DirectX 10 goodness can now be had without giving up an arm and a leg. NVIDIA today launched a new lineup of DirectX 10-capable cards using NVIDIA’s new G84 GPU (a less-powerful variant of the G80) with prices starting as low as $90 for the 8500.

New to NVIDIA’s product lineup are the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT, GeForce 8600 GT, and the 8600 GTS. The 8500 GT starts at $89, while the 8600 GTS tops out at between $199 and $229. All three of the new Series 8 cards offer DirectX 10 support as well as NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD technology, which handles HD DVD and Blu-ray playback.

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday Google is set to introduce software for creating meeting presentations online, offering a twist on Microsoft Corp.’s popular PowerPoint tool.

Google is adding presentation software as a new feature to Google Docs, a collection of Web-based product tools such as word-processing, spreadsheets, e-mail and home page publishing that offers an alternative to Microsoft Office, Schmidt said.

But the leader of the world’s Web search leader, which expanded last year to offer a new category of online software for use by consumers and businesses, played down the direct challenge to Microsoft when asked whether the move was meant to compete with PowerPoint.

“We don’t think so. The reason is it doesn’t have all the functionality nor is it intended to have all the functionality of Microsoft Office,” Schmidt said.

Google Inc. is ready to introduce a copyright protection tool that helps media owners to automatically report acts of piracy on its YouTube video site, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday.

Schmidt said the new tools, known as “Claim Your Content” could resolve accusations that the world’s largest provider of Web search services is tolerating piracy by consumers to share video on its YouTube site.

The percentage of US-hosted phishing attacks dropped from 74 per cent in February to 55 per cent in March, according to the latest online fraud report of security firm RSA.

Last month also witnessed a “dramatic increase” in the number of brands targeted by email scams, from 153 in February to 202 in March, even as the number of phishing attacks dropped slightly.

“More institutions were targeted, but on average there were fewer attacks against each institution,” RSA explains.

Microsoft, as part of its outreach to the open-source community, has released a new official Windows Media Player plug-in for Firefox 2.0 that resolves problems with the older one.

The plug-in enables Windows Media Player to work on Firefox for Windows Vista and resolves known issues with the old one, wrote Hank Janssen, the program manager for Port 25, Microsoft’s software lab that works with open source, on a company blog Monday.

The plug-in is compatible with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the XP SP2 and Vista OSes.

The plug-in is backwards compatible with Windows Media Player version 6.4 and also adds support for Windows OCX scripting interfaces, which allows developers to add more functionality to applications.

Microsoft is working on another plug-in for Firefox, the main competitor to the company’s latest Internet Explorer 7 browser. In November, the Port 25 lab said it was working with Mozilla to develop a plug-in for CardSpace, Microsoft’s identity management technology.

Intel Corp. said a new line of computer processors due out later this year will be about 40 percent faster than current chips when running computer games, videos and other heavy workloads.

The world’s biggest microchip maker, which powers about 75 percent of computers, said the new Penryn processors will have the same basic design as current ones, but the circuitry will be 30 percent thinner — just 45 millionths of a millimeter wide.

“In high-performance computing and bandwidth intensive applications … there will be up to a whopping 45 percent performance increase,” said Patrick Gelsinger, the general manager for Intel’s digital enterprise group.

The Penryn would be the world’s first 45 nanometer processor, Gelsinger said at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing on Tuesday. The new processors will hit the market later this year, but Gelsinger did not provide a timeline.