An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The European Commission has ended an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices after SAP agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees. The move could reduce barriers for customers considering third-party support for products nearing the end of their vendor support terms, including thousands of large businesses that rely on SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) to run their business operations. SAP's mainstream support for ECC ends in December 2027, while customers can opt for extended maintenance until December 2030 by paying an additional two percentage points on their maintenance fees. The most recent figures from Gartner showed that in Q4 2024 only 39 percent of worldwide ECC customers -- from a total of 35,000 -- had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to SAP S/4HANA, the replacement ERP product.

In September last year, the European Commission launched a formal investigation into SAP's behavior in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services in Europe. It said it was responding to concerns that SAP restricted competition in this crucial aftermarket by making it harder for rivals to compete, leaving European customers with fewer choices and higher costs. In October, SAP published its response. "SAP's commitments aim at improving the financial attractiveness for customers who wish to reinstate SAP maintenance and support services. Thus, future costs associated with reinstatement will not financially prevent customers from choosing to terminate SAP maintenance and support for a given period of time," the document said (PDF).

SAP has now agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back maintenance fees charged to customers who return to SAP's support after a period of absence, the Commission confirmed. It also agreed to clarify conditions that allow customers to choose different maintenance and support service providers and different levels of support from SAP. The agreement is relevant to customers considering third-party support to extend their use of ECC beyond vendor maintenance. For example, last year, European retailer Kingfisher -- owner of well-known UK brands B&Q and Screwfix -- told a Gartner conference it had chosen Rimini Street to support ECC 6.0 because it saw insufficient value in migrating to SAP S/4HANA. [...] The commitments offered by SAP will remain in force globally for ten years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, is stepping down from her full-time role and becoming a part-time adviser after taking extended medical leave for a chronic neuroimmune condition. "Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness I've lived with for seven years," Simo wrote in a post Thursday on X. "During that time, it became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated -- and that I needed to focus on it fully." Wired reports: Simo joined OpenAI's board of directors in March 2024. The following year, CEO Sam Altman hired her to take on the product and business organizations so he could focus on research and the company's data center buildout. Previously, Simo was the CEO of Instacart and head of the Facebook app at Meta.

Shortly before starting at OpenAI, Simo experienced a significant health relapse. She was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, in 2019. "For my entire time here, I've postponed medical tests and new therapies to stay completely focused on the job and not miss a single day of work," she told OpenAI staff in a memo back in April, announcing her temporary departure. "It's now clear that I've pushed a little too far and I really need to try new interventions to stabilize my health."

News of Simo's medical leave came amid a larger executive shakeup that saw Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's former COO, transition to a role overseeing special projects. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman took over OpenAI's product strategy. In the months since Simo stepped back from OpenAI, the company further reorganized its product teams, positioning Thibault Sottiaux as head of the company's core products, including ChatGPT.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SergioQ79 - Osanpo Photographer - posted a photo:

A Uguisudani la strada tiene insieme funzioni diverse senza fare troppo rumore: centri massaggi, love hotel, izakaya, piccoli locali, persone che passano. Non è una Tokyo nascosta perché sia difficile da trovare. È nascosta perché molti la attraversano senza guardarla davvero. Anche qui la vita quotidiana continua, tra insegne accese, entrate strette e soste brevi.

鶯谷では、いろいろな場所が同じ通りに並んでいる。マッサージ店、ラブホテル、居酒屋、小さな飲食店、そして通り過ぎる人たち。見つけにくいから隠れている東京ではない。多くの人が見ないまま通り過ぎるから、隠れているように見える。明かりのついた看板、狭い入口、短い立ち寄りの中で、ここでも日常は続いている。

In Uguisudani, the street holds different functions together without making much noise: massage shops, love hotels, izakaya, small places to eat, people passing through. This is not a hidden Tokyo because it is hard to find. It is hidden because many people cross it without really looking. Daily life continues here too, among lit signs, narrow entrances, and short stops.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Prahok ktiss: pork belly slowly simmered in coconut milk, fragrant kroeung, prahok, palm sugar, chilies. served with crunch seasonal vegetables An essetial dip for every Cambodian meal.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide December 1983

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The lively flora and fauna of a tiny Filipino island commingle with harrowing memories of California prisons in the surreal works of Gil Batle. Entirely self-taught, Batle honed his skills while incarcerated over the course of 25 years, drawing and eventually tattooing in a clandestine practice. Today, he’s immigrated to his parents’ native country, where he continues to reflect on the decades he spent in confinement.

Batle’s Double Life is a new body of work that explores these dual experiences. On white porcelain plates, the artist renders strange, unsettling compositions in which violence and a desire for freedom pervade every inch. Bird cages—common symbols for incarceration— are aplenty, while chains, barbs, and shivs haunt the scenes.

Utilizing such a commonplace, fragile, and even prized material, Batle sets a poignant backdrop for considering his blue acrylic paintings. The delicate porcelain both nods to the precarity and breakable nature of life, while also symbolizing traditional ideas of civility and propriety. Juxtaposing these domestic objects with scenes rife with struggle and brutality offers uncanny insight into one of humanity’s continually barbarous acts.

Double Life is on view through August 21 at New York’s Ricco/Maresca, a contemporary gallery representing outsider, self-taught, and folk artists.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article The Longtail of Incarceration Unfolds in Gil Batle’s Surreal Narratives appeared first on Colossal.

Environmental groups want the FCC to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters, arguing the agency shouldn't approve constellations they say would total more than a million satellites before taking a hard look at their environmental impact. Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week urging the regulator to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before approving any of the pending applications. The filing doesn't target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector on hold while it assesses the cumulative effects of proposals from SpaceX, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, and any similar applications that follow. According to the petition, those proposals collectively seek "well over a million datacenter satellites" in low Earth orbit. "The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based datacenters to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade," the petition states. "Collectively, the proposals seek to place well over a million datacenter satellites into orbit, increasing the existing volume of satellites in low-earth orbit by multiple orders of magnitude." The groups argue that the FCC is trying to apply licensing rules written for much smaller satellite constellations to an entirely new class of infrastructure. "If ever a situation warranted a PEIS, it is this one," the petition says. It argues that a single review would allow the agency to examine "the risks, alternatives, needs, costs, and impacts of this sudden transformation of Earth's exosphere" before deciding whether any of the projects are in the public interest. The petition raises concerns about rocket launch emissions, pollutants released as satellites burn up during atmospheric reentry, depletion of the ozone layer, orbital debris, light pollution, impacts on wildlife, and interference with astronomy. It also argues that the combined effects of these constellations cannot be understood by evaluating applications one at a time. "It is difficult to imagine a better example of multiple projects presenting essentially identical impacts and risks that compound synergistically and cumulatively than the present proposals for orbital datacenter constellations," the petition argues. "The FCC's default position that such projects 'individually and cumulatively' have no environmental impact is plainly inapplicable here." The groups also criticize the applicants, saying they make expansive claims about the benefits of orbital computing while offering little detail about its environmental consequences. "The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms," the petition states. "But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values." The petition arrives as the FCC reconsiders its environmental review rules for satellites, acknowledging that rapid growth in the space industry has raised new questions about how to apply its existing framework. The petition argues that the FCC's current approach, which generally treats satellite licenses as categorically excluded from detailed environmental review, is no longer fit for proposals measured not in dozens or thousands of spacecraft but in hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions. If the FCC agrees, orbital datacenter operators will have a mountain of paperwork to clear before sending their hardware skyward. ®

OpenAI has decided its AI browser experiment has run its course, pulling the plug on ChatGPT Atlas less than a year after launch and moving its browser-based agent features into ChatGPT and Codex. The company said Atlas will stop working on August 9 as it rolls out the newly unveiled ChatGPT Work platform. Atlas arrived last October with no shortage of ambition. Rather than trying to out-Chrome Chrome, OpenAI wanted to bolt ChatGPT directly onto the web, promising a browser that could read pages, rewrite them, answer questions, and eventually start doing the clicking itself. However, within days of its debut, security researchers demonstrated prompt injection attacks that could manipulate the browser's AI assistant into following malicious instructions embedded in web pages. A few days later, researchers uncovered another flaw that allowed malformed URLs to cause Atlas to expose information about previously visited sites. Neither flaw proved fatal, but they quickly exposed the gap between an AI browser on launch day and one ready for the open web. OpenAI hasn't fully abandoned the idea of AI-powered browsing, but appears to have decided it doesn't need a standalone browser to deliver it. ChatGPT Work looks less like a browser and more like OpenAI's attempt to become the operating system for office work. The desktop application combines ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas into a single package that can connect to files and business applications, browse the web, generate documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and websites, and stick with long-running projects for hours at a time instead of answering one prompt after another. Powering it all is GPT-5.6, OpenAI's latest model series, which the company says is better at reasoning through multi-step tasks and producing work that follows users' templates and reference material. The pitch is different this time around too. Atlas was all about rethinking the browser, but ChatGPT Work is about getting office workers to spend more time with OpenAI. To help with that, OpenAI has bundled plugins into a single directory, allowing ChatGPT to pull context from tools including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, SharePoint, email, calendars, CRMs, and project trackers, either automatically or when users explicitly call them into a prompt. For developers, the biggest change is that Codex is no longer treated as a separate product. Codex is losing its standalone app and moving into ChatGPT Work, picking up inline diff editing, pull request reviews, and multi-repository support. ChatGPT Work is available to all plans on desktop, rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu on web and mobile over the next few days. AI browsers have attracted no shortage of hype over the past year, but convincing people to swap Chrome for an AI-first alternative was always going to be a taller order than bolting another chatbot onto the web. ®

Ja mogen we ons even zes kwartier achtereen doodlachen en driehonderdeenenveertig keer 'goh' zeggen om dat idiote ideetje van de Amsterdamse politie: de politiepaal. De ontwikkeling van deze faalpaal duurde jaren, jaren die helemaal niemand meer terugkrijgt nu het prestigieuze project tegen etnisch profileren al na één jaartje faliekant is mislukt. Niemand in de hoofdstad kon kennelijk vooraf bedenken dat het hier niet ging om de allerbeste uitvinding sinds de airfryer. De Telegraaf stelde de politie vragen over de resultaten, maar de politie beantwoordde die niet. Zou zomaar kunnen dat er helegaar geen resultaten te overleggen zijn. In ieder geval staan burgemeester Halsema, de Amsterdamse politie en de Amsterdamse politiechef Holla stokstijf voor paal (ja ja we gaan al, net als die paal dus). Douw die faalpalen dus maar snel diep een donker hol in, praten we nergens meer over. Doe alleen wel weer gewoon ouderwets preventief fouilleren, in plaats van willekeurige omaatjes van 89 je politiepaal te laten toucheren. Scheelt weer!

Schakelen we nu over naar Eindhoven, waar drie volwassen kerels het afgelopen Koningsdag presteerden om drie van de allersneuste dingen in grofweg drie minuten te proppen: vrouwen uitjouwen, mensen op hun kleurtje beoordelen, vrouwen mishandelen. Als volgt: twee vijftigers paraderen met hun dochter/nichtje (23) door het Brabantse, wandelen naar hun fiets, en worden volgens de politie vanuit het niets uitgescholden door de heerschappen hierboven. "De vrouwen laten het daarbij, draaien om en willen weer naar hun fiets lopen. Plots voelt de moeder dat ze een klap tegen haar achterhoofd krijgt, gevolgd door nog een harde klap tegen haar oor.  Geschrokken rennen de vrouwen naar de fiets van de moeder. Maar de mannen zijn nog niet klaar en komen achter hen aan. De dochter krijgt een flinke trap van een van de mannen en valt daardoor op de grond. De moeder krijgt de inhoud van een blikje drinken over haar hoofd leeggegooid. Een van de mannen trekt haar ketting van haar nek en de oorbellen uit haar oor. Ook bij haar zus worden de sieraden van haar afgetrokken."

Update - Dat ging rap zeg: de politie meldt dat de zaak 'niet meer actueel' is, de drie stumperds hebben zich namelijk gemeld bij de politie.

De harde coronamaatregelen als lockdowns en het bezoekverbod in verpleeghuizen waren „onvermijdelijk”.

Zeker elf mensen zijn omgekomen bij natuurbranden in Zuid-Spanje. Meer dan duizend mensen hebben uiteindelijk hun huis verlaten.