An Australian cattle farmer has found what he suspects to be space junk in a paddock on his outback cattle ranch.

The metal/carbon composite combination, which at first glance appears like a massive insect hive, is presumed to be a "fuel cell" for a rocket used to propel communication satellites into orbit. The fallout from such rockets is supposed to land in safe zones where no-one can be hurt. Looking at the pictures, if that landed on my house, I might be a little upset, and if it landed on my head, well, I wouldn't have time to get upset.

Tomorrow the first Intel Developer Forum of the years kicks off in Shanghai for two days of technology packed geekness. It is a stage that Intel uses to show off upcoming products and stuff that they are working on.

We won't be at the show but there is already a wealth of information over at the Intel IDF "Live" website. This Spring show focus is going to be on "Petaflops to Milliwatts" which in other words means Nehalem processor microarchitecture to the ultra small and low power consuming Atom processor. There will be many other subjects discussed such as USB 3.0, WiMAX, graphics software and more.

Several audio and video podcasts have already been uploaded for your viewing pleasure along with many wafer shots and so forth as eye candy.

Word is circulating that just four short months after the launch of the 9800 GTX (set for launch tomorrow), Nvidia will welcome its new high-end graphics cards to the world.

Namely we are talking about the GT200 based 9900 GTX and 9900 GX2. There are little details floating around at this stage but some reports suggest that Nvidia's GT200 core will be a huge performer. One report says that the 9900 GTX will replace the 9800 GX2 which suggests that a single 9900 GTX may outperform the dual-GPU 9800 GX2. Likewise, the 9900 T was said to possibly replace the 9800 GTX.

Today marks the second annual Earth Hour day which is organized and promoted by the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald.

It encourages everyone to switch off lights and non-essential items in your house or office between 8pm local time and 9pm on March 29. It is designed to promote electricity conservation and thus the final hope is lower carbon emissions.

Playing the Nintendo DS lite for many hours, I often feel something is just not quite right. For those of you wondering what a DS lite is, it's a popular hand held device from Nintendo used for playing cartridge games while on the move. It opens and closes like a book, has two screens similar to the old Donkey Kong consoles way back in the eighties. The lower screen is a touch screen and the games for the console use all manner of ways to catch your attention when you play with it. Some games on the handheld console use the microphone response, others the Wi-Fi capabilities to build the thrill of competing, but by far the most interactive aspect of the device is the mini touch screen, where you can actively tap the screen to give the game inputs.

Then while reading an article earlier at this website , it hit me what that missing ingredient is; namely you never know if your press on the touch screen has been registered until you see the response a few milliseconds later. If you did it wrong, you will see the result after the fact. There is no immediate and direct haptic response. What I mean by this is if you push a key on a keyboard you can feel the button go in, can feel it activate the letter or number on your screen and you can also feel when you release the key or accidentally push an adjacent key. Doing the same thing on an iPhone touch screen, or any one of the many touch screen devices with a stylus or finger push just isn't the same experience.

Nokia's N95 enjoyed a massive amount of fanfare when it was first announced and released with it still being one of the most feature-rich mobile phones on the market, also with one of the highest price tags.

Months ahead of its release, the folks over at Mobile-Review.com have taken the upcoming N96 mobile phone for a spin in a heck of a lot of detail.

Continue reading: Nokia N96 mobile gets very early review (full post)

ABIT was once a monstrous motherboard maker with an instrumental marketing machine and engineering team behind it who could do no wrong - except for of course, accounting.

ABIT only managed to barely keep its head above water and was bought out by another company which gave it the chance to live on. The struggling company is still in the game but much more quiet than it used to be. Motherboards keep filtering out, some good but not what we were all accustomed to.

The Boy Genius managed to get his hands on a phone using Microsoft's updated Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system a full week or so before it is officially released.

Besides the screenshot gallery, he claims the new features as being: Support for AT&T's Video Share, New thumbnail browsing, New Albums feature, Send to your space (upload to your Windows Live account), Updated camera UI, Updated home screen (more music and multimedia features) and TV out.

VIA announced its new processor architecture, code-named Isaiah.

The processor according to Centaur President Glenn Henry (Centaur is VIA's subsidiary CPU design company) has double or more the processing power of current generation C7 processors. The C7 VIA CPU is already available in the market and in use in many of the Ultra-mobile PC's and net-book devices such as the GIGABYTE U60 UMPC (reviewed here).

The truly remarkable feature of this new architecture is that it is drop-in compatible with current boards, offering double the performance, but at the same power (wattage) usage. This will mean current systems already being sold and used, can be re-aligned to contain the new Isaiah processor, giving the manufacturer's two product SKUs for the design costs of one. See the clip below.

According to Digitimes, Acer will leverage its large economies of scale to build and distribute a UMPC similar to Eee PC.

The device is said to be 8.9" long, and fits the "low-cost PC" profile. Asustek will launch its second generation Eee PC at around the same time, but supposedly there will not be a price war between the two giants of the PC world. They speculate that Asustek may launch their Eee PC product earlier to gain an advantage.