Month: March 2025

Back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic was still new, everyone was "sheltering in place" and bingeing films and television. Pandemic-related fare proved especially popular, including the 1995 medical disaster-thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity, which some researchers have suggested is an evolved response mechanism for dealing with threats by learning from imagined experiences. Outbreak turned 30 this week, making this the perfect time to revisit the film.

(Spoilers for Outbreak abound below.) 

Outbreak deals with the re-emergence of a deadly virus called Motaba, 28 years after it first appeared in an African jungle, infecting US soldiers and many others. The US military secretly destroyed the camp to conceal evidence of the virus, a project overseen by Major General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and Brigadier General William Ford (Morgan Freeman). When it re-emerges in Zaire decades later, a military doctor, Colonel Sam Daniels (Hoffman), takes a team to the afflicted village to investigate, only to find the entire town has died.

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Der Steckdosenturm von Tessan ist im Angebot und versorgt mehrere Geräte gleichzeitig, während er Platz spart. (Technik/Hardware)

The Electric State ist ein Kunstbuch mit melancholischen Artworks. Für die teure Netflix-Verfilmung haben zwei Avengers-Regisseure aber lieber schlecht woanders kopiert. Eine Rezension von Daniel Pook (Filme & Serien, Film)

Amazon hat ein kabelloses Gaming-Headset von Corsair im Angebot, das mit Dolby Atmos ein immersives Klangerlebnis erzeugt. (Corsair, Dolby Atmos)

Einer Studie zufolge nehmen es KI-Suchmaschinen nicht so genau, wenn es um das Zitieren von News-Quellen geht - und geben oft ausgedachte Antworten. (KI, Suchmaschine)

Apple released a new version of the basic $349 iPad this week, though you could be forgiven for not noticing. The new 11th-generation iPad (also known as the "iPad (A16)" or just plain-old "iPad") looks identical to the previous version, it was introduced in a single paragraph buried in the middle of an iPad Air announcement, and the company didn't offer to send any to reviewers. The one I have I bought myself for our 5-year-old, whose hand-me-down 2019 iPad Air 3 is slightly older than he is and a little worse for wear.

There's nothing exciting or even particularly interesting about this tablet. The design is recycled from 2022's 10th-generation iPad, which was itself a lower-rent version of the 2020 iPad Air design. It's powered by a variant of the Apple A16, originally an iPhone chip from 2022. It still doesn't support the regular Apple Pencil or Pencil Pro or the same keyboard accessories as other iPads. It still doesn't have an anti-reflective screen coating, and the screen doesn't feel as nice to use as an iPad Air's or Pro's.

But for all that, this is still probably the purest expression of what the iPad is: a cheap Internet-connected screen for reading and watching things. I say this as someone who has tried every new piece of hardware and software that Apple has introduced to try and make the iPad a powerful and versatile laptop replacement—it still feels like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. The more expensive iPads are nice, but I don't end up using them much differently from how I use this bare-bones tablet.

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Während OpenAI mit seiner Forderung den Diebstahl geistigen Eigentums verhindern will, fordert Google die Aufhebung des Urheberrechts für KIs. (KI, Urheberrecht)

Nach dem kürzlichen Abbruch der Crew-10 von SpaceX hat die Nasa einen neuen Starttermin für den 14. März 2025 angekündigt. (ISS, Nasa)

Im neuen Outlook gibt es einen Fehler, der Nutzer an der Rückkehr zur Classic-Variante hindert. Ein Fix ist in Arbeit, ein Workaround hilft schon jetzt. (Outlook, Microsoft)

Der geomagnetische Schweif der Erde hat einen größeren Einfluss auf das Ionosphärenplasma des Mondes als bisher angenommen. (Mond, Raumfahrt)