LONDEN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De wereldwijde investeringen in datacenters voor kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) zullen de komende jaren blijven toenemen door de enorme AI-vraag. Volgens onderzoek door accountants- en adviesbureau PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) kan dat totale investeringsbedrag in 2050 uitkomen op 31,6 biljoen dollar, oftewel meer dan 27.000 miljard euro.
PwC sluit niet uit dat het bedrag nog groter uitvalt op 50 biljoen dollar doordat AI-toepassingen nog sneller groeien dan vooralsnog wordt voorzien. Het geld dat de komende decennia met AI-datacenters gemoeid zal zijn, valt daarmee hoger uit dan de totale omvang van de Amerikaanse economie ter waarde van circa 30 biljoen dollar.
De onderzoekers denken dat het meeste investeringsgeld naar datacenters in de Verenigde Staten zal gaan, met een bedrag van ruim 15 biljoen dollar. Daarna volgen Azië (8,2 biljoen dollar), Europa (5,6 biljoen dollar) en het Midden-Oosten en Afrika met duidelijk lagere investeringen.
HBO Max en Videoland bieden in Nederland vanaf nu gezamenlijke abonnementen aan. Wie beide streamingdiensten via één bundel afsluit, betaalt per maand minder dan voor twee losse abonnementen.
De samenwerking betekent geen fusie: HBO Max en Videoland blijven afzonderlijke platforms met een eigen app, aanbod en abonnementstype. De bundel is vooral bedoeld voor kijkers die zowel internationale series en films als Nederlandse producties, reality en RTL-programma’s willen volgen.
Drie bundels beschikbaar
Er zijn drie combinaties, van een voordelig instappakket met reclame tot een premiumvariant met de uitgebreidste mogelijkheden.
| Bundel | Prijs per maand | Losse prijs per maand | Maandelijkse besparing |
| HBO Max Basic met reclame + Videoland Basis | €9,99 | €12,98 | €2,99 |
| HBO Max Standaard + Videoland Plus | €17,99 | €23,98 | €5,99 |
| HBO Max Premium + Videoland Premium | €23,99 | €31,98 | €7,99 |
De laagste bundel kost dus net geen tientje per maand. Daarvoor krijgen abonnees HBO Max Basic met reclame en Videoland Basis, eveneens een pakket met reclameonderbrekingen. Wie kiest voor het duurste pakket, bespaart op jaarbasis bijna €96 vergeleken met twee losse premiumabonnementen.
Wat krijg je ervoor?
HBO Max is onder meer de plek voor HBO-series, Warner Bros.-films, Max Originals en content van Discovery. Videoland richt zich juist sterk op Nederlandse series, reality, documentaires en programma’s van RTL.
De bundel kan daardoor aantrekkelijk zijn voor huishoudens die bijvoorbeeld internationale titels van HBO Max willen combineren met programma’s als B&B Vol Liefde, The Masked Singer, Nederlandse dramaseries en Videoland Originals.
Let wel op de verschillen tussen de pakketten. Het instapabonnement bevat reclame, terwijl de hogere HBO Max-pakketten meer mogelijkheden bieden voor gelijktijdig kijken, downloads en bij Premium ook 4K-kwaliteit. Bij Videoland zijn Plus en Premium uitgebreider dan Basis, maar Videoland had al aangekondigd ook rond het afspelen van content bij deze duurdere pakketten reclame te kunnen tonen.
Interessant na prijsstijgingen
De bundel komt op een moment waarop streamingdiensten steeds vaker met advertenties werken en hun tarieven verhogen. Videoland verhoogde eerder dit jaar de prijzen: Basis kost €6,99 per maand, Plus €11,99 en Premium €14,99. HBO Max biedt in Nederland pakketten vanaf €5,99 per maand.iculture+1
Voor consumenten die beide diensten toch al los afnemen, is de rekensom daarom eenvoudig: de combibundel is in alle drie de varianten goedkoper. Voor wie slechts één dienst gebruikt, is overstappen uiteraard pas interessant als het aanvullende aanbod ook daadwerkelijk wordt gekeken.
Meer weten?
- HBO Max + Videoland-bundel: prijzen, pakketten en voorwaarden
- Videoland + HBO Max: sluit de gezamenlijke bundel af
- HBO Max en Videoland slaan handen ineen met goedkopere bundel
KATHMANDU (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Het dodental door de overstroming in Nepal is opgelopen tot 1114, meldt de rampenbestrijdingsdienst in het land. Nog eens 3916 mensen worden vermist. De ramp trof het gebied precies een week geleden. Het officiële dodental in Tibet staat volgens Chinese staatsmedia op zestien. Daar worden 546 mensen vermist.
Er zijn nog niet veel lichamen overgedragen aan de nabestaanden, meldt de politie. Dat is tot nu toe met maar 95 overledenen gebeurd. De meeste resten zijn nog niet geïdentificeerd. In veel gevallen wordt maar een klein deel van een lichaam gevonden.
Chinese reddingswerkers zijn er deze woensdag in geslaagd om de enige toegangsweg naar de grensovergang bij Gyirong te heropenen. Daarmee kan voor het eerst zwaar materieel naar het rampgebied gebracht worden. Dat is volgens de staatstelevisiezender CCTV inmiddels ook "in grote aantallen" gebeurd. De toevoer van hulpgoederen en materieel ging tot nu toe door de lucht.
New submitter greytree shares a report from Brown University: LUX-ZEPLIN, an experiment co-led by Brown University faculty and students, observed a particle interaction that could be interpreted as a signal from WIMPs, a dark matter candidate -- but researchers need more data to confirm. [...] The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery, but it is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date. "We're very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up, and the competing backgrounds are very low," said Rick Gaitskell, a professor of physics at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. "With only one event, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input." [...]
If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton. The LZ results have not reached "5-sigma" significance, the statistical threshold in physics that an event must reach to be considered a discovery. The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds. With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away. LZ has already accumulated the world's largest dark matter dataset and will continue to accrue WIMP search data at SURF, substantially improving their search statistics.
JiJi Fan, an associate professor of physics at Brown not involved in the LZ experimental research but whose theoretical work is cited in the new LZ paper, said the new findings were "very intriguing." While the event recorded by LZ could not have been the simplest type of WIMP interaction, there are other types of possible interactions that could explain it, she said. Had a WIMP interacted in the simplest way at the high energy associated with this recent event, the detector would have recorded many recoil events at lower energies following the initial event. LZ recorded a single event, however, which requires an expanded theoretical explanation. "There are well-motivated theoretical extensions, including inelastic scattering and momentum-dependent elastic scattering, that could potentially account for this single event," Fan said. "This also sets up a target for on-going dark matter hunting, not only at direct detection experiments such as LZ but also at other complementary experimental frontiers."
The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan on Tuesday, Sept. 1. A paper detailing the finding can be found here (PDF).
If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton. The LZ results have not reached "5-sigma" significance, the statistical threshold in physics that an event must reach to be considered a discovery. The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds. With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away. LZ has already accumulated the world's largest dark matter dataset and will continue to accrue WIMP search data at SURF, substantially improving their search statistics.
JiJi Fan, an associate professor of physics at Brown not involved in the LZ experimental research but whose theoretical work is cited in the new LZ paper, said the new findings were "very intriguing." While the event recorded by LZ could not have been the simplest type of WIMP interaction, there are other types of possible interactions that could explain it, she said. Had a WIMP interacted in the simplest way at the high energy associated with this recent event, the detector would have recorded many recoil events at lower energies following the initial event. LZ recorded a single event, however, which requires an expanded theoretical explanation. "There are well-motivated theoretical extensions, including inelastic scattering and momentum-dependent elastic scattering, that could potentially account for this single event," Fan said. "This also sets up a target for on-going dark matter hunting, not only at direct detection experiments such as LZ but also at other complementary experimental frontiers."
The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan on Tuesday, Sept. 1. A paper detailing the finding can be found here (PDF).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Oil has hit its highest level in almost six weeks today, after the US has launched new airstrikes on Iranian targets.
Brent crude traded as high as $97 a barrel, for the first time since 24 July, having jumped by 4.6% yesterday.
“Developments in recent days brought risks to regional oil supplies back into focus ... We’ve seen oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz despite the stalemate between the US and Iran, but rising tensions clearly put crossings at risk.”
Continue reading...For his latest in a series of work photographing people with red hair, photographer Kieran Dodds interviewed and made portraits of hundreds of people with ginger hair, with widely varying backgrounds and heritage, across the US between 2024 and 2026. Dodds asked each interviewee the same question at the end of the interview: What unites the states? We hear some of the responses
A new book of this work is available to preorder here
‘Although almost everyone featured in the project is ginger, it is not really about hair. It is structured around themes raised time and again in the conversations I had with portrait sitters, and which I reflected on during my travels in the states’ – Kieran Dodds
Continue reading...Distilleries are the backbone of Islay’s economy and tourist trade. Thanks to their success, other businesses – from breweries and farms to restaurants and chocolatiers – are now thriving and adding to the island’s appeal
The Paps of Jura disappear into the mist as I pedal along the shores of Loch Indaal, and the rain cloud I’ve been racing finally catches up. I stash my hire bike at Port Charlotte youth hostel, quickly change and make it to Lochindaal Seafood Kitchen just before the downpour.
I’m soon warmed, by the welcome then by a bowl of creamy fish chowder. “We’ve plenty of fresh seafood just in,” is all the temptation I need to order the seafood plate. It’s a bowl for one, but a hungry one, and soon I’m picking and cracking my way through piles of fat langoustines and crab claws, with hot whisky-butter scallops and plenty of bread and butter.
Continue reading...A group of thinly drawn characters on a Louisiana tour fight for survival against a rampaging vegetarian
This animal-attack horror plugs a gap with beasties – hippopotamuses – that may be deadly in real life but are hard to take seriously as a threat on screen. As someone says here, they have cute ears. Even the film’s title, evoking the kids’ game Hungry Hungry Hippos, diminishes the menace. That’s perhaps not the tone to set if you’re trying to persuade audiences that fatal consequences are in the offing. And as the script often reminds us, hippos are vegetarian, so hunger isn’t driving these multi-ton mammals to murder. Turns out they’re massively territorial, and especially dangerous when protecting their young. That, or they do just think killing people is fun.
The film naturally spends less time worrying about the hippos’ motives and dwells more on the victims, who look pretty doomed given their thin characterisations. This lot certainly weren’t expecting to be attacked by a hippo when they woke up because they are on a bayou tour in Louisiana, where the biggest threats are normally alligators.
Continue reading...Study reveals that pesticide poisoning kills 11,000 people each year, with India accounting for nearly 60% of fatalities
Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.
Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402-433m cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.
Continue reading...South African artist Puleng Mongale explores how her childhood church still connects her to the women of her family, not through religion but shared history and memory
This image, called Holy Gang, combines an image of a church in my mother’s home town, Fateng-tse-Ntsho, in Free State province, South Africa, with self-portraits of me, multiplied to form a group of women. Although at first glance the women are moving towards the church, it is not the final destination.
Positioned higher, beyond the church, is what appears to be a rising sun. For me, the sun represents a place where I can meet and be with my ancestors beyond religious limitations, even though they were members of the church and I am not.
Continue reading...Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains
Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone volume and then as the final story in the 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, followed Miquel through dramatically extreme circumstances and patient endurance. It was told with the most restrained prose ever likely to be employed for a son’s view of vultures circling a corpse.
Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel’s life and he is eking out an existence with his hurtful, unyielding father. The sheep are grazing their high summer pastures; a side hustle smuggling contraband brings in a little much-needed cash. In the bare conditions of the lonely farm, any warmth of feeling is a kind of contraband smuggled in by night; love between men is doubly illicit. The grave tenderness that grows between Miquel and his father’s maltreated servant Manolo gives The Bridge its emotional centre. These young men salve the emptiness with a few quiet words and touches. We sense their youthful beauty and resilience, their suppleness in a place of fixity.
Continue reading...Exclusive: sanctions against ministers and settler groups are ‘smoke and mirrors cop-out’ says Omar Barghouti
Britain’s legal and ethical obligation to stop a genocide in Gaza requires it to take bigger steps than halting trade with illegal Israeli settlements or imposing further sanctions, Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has said.
He described sanctions against individual settler groups or extremist ministers as a “smoke and mirrors cop-out and distraction” from the UK’s legal obligation under international law to end all support for Israel, including arms exports, trade deals and academic relations that “may directly or indirectly enable Israel’s illegal occupation” of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Continue reading...For a decade I lived with a fear so bad that I once tried to climb out of a tube carriage while it was in motion. Then a hypnotherapist told me to ask my parents one very important question
In 2000, I had been living in London for just over a decade and working at EMI Records for five years. I had moved to Brixton from Surrey – where space and peace were generally abundant – in the late 80s, and I’d noticed I was becoming increasingly anxious and claustrophobic, particularly on public transport.
As things got progressively worse, I had a string of distressing panic attacks. Every time, it felt like the world around me was closing in. Then, in July 2003, during my daily commute between Brixton and the South Bank, I had a panic attack so intense I tried to climb out of the tube carriage doors. Thankfully, other passengers held me back until we arrived at the next platform – but I knew the problem was no longer something I could ignore.
Continue reading...Oh jee. “Een senior directeur heeft meerdere bestanden uit de bedrijfsomgeving naar zijn privé e-mailadres verzonden en heeft daarnaast het hele bestand van zijn zakelijke computer willen uploaden.” Nee, dat vond de rechter niet leuk en de directeur mocht op staande voet worden ontslagen. Wat was hier aan de hand?
Het vonnis is kort en kernachtig. Zo te lezen waren er beëindigingsonderhandelingen bezig, wat wijst op een al bestaand arbeidsconflict. Het is dan op zijn zachtst niet handig om grootschalig bestanden te gaan downloaden, want dat wordt gelogd en komt op tafel.
Hier ook:
[verzoeker] heeft meerdere bestanden uit de bedrijfsomgeving van [werkgever] naar zijn privé e-mailadres verzonden en daarnaast op 19 november 2025, in de ochtend om 07:00 uur, zo blijkt, het hele bestand van zijn zakelijke computer willen uploaden naar Gemini (Google AI).De reden dat het aan het licht kwam, was dat er een intern security systeem dit detecteerde en ingreep. Logisch en standaard bij zulk bulkwerk.
Mag dat? Alleen al uit het arbeidsrecht algemeen volgt al dat zoiets niet mag. Maar hier stond het ook “met heldere bewoordingen in de arbeidsovereenkomst van [verzoeker] en in de Code of Business Conduct Policy”. En dan ben je af, zeker als je een hoge functie “met een bijbehorend salaris” bij zo’n bedrijf hebt.
Omdat die tweede stap gebeurde nádat hij was aangesproken op het privémailen, en hij daar niets over zei, is het bedrijf alle vertrouwen in hem verloren. En de rechter wijst het ontslag op staande voet dan ook toe.
Het wrange gevoel dat ik bij zulke zaken vaak wel heb, is dat je als werknemer op een forse achterstand staat. Alle informatie is digitaal, dus als je ineens in een geschil zit met je werkgever dan moet je van alles gaan downloaden. Gericht zoeken kost tijd, en misschien gaat je account zo op nonactief, dus bulkdownloaden is dan logisch. Maar dat kan dus wel leiden tot dit soort situaties.
Zoals ik in 2023 al blogde:
Daarom blijft het advies: kopieer bewijsstukken die jouw positie ten opzichte van de werkgever kunnen beïnvloeden. Een risico daarvan is natuurlijk weer dat je dan beschuldigd kunt worden van stelen van bedrijfsgeheimen. Beperk zoiets dus tot dingen die evident jou aangaan, zoals mails van HR of directie met toezeggingen, niet hele bergen documenten van projecten om aan te kunnen tonen dat je daaraan had gewerkt en niemand ooit had geklaagd.Arnoud
Het bericht Op staande voet ontslagen omdat je al je werkbestanden in Google Gemini wilde schuiven (vanwege een arbeidsconflict) verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.
Arm servers won’t have significant market share in the enterprise for at least three to five years, according to Ram Velaga, the recently installed leader of Broadcom’s software business. That’s unwelcome news for hardware vendors contemplating Arm servers, because buyers will be less interested in the devices if they can’t manage them with the tools they already use. VMware remains the most commonly deployed enterprise server virtualization supplier, so its users won’t be able to embrace Arm servers anytime soon without Arm boxes becoming a silo – a scenario few will embrace. Velaga previously led Broadcom’s networking silicon group and became president of Broadcom’s enterprise software division on January 1, putting him in charge of the former VMware, Symantec, and CA business units. Speaking at VMware’s Explore conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Velaga said the virtualization pioneer’s mission won’t change on his watch. “We will be the abstraction layer, for CPU and GPU, regardless of instruction set,” he said. VMware currently virtualizes servers, storage, and networks, but only on x86 servers. The Broadcom business unit has gone a little wider with GPUs, supporting Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. Another device VMware works with is the SmartNIC/Data Processing Unit – network cards that pack a processor so they can handle networking chores to save the CPU the trouble. The processor in many SmartNICs uses the Arm architecture, so VMware created a version of its hypervisor to run in SmartNICs as part of its distributed services engine, which runs workloads like firewalls and intrusion detection tools on the devices. While VMware worked on that project, it also inched toward creating a hypervisor for Arm servers, and recently delivered a preview of that tech. In his remarks during his conference-opening plenary on Monday, Velaga suggested Arm is likely to become part of the enterprise IT scene. But during a Q&A session on Tuesday he shared his view that it will be a few years before Arm servers have significant market share in the enterprise, and that VMware therefore doesn’t need to port its hypervisor in a hurry. Velaga added his view that VMware customers have zero interest in processors built on RISC-V, the permissively licensed instruction set that some pundits believe could do to processor design what Linux did to proprietary operating systems. VMware’s mission to abstract everything means it will address RISC-V if it makes sense to do so in future, but for now the business unit isn’t touching it. Velaga also outlined how Broadcom software spends its research and development budget and said around 60 percent of its $5 billion annual spend goes towards keeping VMware’s current products up to date. The remainder goes toward developing new products such as the "AI factory" announced yesterday. AI is hot. Arm servers are not. It’s therefore not hard to see where VMware will spend its R&D dollars in coming years. ®
Drie auto's zijn dinsdagavond op de N214 bij Noordeloos op elkaar gebotst. Daarbij raakte één persoon gewond, die is naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.
From the internet that brought you Is My Blue Your Blue? (previously), How Well Can You Remember Colors (previously), and JND (previously)... and the 2025 game (previously) and countless "can you name [n] [things]?" games... comes Color Counter! Name 100 colors and finally prove to your parents that you deserved the big box of Crayola.
via. And yes, I reached 100, though I did use the one color named in the instructions. Fair warning: part of the "fun" is discovering some inconsistencies in how these names are formed.
via. And yes, I reached 100, though I did use the one color named in the instructions. Fair warning: part of the "fun" is discovering some inconsistencies in how these names are formed.