
That slimming down alone should help overall performance. If Microsoft has done more to improve Windows 8's operating speed in this developer build, we haven't been told about it. We'll rely on our benchmark tests to bear that out.
Caveat time. Know that the version of Windows 8 we tested is a 64-bit developer's preview build. Any test results below could very well look different from results when the final version ships. Consider our performance comparison, like the operating system preview itself, a look at a work in progress.
Our test bed is a hand-built Intel Core i3-based desktop. Specs include a 3.1GHz Intel Core i3 2105; 8GB of 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; an Intel DZ68D8 motherboard; a 500GB, 7,200rpm Western Digital SATA II hard drive; and a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card (for 3D gaming tests).
Application tests
Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
110
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
111
Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
83
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
87
Multimedia multitasking (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
380
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
403
Cinebench 11.5
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 | Rendering multiple CPUs | | Rendering single CPU |
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
3.01
1.24
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
3
1.24
Instead, our iTunes/QuickTime multimedia multitasking test was the only case where we saw Windows 8 make a noticeable impact on speed. We welcome any speed improvement, and it shows that at least in this build, Microsoft appears to be on the right track for providing some noticeable application performance benefits, at least where memory utilization plays a role. We'll have a better idea once (or if) we can test out 64-bit Photoshop CS5.
Gaming tests
Metro 2033 (in fps)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 2,560x1,600 (very high) | | 1,920x1,00 (very high) |
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
10
18
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
10
18
Far Cry 2 (in fps)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 1,920x1,200 (very high) |
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
98
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
26
Crysis (in fps)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 1,600x1,200 | | 1,280x1,024 |
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 (64-bit)
51
58
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit)
42
44
In addition to our CS5 difficulties, we were also unable to run 3DMark 11, and we had difficulty with Far Cry 2. The latter wouldn't run our lower-resolution test, and the scores between the operating systems on the higher-resolution test are wildly divergent. Our problems with both programs could be because of the operating system, the individual applications, the graphics card drivers, or a combination.
For the games that did work, we were most impressed by Windows 8's handling of the original Crysis. That game is notoriously hard for PCs, in part because it's a known system-memory hog. We'd expect a Core i3-based desktop with 8GB of RAM and a decent midrange graphics card to handle Crysis reasonably well, but even at high resolution, the Windows 8-based test bed showed impressive frame rate gains over the Windows 7-based system. Crysis is not the most relevant title anymore, but the fact that this build of Windows 8 makes easy work of this memory-chewing game suggests again that Microsoft's new OS does indeed bring with it some noticeable benefits to memory efficiency.
For newer games, don't take the Far Cry 2 scores seriously. We show them only to demonstrate the disconnect between operating systems with that game. The Metro 2033 results are more encouraging for gamers. We ran that test in DirectX 11 mode with full detail and at the highest resolutions we could muster on a single display. We didn't expect to see much of a performance boost between operating systems, but at least for this game, and with this OS build, Windows 8 doesn't seem to have lost a step on more-demanding 3D workloads. It's not surprising that we had some problems with certain programs in Windows 8, and it's reasonable to expect that most issues will be resolved as Microsoft and application developers update their code. What we did not necessarily expect is the noticeable performance boost between operating systems to applications and tasks that depend on system memory.
Take an early tour of Windows 8 (photos)
Derelict NASA satellite falls back to Earth
NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, out of gas and out of control after two decades in space, plunged back into the atmosphere early Saturday, heating up, breaking apart and presumably showering chunks of debris along a 500-mile-long downrange impact zone.
But NASA officials could not immediately confirm where or exactly when the satellite came down, saying only that re-entry occurred during a two-hour period.
"NASA's decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell back to Earth between 11:23 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 23, and 1:09 a.m. EDT Sept. 24," the agency said in a statement released more than three hours -- two complete orbits -- after the predicted impact time.
"The satellite was passing eastward over Canada and Africa as well as vast portions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans during that period," NASA said. "The precise re-entry time and location are not yet known with certainty."
U.S. Strategic Command predicted the defunct UARS satellite would re-enter the atmosphere off the west coast of Canada. (Credit: William Harwood/MacDoppler Pro)
The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., reported that UARS entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs, but the "precise time and locale aren't yet known."
Given the trajectory of the bus-size, 6.3-ton satellite, experts said it was unlikely any falling remnants would result in injuries or significant property damage. But there was no immediate confirmation as to how much debris might have reached the ground or where the debris "footprint" might be located.
The centerpiece of a $750 million mission, the Upper Atmosphere Research satellite was launched from the shuttle Discovery at 12:23 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Sept. 15, 1991. The solar-powered satellite studied a wide variety of atmospheric phenomena, including the depletion of Earth's ozone layer 15 to 30 miles up.
The long-lived satellite was decommissioned in 2005 and one side of its orbit was lowered using the last of its fuel to hasten re-entry and minimize the chances of orbital collisions that could produce even more orbital debris. No more fuel was available for maneuvering and the satellite's re-entry was "uncontrolled."
As with all satellites in low-Earth orbit, UARS was a victim of atmospheric drag, the slow but steady reduction in velocity, and thus altitude, caused by flying through the tenuous extreme upper atmosphere at some five miles per second.
UARS' final trajectory as it neared the discernible atmosphere proved difficult to predict. The descent slowed somewhat Friday, presumably because the spacecraft's orientation changed. As the day wore on, the predicted impact time slipped from Friday afternoon to early Saturday.
"As of 10:30 p.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 85 miles by 90 miles (135 km by 140 km)," NASA said in a 10:50 p.m. statement. "Re-entry is expected between 11:45 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, and 12:45 a.m., Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time (3:45 a.m. to 4:45 a.m. GMT). During that time period, the satellite will be passing over Canada and Africa, as well as vast areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. The risk to public safety is very remote."
The final update from U.S. Strategic Command, which operates a global radar network used to monitor more than 20,000 objects in low-Earth orbit, predicted entry around 12:16 a.m. EDT Saturday above the Pacific Ocean just west of Canada. But the prediction was uncertain by plus or minus two hours and at orbital velocities of 5 miles per second, just 10-minutes of uncertainty translates into 3,000 miles of uncertainty in position. Nick Johnson, chief scientist with NASA's Orbital Debris Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told reporters last week he expected most of the satellite to burn up as it slammed into the dense lower atmosphere at more than 17,000 mph. But computer software used to analyze possible re-entry outcomes predicted 26 pieces of debris would survive to impact the surface in a 500-mile-long down-range footprint. "We looked at those 26 pieces and how big they are and we've looked at the fact they can hit anywhere in the world between 57 north and 57 south and we looked at what the population density of the world is," he said. "Numerically, it comes out to a chance of 1-in-3,200 that one person anywhere in the world might be struck by a piece of debris. Those are obviously very, very low odds that anybody's going to be impacted by this debris."
For comparison, some 42.5 tons of wreckage from the shuttle Columbia hit the ground in a footprint stretching from central Texas to Louisiana when the orbiter broke apart during re-entry in 2003. No one on the ground was injured and no significant property damage was reported.
But NASA officials could not immediately confirm where or exactly when the satellite came down, saying only that re-entry occurred during a two-hour period.
"NASA's decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell back to Earth between 11:23 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 23, and 1:09 a.m. EDT Sept. 24," the agency said in a statement released more than three hours -- two complete orbits -- after the predicted impact time.
"The satellite was passing eastward over Canada and Africa as well as vast portions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans during that period," NASA said. "The precise re-entry time and location are not yet known with certainty."
U.S. Strategic Command predicted the defunct UARS satellite would re-enter the atmosphere off the west coast of Canada. (Credit: William Harwood/MacDoppler Pro)
The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., reported that UARS entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs, but the "precise time and locale aren't yet known."
Given the trajectory of the bus-size, 6.3-ton satellite, experts said it was unlikely any falling remnants would result in injuries or significant property damage. But there was no immediate confirmation as to how much debris might have reached the ground or where the debris "footprint" might be located.
The centerpiece of a $750 million mission, the Upper Atmosphere Research satellite was launched from the shuttle Discovery at 12:23 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Sept. 15, 1991. The solar-powered satellite studied a wide variety of atmospheric phenomena, including the depletion of Earth's ozone layer 15 to 30 miles up.
The long-lived satellite was decommissioned in 2005 and one side of its orbit was lowered using the last of its fuel to hasten re-entry and minimize the chances of orbital collisions that could produce even more orbital debris. No more fuel was available for maneuvering and the satellite's re-entry was "uncontrolled."
As with all satellites in low-Earth orbit, UARS was a victim of atmospheric drag, the slow but steady reduction in velocity, and thus altitude, caused by flying through the tenuous extreme upper atmosphere at some five miles per second.
UARS' final trajectory as it neared the discernible atmosphere proved difficult to predict. The descent slowed somewhat Friday, presumably because the spacecraft's orientation changed. As the day wore on, the predicted impact time slipped from Friday afternoon to early Saturday.
"As of 10:30 p.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 85 miles by 90 miles (135 km by 140 km)," NASA said in a 10:50 p.m. statement. "Re-entry is expected between 11:45 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, and 12:45 a.m., Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time (3:45 a.m. to 4:45 a.m. GMT). During that time period, the satellite will be passing over Canada and Africa, as well as vast areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. The risk to public safety is very remote."
The final update from U.S. Strategic Command, which operates a global radar network used to monitor more than 20,000 objects in low-Earth orbit, predicted entry around 12:16 a.m. EDT Saturday above the Pacific Ocean just west of Canada. But the prediction was uncertain by plus or minus two hours and at orbital velocities of 5 miles per second, just 10-minutes of uncertainty translates into 3,000 miles of uncertainty in position. Nick Johnson, chief scientist with NASA's Orbital Debris Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told reporters last week he expected most of the satellite to burn up as it slammed into the dense lower atmosphere at more than 17,000 mph. But computer software used to analyze possible re-entry outcomes predicted 26 pieces of debris would survive to impact the surface in a 500-mile-long down-range footprint. "We looked at those 26 pieces and how big they are and we've looked at the fact they can hit anywhere in the world between 57 north and 57 south and we looked at what the population density of the world is," he said. "Numerically, it comes out to a chance of 1-in-3,200 that one person anywhere in the world might be struck by a piece of debris. Those are obviously very, very low odds that anybody's going to be impacted by this debris."
For comparison, some 42.5 tons of wreckage from the shuttle Columbia hit the ground in a footprint stretching from central Texas to Louisiana when the orbiter broke apart during re-entry in 2003. No one on the ground was injured and no significant property damage was reported.
