Mediu Știri: 26 august 2025 - 29 august 2025

October 11, 2025, 7:44 PM EDT. ABTA's travel study shows more travelers turning to AI for holidays. Alan Smith in Kent used ChatGPT to identify coastal stops in northern Spain and ended up loving Castro Urdiales, a 700-year-old town with lively pintxos. He verified results on Google and booked himself, cautious about the AI's limits. In Wales, Hannah Read aimed for a Norway trip and found a non-existent Newcastle–Bergen ferry predicted by ChatGPT, a reminder that AI can be wrong. The report notes age-based use: 3% of travelers over 60 use AI, 18% of 25–34-year-olds, with overall ~8%. The takeaway: AI can speed up planning and surface ideas, but users should double-check details and not rely on it for bookings or critical routes.

October 11, 2025, 5:50 PM EDT. Long before face detection, cameras learned to read a film's speed with DX coding. Kodak introduced this 1983 standard, using a checkerboard of conductive squares on the canister to let cameras auto-set ISO via simple camera auto sensing contacts. It solved the era's most common mistake: forgetting to match ISO when loading a new roll, which could ruin an entire shoot. The system also spoke to exposure latitude and count, with barcodes for lab workflows. The elegance lay in a low-tech, reliable solution—no microprocessors required. DX-compatible cameras proliferated in the 80s, gradually fading as digital sensors gained true ISO flexibility. This feature shows how film-era design addressed real problems with simple engineering, a contrast to today's computational wonders.

October 11, 2025, 5:32 PM EDT. Researchers at UC Riverside have developed the State of Mission (SOM), a mission-aware diagnostic metric that goes beyond traditional battery state functions. Unlike SOC or SOH, SOM predicts whether a battery can complete a specific task—such as powering an EV over a mountain pass, a drone in wind, or a home through a cloudy day—under real-world conditions. By fusing physics-based models with machine learning, SOM combines battery data with factors like temperature, terrain, and traffic to move from reactive readings to proactive, goal-based guidance. This could help electric vehicles plan routes, optimize energy use, and reduce range anxiety. The work by Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan at UC Riverside envisions a new class of battery management that answers: can I finish this trip?

October 11, 2025, 4:46 PM EDT. Apple has pulled the plug on Clips, its quirky short-form video app launched in 2017. A new support document confirms Clips is no longer receiving updates and has been removed from the App Store. Affected users can still redownload it on an iOS 26 device to export videos into another app, but there are no guarantees it will work past iOS 26. With Clips dead, Apple still offers iMovie for iPhone, though it hasn’t seen major updates since 2023 and 2024 bug fixes. Other core apps like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers in the iWork suite remain aging, and related acquisitions Pixelmator Pro and Photomator are awaiting a Liquid Glass update.

October 11, 2025, 4:45 PM EDT. Samsung's W26 is a luxury foldable designed for China's elite, pairing gold accents with a premium build and a price north of $2,300. When folded, it's 8.9mm thick and 215g; unfolded, a slim 4.2mm hinge enables a dual-screen setup with a 6.5-inch cover and an 8-inch inner display at 120Hz. The chassis features armored metal and gold rings around a triple-camera array, available in Danxi Red or Xuan Yao Black. Inside are a Snapdragon 8 Elite, 16GB RAM, up to 1TB, and Android 16 on One UI 8. The camera system includes a 50MP main with OIS, 12MP ultra-wide, and 10MP telephoto, plus 10MP outer and 4MP under-display selfies. IP48 water resistance and a side fingerprint sensor complete the package.