At last! NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent photos of the Apollo lunar landing sites, the first images ever since the Apollo missions. I will say it once again, one last time: Moon landing conspiracy theorists, SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.

This is the first time that images of the lunar landing sites have been taken by any camera after the Apollo missions. This photo is the Apollo 17 landing site. It was the sixth and final mission to the Moon, manned by Commander Eugene A. Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald E. Evans, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison H. Schmitt.

Apollo 16 was launched on April 16, 1972. It was a J-class mission, so it used a Lunar Rover. The astronauts brought back back 94.7 kg of lunar material with them. It was manned by Commander John W. Young, Command Module Pilot T. Kenneth Mattingly Jr., and Lunar Module Pilot Charles M. Duke Jr.

This is Apollo 11. You know. Those guys who got there FIRST. If it was 1969, they would be travelling there right now. It was manned by Commander N

SocialToo founder Jesse Stay has alerted us (and the rest of his blog readers) to certain Twitter API changes that may be detrimental to many developers.

Stay’s main beef with the changes is that no one was notified of these changes (to verify_credentials(), incidentally). Stay further reported that an email response from a Twitter rep stated that the company “assumed (apparently incorrectly) that people were only using this method occasionally.”

The change in the API limits the number of username/password verifications to 15 per hour. According to the afore-linked developer wiki, “Because this method can be a vector for a brute force dictionary attack to determine a user’s password, it is limited to 15 requests per 60 minute period (starting from your first request).” The wiki language was changed June 29.

Granted, Twitter has had a bit of a media tsunami on its hands lately, but we still must note that no official announcement has been made about the API changes. This seems to be the case with other API changes, as well. For example, earlier this month, API request limits were increased from 100 to 150, as several blogs and end users noted at that time. No official announcement was made; the information was confirmed, as with this most recent change, through an update to the API wiki.

Although the company is usually tight-lipped, do you think developers whose apps and livelihoods rely on the service and the API deserve a dedicated blog? Google Code is a great resource that acknowledges the ecosystem of apps built around that company’s APIs.

Even if Twitter can’t afford to support developers with resources of a Googlesque stature, we do tend to feel that developers who rely on the API deserve advance warning of certain changes, even ones the company might consider minor. As it stands, app developers are subjected to a string of pleasant surprises followed by sucker punches.

While not every tweak to YouTube’s system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been uploading high definition content more than a few minutes long. Ten minutes of 1080p footage can easily exceed a gig, especially if you’ve been editing it and weren’t careful about re-encoding. A 2GB limit should soothe that particular pain.

Next, the update now allows for direct linking to HD streams, as well as easy embedding of same. While it wasn’t impossible before now to get an HD video by default on your page, or to link right to one, it required a little work. But now YouTube has apparently decided that they are ready for the bandwidth shock as thousands and thousands of users default to HD instead of SD — increasing the average amount of bits being sent by a huge amount.

Linking to HD is unfortunately not integrated with the UI yet. You have to add “&hd=1″ to the end of your link — thusly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDiC26-iAs8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDiC26-iAs8&hd=1

With HD link, without HD link.

And here’s a sample HD embed. It’s not really worth it this size; HQ looks fine and loads faster.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDiC26-iAs8]

What will the next improvements be? Upload speed is solid, compatibility is good, it goes without saying that they’ve got enough users. More social aspects? More integration with Google Apps? Personally, I’m hoping for a live video broadcast service like Qik — that would make liveblogging things about a thousand percent easier, and I know it’d be Android-compatible. Only Google knows.

Steve Jobs is officially back at work, according to Apple PR. Even though he had a
“>liver transplant earlier this year, a detail which was leaked to the Wall Street Journal and conveniently reported on a Friday night after the markets had closed. Last week, Jobs was spotted back on Apple’s campus and was even quoted in a press release! Today, Apple is hammering home the message that Jobs is back on the job, telling multiple news organizations from ABC News to Bloomberg to the New York Times to Reuters the exact same canned quote (sometimes attributed to spokesman Steve Dowling, sometimes not).

Steve is back to work, Jobs is at Apple a few days a week and working at home the remaining days. We are very glad to have him back.

Hopefully, he is working from home more than from the office until he is fully recovered. But what is all of this messaging about? When Jobs took his medical leave of absence in January, he said he would return by June 30. This is Apple’s way of telling investors that he kept to that deadline despite the seriousness of his operation. The official story is that he is back, even if only part-time. But honestly, if he took another six months, would anyone blame him?

Apple’s stock has always been tied closely to Steve Jobs, but if the past six months have taught investors anything it is that the company’s fortunes are tied even closer to its products. And Apple’s products are on fire right now. Over the past six months, the stock is up 82 percent.

Industry white papers, in general, are dull reading—unless you need a piece of information in one of them to do your job. Then you’ll pay almost anything (i.e. expense it) to get your hands on the white paper you need. Sometimes companies produce white papers and give them away for free, but they have a hard time finding the professionals who might be interested in whatever narrow topic the paper covers.

Enter LinkedIn. It knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in. The business networking site is testing a new feature that turns white papers into ads and presents them to the narrow group of professionals most likely to want to read them. LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.

A few hours ago, CEO Reid Hoffman sent out a Tweet saying that he “downloaded my first whitepaper from Linkedin.” He linked to this white paper from VMware and Intel titled “VMware vSphere™ and Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series: Delivering the IT Infrastructure of Tomorrow – Today.” (You can only see it if you are signed in).

Before letting you download the paper, it asks for your contact information and whether you “have a budgeted project.” In other words, the price of the white paper is that you basically agree to be contacted by the company. This is standard practice on company-run sites and sites like IDG and Bnet where they distribute their own white papers, but it seems like they will have better luck finding takers on LinkedIn.

I contacted Hoffman to ask if this is a new feature. He responded via e-mail:

Yes, it’s a new feature in our advertising program. Essentially: Linkedin is where professionals search for people and information to accomplish business tasks. As such, whitepapers are valuable information for professionals in particular jobs and doing specific tasks. So, Linkedin has deployed an initial system for matching whitepapers to professionals that we will be further developing over the next couple of quarters.

If someone downloads a white paper on VMware and Intel, is that worth more than someone clicking on an ad? It certainly is a bigger commitment. LinkedIn expects to get $40 to $100 per lead. Soon LinkedIn will put up a white paper directory, and LinkedIn users will be able to spread them viraly by sharing them with their network.

Late last year, an $890,000 grant was awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit behind Wikipedia). It was dedicated solely to a new Usability Initiative for improvements to MediaWiki.

Now, the first designs and prototypes have been made public.

Though only a fraction of what’s in store, the work done so far is showing real promise not just for Wikipedia’s future, but for MediaWiki in all instances. In a down economy, a new-and-improved MediaWiki could likely compete with more expensive and cumbersome enterprise collaboration solutions.

Enter the Usability Initiative

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative exists to draw in new volunteer editors to the free encyclopedia by making MediaWiki more user-friendly. The first step was an exhaustive study that revealed the weaknesses that make the current version of the software intimidating and frustrating to newcomers.

Unveiled June 2nd, the initial designs are of basic improvements to skinning, navigation tabs, search results and the edit toolbar. They’re currently up and running on prototype sites, and should be available as an option in Wikipedia user preferences by July.

What the Future Holds

The first mock-ups may not exactly be mind-blowing, but they’re just the beginning. We spoke recently with Usability Initiative Program Manager, Naoko Komura, and she outlined some bold next steps. Concepts being explored include easier media uploading, a real-time preview system, and (most importantly) reducing or hiding the extremely complex wiki syntax that creates tables and templates in MediaWiki.

One idea that’s not being entertained is moving away from syntax altogether.

Nearly all enterprise wikis have implemented a WYSIWYG editor. Even ones that began with MediaWiki, like Mindtouch, quickly replaced wiki syntax with XHTML. The Initiative has attempted to draw on the experience of companies like Mindtouch, whose CEO, Aaron Fulkerson, told ReadWriteWeb he was impressed with the Initiative, but that he felt, “wiki text will always and forever be inferior to XHTML.”

WYSIWYG editors are already available for MediaWiki through extensions, but the potential for corrupting the data that makes up Wikipedia’s encyclopedic content is very real. Avoiding that scenario is primarily what lead the Initiative to discount a switch to WYSIWYG, at least within the scope of the project.

MediaWiki in the Enterprise Again?

Even with the retention of wiki syntax, the Usability Initiative may see a revival of not just Wikipedia’s openness to contributors, but MediaWiki’s suitability for more business-like use.

Licenses and subscriptions for enterprise collaboration platforms are looking more expensive than ever. In 2009, more companies are clearly seeking to upgrade and improve software they already use, rather than start fresh. Despite its quirks, organizations like Intel have maintained large and productive installations of MediaWiki for years.

The Usability Initiative’s core goal is to improve the software with potential Wikipedians in mind. But an unintended consequence of the project may very well be that MediaWiki regains respect in the enterprise.

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today’s consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

Epps acknowledges that Forrester’s initial reaction to the Kindle as a niche device that would only attract a small number of book-loving early adopters underestimated the fact that consumers would fall in love with the Kindle’s one-step shopping system and the immediate gratification of buying books in the Kindle store. Epps also stresses that while users could easily rip CDs and copy them onto their MP3 players when they first appeared in the 1990s, transferring paper books into an electronic medium is obviously a lot harder. So consumers, for the time being, are more likely to prefer a vendor that can provide an Apple-like integration between the hardware reader and the book store.

Kindle DX and Texbooks

The new Kindle DX is geared towards the textbook market, but Forrester warns that universities will be slow to adopt the technology. The schools that Forrester talked to had no plans to encourage students to use the Kindle and the current pilot project only involves a small number of students (50 at Pace, for example). Of course, this is also a classic chicken and egg problem. Textbook publishers will look at the adoption of the Kindle in schools and are unlikely to invest heavily in this technology unless they see a growing market for their content, while students are unlikely to show interest in eReaders unless all of their textbooks are available in this format.

Looking into the Future: Price, Color, Video – and the End of the Chain Bookstore

Forrester also predicts that the eReader market will soon expand beyond books, especially once eInk technology becomes more mature and maybe even allows for color reproductions. Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps expects that newspapers, magazines, comics, and business and personal documents will also soon become more important, especially as other vendors besides Amazon start to produce more compelling devices and user experiences.

We received this report just after we wrote about Google’s expected entry into the eBook market this morning, but the report clearly vindicates Google’s interest in this market. Forrester thinks that other players like Apple, RIM, Borders, and Barnes & Noble might try to enter this market either with hardware products or by offering distribution platforms. Epps, however, argues that while traditional chain booksellers will try to enter the eBook market, their real estate holdings will weigh them down and make it hard, or even impossible, for them to compete with Amazon.

Overall, we agree with Forrester’s assessment of the eBook market. Obviously, we are still very early in the eBook and eReader cycle. It will be interesting to see if any new players will be able to establish themselves in the next year or so, or if we will see a convergence between dedicated eReaders and other mobile devices. Wattpad, one of the larger mobile eBook players, just released an interesting metrics report (PDF), and this company sees about 78% of its eBook usage within the U.S. from iPhone users. Consumers are clearly interested in eBooks, but they are also willing to try out new devices. Even though the Kindle has virtually locked up the market today (at least in the U.S.), the business is still small enough to allow other players to successfully enter the market and be able to conquer the mainstream market.

Google today announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a ‘wave’ as “equal parts conversation and document” and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Reinventing Email for the 21st Century

Users will be able to create ‘waves,’ and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

From what we have seen, Wave combines aspects of productivity tools, social networks, and micro-blogging. One of the most interesting features is that every change to a wave is captured and users can ‘replay’ how the specific wave developed over time. Wave will allow users to send private and public messages, and Google is heavily relying on HTML5 to make the product work well in modern browsers. We will have a more detailed look at all the features of Wave once we get access to the product itself.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Google is also making a set of APIs available to developers today. These APIs should give developers the ability to enhance Wave by building extensions for the core product, but also to embed Wave’s features on other sites to make them more collaborative. One extension Google offers today, for those lucky enough to have access to Wave already, is a Twitter extension, and Google will also offer the ability to integrate OpenSocial gadgets into Wave.

Interestingly, Google is taking a very open approach with this new product. Not only will it give developers access to Wave’s APIs, but the team also plans to open-source the protocols at the core of Wave, which really points at the greater ambition of the Wave team to see Wave and its protocols replace at least some of today’s standard communications systems.

Post from NewsGator.com:

Giz Explains: GPGPU Computing, and Why It’ll Melt Your Face Off

No, I didn’t stutter: GPGPU—general-purpose computing on graphics processor units—is what’s going to bring hot screaming gaming GPUs to the mainstream, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Finally, everbody’s face melts! Here’s how.

What a Difference a Letter Makes
GPU sounds—and looks—a lot like CPU, but they’re pretty different, and not just ’cause dedicated GPUs like the Radeon HD 4870 here can be massive. GPU stands for graphics processing unit, while CPU stands for central processing unit. Spelled out, you can already see the big differences between the two, but it takes some experts from Nvidia and AMD/ATI to get to the heart of what makes them so distinct.

Traditionally, a GPU does basically one thing, speed up the processing of image data that you end up seeing on your screen. As AMD Stream Computing Director Patricia Harrell told me, they’re essentially chains of special purpose hardware designed to accelerate each stage of the geometry pipeline, the process of matching image data or a computer model to the pixels on your screen.

GPUs have a pretty long history—you could go all the way back to the Commodore Amiga, if you wanted to—but we’re going to stick to the fairly present. That is, the last 10 years, when Nvidia’s Sanford Russell says GPUs starting adding cores to distribute the workload across multiple cores. See, graphics calculations—the calculations needed to figure out what pixels to display your screen as you snipe someone’s head off in Team Fortress 2—are particularly suited to being handled in parallel.

An example Nvidia’s Russell gave to think about the difference between a traditional CPU and a GPU is this: If you were looking for a word in a book, and handed the task to a CPU, it would start at page 1 and read it all the way to the end, because it’s a “serial” processor. It would be fast, but would take time because it has to go in order. A GPU, which is a “parallel” processor, “would tear [the book] into a thousand pieces” and read it all at the same time. Even if each individual word is read more slowly, the book may be read in its entirety quicker, because words are read simultaneously.

All those cores in a GPU—800 stream processors in ATI’s Radeon 4870—make it really good at performing the same calculation over and over on a whole bunch of data. (Hence a common GPU spec is flops, or floating point operations per second, measured in current hardware in terms of gigaflops and teraflops.) The general-purpose CPU is better at some stuff though, as AMD’s Harrell said: general programming, accessing memory randomly, executing steps in order, everyday stuff. It’s true, though, that CPUs are sprouting cores, looking more and more like GPUs in some respects, as retiring Intel Chairman Craig Barrett told me.

Explosions Are Cool, But Where’s the General Part?
Okay, so the thing about parallel processing—using tons of cores to break stuff up and crunch it all at once—is that applications have to be programmed to take advantage of it. It’s not easy, which is why Intel at this point hires more software engineers than hardware ones. So even if the hardware’s there, you still need the software to get there, and it’s a whole different kind of programming.

Which brings us to OpenCL (Open Computing Language) and, to a lesser extent, CUDA. They’re frameworks that make it way easier to use graphics cards for kinds of computing that aren’t related to making zombie guts fly in Left 4 Dead. OpenCL is the “open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems” standardized by the Khronos Group—AMD, Apple, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung and a bunch of others are involved, so it’s pretty much an industry-wide thing. In semi-English, it’s a cross-platform standard for parallel programming across different kinds of hardware—using both CPU and GPU—that anyone can use for free. CUDA is Nvidia’s own architecture for parallel programming on its graphics cards.

OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard. Windows 7 will use some graphics card acceleration too (though we’re really looking forward to DirectX 11). So graphics card acceleration is going to be a big part of future OSes.

So Uh, What’s It Going to Do for Me?
Parallel processing is pretty great for scientists. But what about those regular people? Does it make their stuff go faster. Not everything, and to start, it’s not going too far from graphics, since that’s still the easiest to parallelize. But converting, decoding and creating videos—stuff you’re probably using now more than you did a couple years ago—will improve dramatically soon. Say bye-bye 20-minute renders. Ditto for image editing; there’ll be less waiting for effects to propagate with giant images (Photoshop CS4 already uses GPU acceleration). In gaming, beyond straight-up graphical improvements, physics engines can get more complicated and realistic.

If you’re just Twittering or checking email, no, GPGPU computing is not going to melt your stone-cold face. But anyone with anything cool on their computer is going to feel the melt eventually.