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.

Tech MNCs don mentor hat, give start-ups low-cost tools

BANGALORE: It is not money alone that can kick-start a new venture. Access to the latest software tools, advice on how to pitch a business

India's top 10 BPOs The rise of multinational IT in India Key facts on India's IT industry Top acquisitions in BPO space

proposal and introduction to prospective customers are equally important pieces of the start-up puzzle, as scores of technology start-ups are finding out.

Until six months ago, Chennai-based information technology outfit OrangeScape would use 50-100 servers, managed round the clock by about 10 employees, to help build and host web applications for a roster of big-ticket clients. “It was a nightmare to manage over 50-100 servers, we couldn’t afford that,” said Suresh Sambandam, founder & CEO, OrangeScape, who then sought help from search giant Google to use their suite of free and open source tools. “We were able to get on Google’s cloud platform on the right time and now we don’t need any of the virtual servers,” Mr Sambandan added.

Elsewhere in Bangalore, Gradatim IT Ventures, a start-up that provides technology tools to clients in the financial sector, also received a welcome boost when they signed onto the Microsoft BizSpark network that allowed them to access licensed software free of cost. “Typically, such licensing would have cost us $200,000 that I can now instead use to build my business,” said CV Prakash, founder & CEO, Gradatim.

Rogue antivirus program comes with tech support

In an effort to boost sales, sellers of a fake antivirus product known as Live PC Care are offering their victims live technical support.

According to researchers at Symantec Corp., once users have installed the program, they see a screen, falsely informing them that their PC is infected with several types of malware. That's typical of this type of program. What's unusual, however, is the fact that the free trial version of Live PC Care includes a big yellow "online support" button.

Clicking on the button connects the victim with an agent, who will answer questions about the product via instant message.

Symantec says the agent is no automated script, but in fact a live person. This lends an "air of legitimacy" to the program, said Marc Fossi, a manager of development with Symantec Security Response. "Obviously if they've got live tech support, it must be real," he joked.

The tech support doesn't help much, though. According to Symantec, the support staff simply try to convince victims to shell out between US$30 and $100 for the product.

This isn't the first time a fake security product has been spotted offering tech support. Another company called Innovative Marketing operated a call center to support its security products, including a program called WinFixer. According to security experts, Innovative Marketing's tech support technicians acted in the same way as Live PC Care's, trying to reassure victims that they were buying a legitimate product.

These so-called rogue antivirus products can sometimes lower security settings on a victim's computer. At best, they offer a false sense of security because the products never protect computers from the latest security threats.

Rogue antivirus has been a major headache for users over the past year. It is often installed via annoying pop-up ads that try to convince the victim that something is wrong with their PC. Symantec tracked 43 million rogue AV installation attempts between July 2008 and July 2009.

Xirrus Resolves Growing Demand for Web Self Help with iSolve

Softlib Software, a provider of Solution Identification software for Web Self-Help, technical support centers and helpdesk teams, recently announced that Xirrus, Inc., aWiFi ( News - Alert) Switching provider, picked Softlib iSolve software for its online customer and partner support.

Softlibs software helps customers reduce costs considerably while enhancing service to end users as well as customers. Softlibs customers include financial institutions, telecom companies, technology vendors and government agencies. Softlib products are widely used on thousands of computers across the world.

Presently iSolve powers support.xirrus.com which allows Xirrus customers and partners to find the information required quickly and easily they need without having to call up and consulting an expert. This allows Xirrus to provide enhanced as well as 24x7 service by leveraging the Web as a scalable Support channel. The content is delivered actively based on intelligent free text search and user credential level.

Xirrus is the only WiFi “Power-Play” that manufactures the Wi-Fi Array architecture that replaces both overlay WiFi offerings and switched Ethernet to the desktop, according to the company. Being a rapidly growing technology company with a passion to provide premier service to its customers and partners, Xirrus was on the look out for technology which could accurately provide solutions to issues put forward and optimizing home grown content automatically while smoothly integrating with existing systems like their Service Desk system. The technology which they would choose also needed to provide the content through natural language search and not depend on FAQs or pre-authored content in order to lower the cost of ownership and provide knowledge to end users faster.

Xirrus decided to chose iSolve due to its capabilities like Intelligent natural language search; Unique solutions grouping for simplified presentation; Seamless integration with existing information sources and applications and Deployment in days.

http://www.techsupportleaders.com/