E-ZCharge Dock Wrangles Charge Cords

E-ZCHARGE is a convenient, inexpensive way to cradle cell phones, iPods, and Bluetooths while they charge - with no more long, messy wires to deal with.

“Tangled wires and cords were everywhere in my house and the idea hit me one day when I tripped on one that was lying on the floor,” said Rick Shuster, inventor and founder of the E-ZCHARGE “I then started noticing that my kitchen countertop was neat except for all those wires. I knew I couldn’t be the only one bothered by this. So I asked around and I found a lot of other people had the same annoyance. There’s also a safety benefit to keep long wires away from children and pets who play with and gnaw on these wires.”

E-ZCHARGE is an innovative non-electrical plastic stand that, with commercial-grade heat-resistant, double-sided tape, affixes to the charging module of small personal electronic devices. The excess cord that is on charging devices gets wrapped around the post, and the end of the wire is held in place by a patented hook. It is small at 2”x 21/2”x1/2”, lightweight (1 oz.), travels well, and is inexpensive. It comes in black, white, and grey colors and retails for $9.99.

Trojan masquerades as iPhone game

Security firm Sophos warned on Thursday that e-mails being circulated on the Web that purport to offer a free iPhone game instead are carrying a Trojan that can take control of infected Windows machines.

The e-mails have subject lines like "Virtual iPhone games!" and "Apple: The most popular game!" The attachment is called "Penguin.Panic.zip," which refers to the iPhone game of the same name.

The Trojan has been identified as Troj/Agent-HNY, Sophos said.
Sophos has not yet seen versions that run on Mac OS X, Apple iPhone or other mobile devices.

Source : Cnet

NVIDIA plans to cut Off 6.5% of Its Employees

Graphics chip developer Nvidia plans to lay off 6.5 percent of its workforce, the company announced Thursday.

About 360 people worldwide will lose their jobs by the end of October, Nvidia said. The Santa Clara, California, company plans to offer severance, counseling and job placement services for the affected workers.

In a statement, Nvidia said the layoffs will allow it to continue to invest in strategic growth areas, including its CUDA (Computer Unified Device Architecture) parallel computing technology and its Tegra mobile single-chip computer. The move will also help the company become more competitive and boost its financial performance, it said in the statement.

Nvidia will take a US$7 million to $10 million charge in the third quarter of fiscal 2009 to cover severance and other costs related to the reduction.

The layoffs come about a month after Nvidia took a one-time charge of $196 million against its second-quarter revenue to cover the cost of replacing bad chips used in Hewlett-Packard and Dell laptops.

Nvidia also faces a lawsuit that was filed in California alleging that it hid a series of defects in its chips that caused the chips to fail.

The company did not indicate that the layoffs were related to the recent costs associated with replacing the bad chips.

AMD Starts "Fusion" Campaign

AMD, which is currently the number two competitor in the computer processor market, has announced today the introduction of its new corporate brand campaign, which follows a catchy new tagline, "The Future is Fusion." As the company explained, the new campaign is meant to provide users with details on AMD's products and technologies and how they can be combined to ultimately improve the performance of today's computer systems.

"Fusion is AMD’s way to express how we blend our customers’ needs, dreams and desires with our unique passion for enabling innovation," said Nigel Dessau, Advanced Micro Devices senior vice president and chief marketing officer. "While this unique approach has always been our practice, ‘Fusion’ is the most focused articulation yet of how AMD marries innovation with collaboration in ways that can yield benefits to the marketplace greater than the sum of its parts."

The company also announced that at the heart of the new 'Fusion' campaign and brand concept lays a collaboration between AMD's people and technology, and those of its partners. Fusion is ultimately intended to improve the computing experience for its customers and deliver higher performance for computer systems based on the company's processors and graphics. In addition, Fusion is also about the company's upcoming Fusion Architecture, which is planned as a solution that combines the graphics capabilities of the company's Radeon GPUs and its CPUs.

AMD also relesed the AMD Fusion utility today. Addressed to desktop users and gamers and available today for download, the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility beta2 is designed to allow gamers to experience greater performance on AMD processor-based PCs with a simple click of a button. It works by temporarily reducing resource-consuming background services while boosting compute performance with acceleration technologies, including:

• Auto-Tune for AMD processors and chipsets, which is designed to optimize platform performance while maintaining system stability;
• Clock Multiplier Control and Advanced Clock Calibration from within the AMD Overdrive utility allows gaming enthusiasts to customize the performance level of their processor and platform.
• AMD Overdrive is able to monitor the temperature, frequency and stability of the processor and platform to allow users to find the optimal settings for the task at hand;
• Auto-Tune for ATI graphics from within the Catalyst Control Center software, providing complete control of the performance and visual quality of ATI Radeon graphics; and
• Hard Drive Acceleration to decrease data seek time and increase hard drive performance.

This tool is currently being released in a beta form. Advanced users may then customize profiles by selecting specific processes for temporary disablement and degrees of hardware tuning depending on usage scenarios.

Download the AMD Fusion for Gaming