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Anker unveils six affordable AirPod alternatives
Today, Anker added six new Bluetooth earbud models to its Soundcore audio lineup. The additions include follow ups to its Liberty Air music-centered wireless earbuds and three new sports-focused options. The "crown jewel" of the new products is the Liberty 2 Pro, which Anker says has a first-of-its-kind coaxial driver tuned by Grammy winning audio engineers.
Spirit is first budget airline in the US to offer WiFi
As a rule, traveling with a budget airline in the US means foregoing any kind of mid-flight WiFi access. Not so with Spirit, though. The no-frills air carrier is rolling out internet access to its aircraft this fall, with the entire fleet expected to have connectivity by summer 2019. It might even be usable, unlike some options -- Spirit is relying on Ka-band satellite access, and is promising another speed upgrade when the SES-17 satellite reaches orbit in 2021.
NASA’s Opportunity rover sees its 5,000th day on Mars
This weekend, NASA's Opportunity rover spent its 5,000th day on Mars. While that is a feat in and of itself, it's even more impressive when you consider that it was only planned to last 90 Martian days, or sols. Both Opportunity and its companion rover Spirit were launched towards Mars in 2003, landing on two different parts of the planet in January 2004. Neither were expected to make it through Mars' harsh winter though, which lasts about twice as long as ours and is severely lacking in light, but NASA's team discovered that pointing the rovers towards the north and towards the sun was enough to keep them powered through the winter. Further, making sure the rovers were on north-facing slopes each winter helped to keep them going for years longer than they were ever intended to function.
Eight top-secret aircraft that definitely aren't UFOs
Since its establishment in 1955, the Groom Lake airfield at Edwards Air Force Base—better known as Area 51—has hosted the development of some of the most exotic and advanced aircraft the world has ever seen. These so-called black projects, named for their ultra-classified nature, have produced planes like the SR-71 Blackbird, which is still the fastest and highest-operating aircraft ever built (that we know about); the F-117 Nighthawk, the world's first stealth attack aircraft; and the RQ-170, a mysterious and seldom-seen aerial reconnaissance UAV.
Solowheel unicycles are now cheaper and lighter, but still hard to tame
I'm not going to lie: Various parts of my body are still in agony as I'm typing up this article. Yesterday, I attended Inventist's Beijing event where it launched four new Solowheel electric unicycles, as well as the two-wheeled Hovertrax. And in case you didn't get my hint, yes, I had the fortune of test riding some of these human transporters afterwards. For those who aren't familiar with the Solowheel, imagine this: it's like a Segway but sans handle and only with one wheel between your legs, so you'd have to work harder to tame the self-balancing mechanism. If you're already a unicyclist then this shouldn't be a problem at all.
Stats 101: Your character's resources and attributes
If you've been around the game for a while, you know World of Warcraft's system of resources and attributes so well that it seems like it needs no explanation. However, for players diving into their first MMO or even just switching classes, the basics of WoW's resources and stats -- otherwise known as the jumble of numbers listed on your character sheet (just hit "c" to see what we're talking about) -- may as well be a foreign language. So if you're trying to get started and you're a little lost as to what all of these numbers mean, how they affect your game, and the kind of gear you should equip to play your best, this guide is for you. Read on and we'll walk you through the numbers in plain English.
Warlords of Draenor's gear system and spirit as a secondary stat
There has been some discussion recently, on Twitter, between Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street and several players about some elements of the new gearing system, and how it applies to healers. First up, I feel like, before we get into the specifics, I should quickly wrap up how the new system will work. You won't understand the rest of the article without this knowledge, so let's rattle through it. The new gearing system works as follows: A piece drops. It is plate, mail, cloth or leather. It has crit and haste as secondary stats. Its primary stat will change according to your spec, so if you're a caster it will be intellect, melee DPS could be strength or agility and so on. As you change spec, the primary stat changes with you. The secondary stats (in this example, crit and haste) will not change. There may also be tertiary stats on gear, such as +run speed, or -durability damage.
Totem Talk: The Spirit of Restoration
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how No matter what expansion, and regardless of the level of content you're doing, one of the things that comes up regularly as a topic of discussion is Spirit. A stat that took over for MP5 as the hot regen item, and rose to even more prominence and popularity among healers with the announcement of fixed mana pools. It is something that has a presence you will always feel and will never be able to escape. This isn't a bad thing mind you, but it sparks conversations and discussion about how much Spirit you need. What is the right amount? How much is too much? Is there such a thing as too much? Is it worth it at the expense of other stats? I know that many of the fine folks I talk to have had plenty to say on the topic recently, which lead me to today's post.
Humble Bundle returns with five pay-what-you-want games for Android, Mac, Windows and Linux
So let us get this right. You can pay what you want, and get another stack of games for your Android -- or, indeed Mac, Windows or Linux machine? And help charity? And this is actually proving very popular? Yes, Fieldrunners, Bit.Trip Beat, Uplink and SpaceChem, are the latest games to get the Humble Bundle treatment on the aforementioned platforms (the latter two are tablet-only when buying for Android). Oh, and if you're generous enough to pay above the average, you'll unlock the Spirits platform-puzzler, too. We're finding it pretty hard to argue with, especially as you get to decide the distribution of cash (between charity, the hardworking devs, or the platform-providing Humble). Judging by the real-time stats on the site, people aren't holding back on the cash, either. Still not convinced? Hop on the free-for-life video after the break to see the games in action.
Mists of Pandaria Beta: Spirit gear is coming back in fashion
It's been known for a while that spirit gear isn't on the list for the most part right now for players leveling in Mists. DPS cloth abounds, and the idea the designers have is that you can just reforge the DPS gear into healer gear easily enough (or at least reforge it so that it's passable as healer gear). In part, this concept comes from the new rewards system, where you don't see all the gear rewards the quest giver offers but rather only the ones that are specific to you. As a solution to this, Blizzard provides green gear vendors that distribute off-spec gear. However, Ghostcrawler announced today that Blizzard's going to offer more spirit gear again via quest rewards. This is in part due to the constructive (read: non-trolling) feedback it's received on the issue. Ghostcrawler After reading more of this feedback and looking at the zones, we're concerned that there aren't enough quest rewards with Spirit on them. We are leaning towards offering more, as choices, so that players who feel like their Spirit is low can choose to have more. source So rejoice, healers! Getting geared up will be a bit easier for you now. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Ghostcrawler discusses healing gear in Mists beta dungeons
Ghostcrawler took to the official forums to address the lack of spirit cloth gear that some players have experienced in the Mists of Pandaria beta dungeons currently available for testing. Spirit gear for pure healers is necessary to retain mana regeneration levels and output as content increases in difficulty. With a lack of spirit gear, some healers found their jobs more difficult. Ghostcrawler confirmed that the level-up dungeons found throughout the 85 to 90 content cannot be over-challenging due to the nature of their place in the progression. The meat of the answer is that as you approach endgame content at level 90, more gear appears with endgame stats on it -- dodge, parry, and block for tanks, spirit for healers, and so on. When that gear becomes important is when the stats start appearing. Until then, pop some reforge, check reputation vendors and other sources of level-up gear for spirit stuff, and mish-mash together a set of decent healer gear. (Or, at the end of the day, you're just really unlucky with drops.)
The Light and How to Swing It: How to compare intellect and spirit in Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. With Mists of Pandaria coming up on the horizon, many holy paladins are looking ahead to the changes that the expansion will bring. Most of the talent and ability info is still very malleable at this point, and as such, I haven't begun to worry or get excited just yet. One thing that we do know is that in Mists, intellect will finish the transformation that it started in Cataclysm. Intellect is going to become a throughput-only stat, as it will stop increasing our maximum mana. Today, intellect and longevity are nearly synonymous. Replenishment and Divine Plea are two of our largest mana sources, and they both scale off of our intellect. Most paladins are sporting intellect gems and trinkets, and intellect flasks and food fill up our bags. Holy paladins have been leaning on intellect for a long time due to its versatility, and it seemed like the decision to roll spell power into intellect would permanently ensure intellect's role as our best stat. By decoupling intellect and mana, the developers are changing everything we know about gearing a healer.
The Light and How to Swing It: Examining secondary stats for holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Despite any arguments to the contrary, I don't feel that spirit is a true secondary stat. I know you can reforge in and out of it and that it's not as ubiquitous as intellect, but it's actually closer to being our fifth primary stat. In Mists of Pandaria, intellect will no longer grant additional mana, making spirit the only game in town for improving longevity. Because of the way holy paladins function with the new Judgements of the Pure regeneration mechanic, spirit has gone from a good choice to a must-have stat. When we start talking about the true secondary stats, we realize that there's a lot of baggage here. Haste rating was the de facto champion due to its ability to affect all of our heals, critical strike rating was avoided after the removal of Illumination, and our master rating has gone through more iterations than any other spell in Cataclysm.
Raid Rx: A new balance for intellect and spirit in Mists of Pandaria
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. One of the proposed revamps coming in Mists of Pandaria is the way intellect and spirit interact with each other in regards to healers. For the new healer, understanding the current formula for mana regen can be a little daunting. To make it really easy, let's just say that it plays off both your spirit and your intellect. However, your intellect has a gradually increasing impact on how much mana you gain back in combat situations as your gear improves. It appears that will no longer be the case heading into the next expansion. Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) helped shed some light on the issue in a blue post earlier in the week. The highlights? Intellect becomes a sheer throughput stat Spirit controls the rate of mana regen Mana pools will remain fixed
Is it time to kill mana?
In your heart, you always knew we were coming here. Mana is one of WoW's biggest sacred cows. Paladins, shaman, druids, mages, warlocks, priests all make use of it, and hunters were once also on the mana teat, as it were. Every healer uses it, and when the monk class is introduced, they'll heal with mana as well. Every ranged caster uses it. It's the resource system the majority of WoW players are most familiar with, a pool that starts at full and empties as you use it. Over the course of its existence, stats like spirit and MP5 have filled it back up during combat, keeping those classes that rely on it supplied. Since it's the lifeblood for all healers, it effectively is the same for all tanks, even though only one tanking class actually tanks with it. Two classes use it to melee DPS, both hybrids, and these two classes effectively ignore the regeneration of the mana pool via talents and class abilities that make mana regeneration a non-issue. Mana is fairly easy to understand. You have it, you use it. There are various systems built in to make regenerating it easier. With the addition of runes and runic power for death knights and holy power for paladins, secondary resource systems (similar to the combo point system of rogues) have also been introduced to the game. Holy p-ower in particular is interesting to this discussion because it is a secondary resource added to a mana class and one that works for healing, tanking and melee DPS. (Everyone has their own opinion of how well it does so.) This leads us to the subject of this post. Do we need mana at all? As my intrepid coworker Michael Gray pointed out to me when discussing this article, mana serves many uses. It's not just that it's a resource for healing and DPSing, but the finite nature of the mana system serves to limit encounters in both PvP and PvE. Doing away with mana could have as many negative effects as positive ones.
JailbreakMe creator Comex joins Apple as an intern
Allow us to extend our congratulations to Nicholas Allegra. He's more popularly known as Comex, the party responsible for crafting the infamous JailbreakMe and Spirit tools that's given Apple so many headaches recently. Starting the week after next, he'll be officially wandering around 1 Infinite Loop as a bona fide intern. We're not terribly surprised, since the skill level needed to give iOS engineers a run for their money can be a highly valuable asset to the company; hiring someone with the know-how to spot vulnerabilities in Apple's OS would only serve to make the platform more secure. It wasn't mentioned how Allegra's talents will be utilized by Apple, but -- given the programmer's extensive history -- we can make a few educated guesses.
Patch 4.2 New Hunter Pets: Ahnka
Patch 4.2 introduces two brand new daily quest hubs to Cataclysm called The Molten Front and The Regrowth. Yesterday, Blizzard updated the public test realm to include a new tidbit of information about eight new unique and rare creatures that would provide unique challenges to tame them by savvy hunters. 8 new rare tamable beasts have been added, each of which provides a unique taming challenge. Will you be the first hunter to tame Deth'tilac, the rarest and most powerful of them all? Players will need to progress through the Hyjal Regrowth and Molten Front daily questing areas in order to unlock access to the full gamut of taming challenges. source I hopped on to the PTR this morning and, lo and behold, found the first of these eight new challenges -- Ahnka, the spirit cat.
NASA abandons Mars rover Spirit, chooses to remember the good times
More than a year after it first lost contact with its Mars rover Spirit, NASA has finally decided to throw in the towel. Yesterday, the agency confirmed that it will end all planned communications with the robot on May 25th, effectively ending the craft's seven-year mission. NASA was hoping that the approaching Martian spring would allow the Spirit to recharge its solar panels and re-establish radio contact, but it now appears that the craft sustained irreparable damage last winter, when it was forced to endure brutally cold temperatures. NASA executive David Lavery, however, says the rover team will remember the Spirit more for its achievements than its slow demise: "I think we'll all sit around and have a sip of Guinness and reminisce about when Spirit was a wee small little rover and look back at the accomplishments and successes rover had over its entire lifetime." So the Spirit's spirit will live on, but what about NASA's mission to Mars? Well, the Opportunity is still in good health and, later this year, will be joined by the next-generation, nuclear-powered rover Curiosity, which will investigate whether or not Mars ever supported life forms. Meanwhile, NASA's network of orbiting spacecraft will continue to passively listen for signals from the Spirit, just in case it miraculously comes back to life. Full PR after the break.
Raid Rx: Throughput, regeneration and secondary stats
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading on the Matticast. This ends up being the same question that new players keep asking that has spanned multiple expansions. The war between throughput and regeneration continues to be debated. Really, though, there isn't much to discuss because you can't really compare the two on the same scale. Throughput refers to the strength and impact your spells make. Intellect, critical strike rating, mastery and haste affect that to some degree, depending on your class. Regeneration is largely about your mana pool and the rate at which you gain mana back. Without mana, no spells can be cast. Intellect and spirit are the main stats here. They both affect different parts of your game, and I hesitate whenever I'm asked to pit the two against each other.
The Light and How to Swing It: Illuminating holy paladin stats
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Intellect has been our best stat for quite some time, and Cataclysm has only reinforced that. We get spellpower, mana, and critical strike chance from every point of intellect, which makes it valuable for every aspect of holy paladin play. We want to gem for intellect, enchant for intellect, use intellect consumables like Severed Sagefish Head and the Flask of the Draconic Mind. All of our spells scale off of spellpower, which makes it an amazing throughput stat. The fact that it gives us critical strike rating is just icing on the cake. Divine Plea's mana regeneration scales off of our maximum mana, and so stacking intellect gives us both mana at the start of the fight and then additional mana every time we use Divine Plea. My only advice is to be sure to use all plate gear, as we receive a 5% intellect bonus when wearing all plate. Mail caster gear may seem attractive, but the intellect loss isn't worth it. Intellect is designed to be our best stat, and that's why we can find it on all of our gear. Even if you hated intellect, you can't get rid of it. The real gearing decisions come down to choices between the secondary stats.
