EVGA Announces GTX 480 and 470 Graphics Cards

EVGA is proud to announce the latest and fastest GPU on planet earth, the EVGA GTX 480 and the EVGA GTX 470! Experience heart-pounding cinematic visuals thanks to the combined power of DirectX 11, NVIDIA PhysX, and NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround technologies.

“EVGA is here to deliver what the community demands: the next level DirectX 11 gaming and compute accelerator. The EVGA GTX 470 and 480 cards offer the fastest Tessellation and Ray Tracing performance on the planet, indeed these are very exciting times for our customers,” said Bob Klase, VP of Sales at EVGA. “We are thrilled to be offering the best NVIDIA products and support in the industry.”

The amazing performance of these new cards do not end at just benchmarking however, with up to 1536MB of DDR5 memory, super high screen resolutions combined with high resolution textures in games are now more fluid than ever, and with full DirectX 11 support, pointy character heads are a thing of the past with full support for DirectX 11 tessellation, and when combined with NVIDIA PhysX Technology, you achieve the ultimate in interactive gaming.

Features:

• Microsoft DirectX11 Support
• NVIDIA CUDA Technology with CUDA™ C/C++, DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL Support
• NVIDIA PhysX Technology
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology
• NVIDIA 2-way and 3-way SLI ready
• NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready
• PCI Express 2.0 Support
• Two Dual-Link HDCP DVI-I Connectors
• One Mini-HDMI 1.3a connector
• OpenGL 3.2 Support

Oracle enacts 'all or nothing' hardware support policy

Oracle has adopted what amounts to an "all or nothing" hardware support policy, according to a document the vendor has posted on its Web site.

The policy, which went into effect March 16, states that "when acquiring technical support, all hardware systems must be supported (e.g., Oracle Premier Support for Systems or Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems) or unsupported."

It includes all systems running Solaris version 10.9 or later, those running Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM, as well as "all hardware systems for which you have applied services received under a technical support contract for another hardware system (including sharing of updates, patches, fixes, security alerts, work-arounds, configuration/installation assistance or parts)."

Sarawak Mulls Mechanism To Help High-tech Sector During Downturn

arawak is working out a mechanism to help high-technology multinational companies (MNCs) operating in Sama Jaya Free Industrial Zone here minimise risks during any future economic downturn.

State's Deputy Chief Minister, Tan Sri Dr George Chan, said at the moment the state's Industrial Development Ministry was in the midst of gathering feedbacks from the MNCs.

"We are a business-friendly goverment and we mean it," he told reporters after attending a briefing by Sanmina-SCI Corp (M) Sdn Bhd's vice-president/general manager, Mark C. Gable, here Friday.

Dr Chan said the state goverment needed to pay attention to the high-tech companies in view of the jobs as well as the expertise they provided.

He said the global economic downturn has affected the high-tech industry in Sarawak but some of the companies operating here had taken pro-active steps to address the concern of their local workers by not resorting to retrenchment.

"Sanmina-SCI has not retrenched its workers during the economic downturn. It had instead offered half-pay or to review the work shifts," he said.

Dell Tech Support Stop will nothing

Janna's Dell laptop broke, but it was still under warranty. She tells Consumerist that she contacted their technical support by web chat, imagining that it would be simple and easy to get a computer under warranty repaired. Her journey through Dell's tech support began with the chat rep encouraging her to grab a screwdriver and take her computer apart herself, and somehow got even more discouraging from there. When she finally got Dell to take the laptop in for repairs, Dell somehow helpfully cracked her LCD.

On December 7, 2009 I contacted Dell's chat support, as my computer started giving the blue screen of death, randomly not booting up, and the CCFL's were visible underneath the screen when looking at it from the side. My computer is still covered under warranty, so I figured it wouldn't be much of a problem to get it repaired. Was I ever wrong.....

Chat support wasn't any help, they basically asked me to 'find a screwdriver' and take my computer apart myself. I asked them about electrostatic discharge risks, and they asked me what I meant. The language barrier was extremely frustrating. Eventually, they ended up 'accidentally disconnecting' the chat once a so-called supervisor tried to assist me, then they called me later on....at a little past midnight my time.

Then I tried writing to Michael Dell's so-called email address, which got me to some sort of escalation department, still obviously talking to someone in India. After another month or two, I was still waiting for the third-party technicians to call me. We had come to the conclusion that i likely needed a new hard drive, RAM, and bezel.