OpenAI has formed a multi-year "Frontier Alliance" with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI's enterprise-focused technologies like OpenAI Frontier into customers' tech stacks.

The company launched OpenAI Frontier in early February. The no-code open software allows users to build, deploy, and manage AI agents both built on OpenAI's AI models and beyond. OpenAI argues in its latest announcement that consultants are the right avenue to get enterprises on board.

"AI alone does not drive transformation. It must be linked to strategy, built into redesigned processes, and adopted at scale with aligned incentives and culture to deliver sustained outcomes," BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer said in OpenAI's blog post. "Our expanded partnership combines OpenAI's Frontier platform with BCG's deep industry, functional, and tech expertise and BCG X's build-and-scale capabilities to drive measurable impact with safeguards from day one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. "It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview. "It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company's California facilities near San Diego. [...]

With the technological advance revealed on Monday, which is being reported here for the first time, ASML aims to outdistance any would-be rivals by improving the most technologically challenging aspect of the machines. This is the quest to generate EUV light with the right power and properties to turn out chips at high volume. The company's researchers have found a way to boost the power of the EUV light source to 1,000 watts from 600 watts now. The chief advantage is that greater power translates into the ability to make more chips every hour, helping to lower the cost of each. Chips are printed similar to a photograph, where the EUV light is shone on a silicon wafer coated with special chemicals called a photoresist. With a more powerful EUV light source, chip factories need shorter exposure times. "We'd like to make sure that our customers can keep on using EUV at a much lower cost," Teun van Gogh, executive vice president for the NXE line of EUV machines at ASML, told Reuters. Van Gogh said customers should be able to process about 330 silicon wafers an hour on each machine by the end of the decade, up from 220 now. Depending on the size of a chip, each wafer can hold anywhere from scores to thousands of the devices.

ASML got the power boost by doubling down on an approach that already places its machines among the most complex inventions of humans. To produce light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, ASML's machine shoots a stream of molten droplets of tin through a chamber, where a massive carbon dioxide laser heats them into plasma. This is a superheated state of matter in which the tin droplets become hotter than the sun and emit EUV light, to be collected by precision optic equipment supplied by Germany's Carl Zeiss AG and fed into the machine to print chips. The key advancements in Monday's disclosure involved doubling the number of tin drops to about 100,000 every second, and shaping them into plasma using two smaller laser bursts, as opposed to today's machines that use a single shaping burst. [...] ASML believes the techniques it used to hit 1,000 watts will unlock continued advances in the future, Purvis said, adding, "We see a reasonably clear path toward 1,500 watts, and no fundamental reason why we couldn't get to 2,000 watts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be "a top three global provider of the Android TV platform." In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn't been able to maintain that position regularly. Panasonic made its announcement at a "launch event," FlatpanelsHD reported today. During the event, a Panasonic representative reportedly said: "Under the agreement the new partner will lead sales, marketing, and logistics across the region, while Panasonic provide expertise and quality assurance to uphold its renowned audiovisual standards with full joint development on top-end OLED models."

Panasonic also said that it will provide support "for all Panasonic TVs sold up to March 2026 and all those available from April." Skyworth-made Panasonic TVs will be sold in the US and Europe. In the latter geography, the companies are aiming for double-digit market share. [...] The news means there's virtually no TV production happening in Japan anymore, as other Japanese companies, like Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Pioneer, have already exited TV production. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it was ceding control of its TV hardware business to TCL.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations.

Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and that AI could now flip that equation by mapping dependencies and documenting workflows across thousands of lines of legacy code. The sell-off deepened a rough 2026 for IBM, whose shares are now down more than 22% year to date.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cocteau Twins

Kong

2 Many DJ's

The Cramps

DJ Krush

The Mars Volta

Controlled Bleeding

Simple Minds

Janis Joplin

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De klimaatplannen van 28 grote bedrijven die actief zijn in Nederland, zijn nog altijd niet in lijn met de klimaatdoelen. Die conclusie trekken Milieudefensie en het NewClimate Institute op basis van een analyse van de plannen. Volgens hun zogeheten Klimaatcrisis-Index zetten zeven bedrijven wel "stappen in de goede richting", maar handelt nog geen van de ondernemingen in lijn met het Klimaatakkoord van Parijs.

Het onafhankelijke NewClimate Institute uit Keulen heeft beoordeeld in hoeverre de klimaatplannen voldoen aan de internationale klimaatdoelen, waarvan het belangrijkste is dat de opwarming van de aarde onder de 1,5 graad moet blijven. Ook hebben ze bekeken hoe transparant de bedrijven zijn over hun CO2-uitstoot en in hoeverre ze al plannen voor na 2030 hebben.

Geen enkel bedrijf krijgt het eindoordeel 'goed'. Ook de categorie 'redelijk' heeft niemand behaald. Een 'matige' score krijgen de pensioenfondsen ABP en PFZW, verffabrikant AkzoNobel, bouwbedrijf BAM, autobedrijf Stellantis dat zijn hoofdkantoor in Nederland heeft, energiebedrijf Vattenfall en staalfabrikant Tata Steel.

Transparantie

De laagste score gaven de onderzoekers aan Boskalis, BP, Cargill, ExxonMobil, Vion, Vitol en Vopak. Die bedrijven, die onder meer handelen in fossiele brandstoffen, doen het volgens de beoordeling "zeer slecht" op klimaatgebied. De overige bedrijven kregen het eindoordeel "slecht".

De transparantie van klimaatplannen laat bij de meeste ondernemingen eveneens te wensen over. Daar scoren alleen Stellantis, Vattenfall en Tata redelijk op. Voor Tata is dat van groot belang, want ook de overheid eist transparantie van het bedrijf om in aanmerking te blijven komen voor miljardensubsidies voor verduurzaming.

'Wake-upcall'

Milieudefensie noemt de index "een wake-upcall" voor de bedrijven en voor het maandag aangetreden kabinet-Jetten. De organisatie vindt dat de overheid moet stoppen met steun aan bedrijven die tekortschieten. Milieudefensie wijst er ook op dat het gerechtshof in Den Haag in de klimaatzaak tegen Shell duidelijk heeft uitgesproken dat bedrijven verantwoordelijkheid dragen voor het tegengaan van klimaatverandering. Anders dan de rechtbank wilde het hof echter geen percentages opleggen waarmee Shell de uitstoot moet verminderen.

"Het is hoopgevend dat een aantal bedrijven op deelonderwerpen het goed doet, maar noodzakelijk dat ze gesteund worden om over de hele linie te gaan voldoen aan internationale klimaatafspraken", stelt directeur Donald Pols van Milieudefensie.

Company had suspended account of Tumbler Ridge shooter in June 2025 over ‘furtherance of violent activities’

Canada’s artificial intelligence minister says he has summoned representatives from the technology company OpenAI after the company declined to alert police after suspending the account of a user who became the perpetrator of one of the country’s the worst-ever school shootings.

Evan Solomon says he is “deeply disturbed” by reports the company, which operates the popular ChatGPT chatbot, suspended the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar over the “furtherance of violent activities” in June 2025 but did not reach out to Canadian law enforcement.

Continue reading...

The World Nature Photography awards have announced the winners for 2026 and Australian Jono Allen has taken out the top prize

Continue reading...

'This is a warning. We know you live right here'

Two US residents have sued several Homeland Security agencies and officials, including Secretary Kristi Noem, for allegedly using surveillance tools to harass them, branding them as "domestic terrorists," and even showing up at their homes based on license-plate recognition. …

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide March 1977

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo: