As hard as it may be to believe, Blizzard is really making a Pandaren-based expansion to World of Warcraft. Rumors have been floating around for quite some time, but now it’s official. Dubbed the Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft’s fourth expansion promises to bring many new changes to the game.
Things to come:
New playable race, Pandaren
New continent, Pandaria
New Monk class
90 level cap
Dungeon system changes
Pet Battle System
Talent system revamp
For more details on the latest expansion, head on over to the game’s site here.
Seamus McGarvey, the cinematographer for the upcoming movie The Avengers, claims that some of the footage was shot using the iPhone 4′s camera. In fact, a few nuggets of that Apple-tainted footage appear in the movie trailer below. Can you tell where he used the new camera?
“The beauty of photography or cinema is that you make every choice based on the content at hand,” he told IFTN in a recent interview. “I understand that sometimes there is no choice and you have to go for the cheapest option, but if you are limited for choice, you can still make poignant decisions that will affect the look of the film.”
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang discussed his Tegra processors at the AsiaD conference and noted that the development of mobile smartphone and tablet processors is getting quite expensive. In Nvidia’s case, Tegra raked up a cost of more than $2 billion over the past five years, Huang said.
The cost for developing such a chip is likely to go up over time, Huang said, and is driven by an approach to come up with “something magical” and “unexpected” in every product generation. For example, while Kal-El will be moving to four cores, with one additional supporting core, the cores in the succeeding product generation will offer more performance and there will be a feature that catches Nvidia’s rivals “off-guard”, the executive said.
He also speculated that, as tablet and smartphone markets expand, they may segment and there may be reasons for companies such as Apple to actually buy third-party processors that accommodate the requirements of those segments.
IP company Walker Digital has launched a wave of patent infringement lawsuits against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Vibrant Media over the use of hyperlinks in digital documents. The patent in question was filed in June 2006 and granted last Tuesday, on October 18. The title: “Method and system for providing a link in an electronic file being presented to a user.”
Walker Digital claims that all five companies infringe on its patent which describes “an association between a data pattern and a computer network resource.” The patent indicates a slight modification of content when a user clicks on a link in order to provide a “customized viewpoint for the user”, which is especially important in Internet advertising products that offer user targeting.
The benefits of the idea include, according to Walker Digital, to enable “a party other than the author or administrator of content to alter or manipulate the content in a customized manner for a user, prior to or as part of delivery or display of the content to the user. The content may be customized for an individual user, a user belonging to a particular category or class, or a user who belongs to a particular organization. In one embodiment, a Web browser processes the content retrieved by a user, based on a viewpoint defined for the user, to insert at least one hyperlink into that content. Each hyperlink provides the user with a linkage, or cross-reference to a computer network resource.”
Walker’s patent does not include the actual technology required to realize his idea, but simply provides a schematic approach how such a technology could work. It is rather startling to see that those who actually create a product may be punished because someone else had the idea for it before – without building it. However, Walker Digital’s Jay Walker delivers an interesting explanation for this circumstance on his company’s website: The quote attributed to him reads, “Original thinking is the hardest work there is; it is also the most rewarding.” If he is able to collect royalties, he is most certainly right.
Google+ will add support for Google Apps in a matter of days, but support for anonymous accounts and pseudonyms may not arrive for a while longer. During the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google+ SVP Vic Gundotra and Google Co-founder Sergey Brin said that Google Apps support for Google+ will be arriving within a few days. Google is also working on an implementation for pseudonyms and anonymous users for those who simply don’t want to use their real names online (and for good reason).
However the latter feature may not arrive on Google’s social network for quite a while. “It’s complicated to get this right,” Gundotra said. The company needs time to figure out how users can don their nicknames and handles without “dramatically changing the atmosphere” of Google+. The company is also figuring out how to address the under-aged users and their right to privacy.
On the Google Apps for business front, previously there has been no way for users to access Google+ using their account. Instead, they’ve either had to create an additional account with the consumer-based Gmail, or avoid the social website altogether. Google hasn’t already integrated Google Apps into the social website because the company “thought it would have more time” before Google+ grew to the point where integration was actually needed.
But the site has grown quicker than expected, with more than 40 million users already signed up and chatting. They have even uploaded 3.4 billion photos over the last 90 days, a statistic that Gundotra said blew his mind. That said, the sudden success has pushed Google into scaling the social network rather quickly to make sure it will work for all of its users — including adding Google Apps support.
During the Web 2.0 Summit, Gundotra also talked about how developers have clamored for Google+ APIs. The company has decided to take a slow, cautious approach, not wanting to rush its APIs into the hands of the public. Because of this hesitation, the developer platform may not arrive until Google’s I/O developer event next Spring.
“When we release an API we want developers to have high confidence that they can depend on Google,” he said. “We don’t want to do anything haphazard.”
There is a new feature that has just popped up in the Webkit snapshot releases of future Chrome versions, also known as Chromium releases. Chromium 17 includes an HTTP Pipelining flag.
Google is a bit late to the party with this feature. Opera has had pipelining support since version 4 and Firefox has also included some customization freedom for users to adjust pipelining to alleviate the page load delays that are cause in high-latency situations.
Pipelining can be enabled via a flag in chrome://flags and will result in Chrome sending off multiple http requests before a response is received. The purpose is to shorten load times of pages especially on slow client-server systems. The improvement is very limited at this time and highly subjective. Google is unlikely to offer this feature for customization, but indicated that Chrome will automatically select the best number of pipelines. There is no proxy support and there is no way for the system to deal with servers that do not support pipelining or incorrectly implement pipelining. Google said that it will be fixing this feature in the future.
It is unclear when pipelining will be available by default. However, Chrome 17 is about 12 – 14 weeks from its final release and there is plenty of time to prep the feature. You can test drive pipelining in Chrome by downloading a recent Chromium snapshot. The feature is integrated in the browser in build versions 106364 and higher.
According to NASA, tens of millions of fires have been recorded between July 2002 and July 2011 and the new visualization reveals how fires relate to seasonal changes.
“What you see here is a very good representation of the satellite data scientists use to understand the global distribution of fires and to determine where and how fire distribution is responding to climate change and population growth,” said Chris Justice of the University of Maryland, College Park, a scientist who leads NASA’s effort to use MODIS data to study the world’s fires.
The data suggests that only 2 percent of the world’s area is burned in North America every year. For example, the released animation shows the forest fires in the West, agricultural fires in the Southeast and the recent wildfires in Texas. NASA found that 70 percent of the fires in the world take place in Africa. A substantial number of fires in Africa are savanna fires in Central Africa that are caused by agricultural activity as well as lightning strikes.
The videos of the world’s fires can be seen on NASA’s website.
Google+ will add support for Google Apps in a matter of days, but support for anonymous accounts and pseudonyms may not arrive for a while longer. During the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, 
There is a new feature that has just popped up in the Webkit snapshot releases of future Chrome versions, also known as Chromium releases. Chromium 17 includes an HTTP Pipelining flag.
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