Developers on the Blink browser engine, the core component that powers both Google's Chrome browser and Opera, announced Friday that they're dropping support for the Pointer Events specification originally devised by Microsoft.

There are two competing specifications for handling touch input in the browser. The first, Touch Events, was devised by Apple and integrated into WebKit. While Touch Events was part of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards track, for a long period they were held up in patent limbo, with Apple claiming that it owned patents that covered the specification and refusing to offer a royalty-free license for those patents. During this period of uncertainty, W3C stopped work on Touch Events.

In response to this, Microsoft devised a similar but different specification, which it called Pointer Events. Pointer Events both avoided Apple's patent claims, and offered some features not found in Touch Events. In particular, Pointer Events allowed Web content to handle mouse, touch, and stylus input in a more or less uniform way. With Pointer Events, developers can specialize these input methods where necessary, but also handle common behavior with common code.

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Bent Kure

All my life, I've been the kind of person who absorbs and chronicles trivial facts for easy recall later. So Good Job Brain is the kind of radio show/podcast I've been waiting for my whole life. Every week, the four members of a real-life pub quiz team get together for an hour or so to just chat about some of their favorite facts, all centered loosely around a different theme each week. Sometimes these facts will take the form of clever quizzes (with the other participants ringing in using hilarious "barnyard buzzers"), but more often than not, the hosts just present well-researched, interesting , yet mostly useless facts in a clean, clear, and conversational style.

I'll listen to Good Job Brain when I'm out doing errands, when making dinner, or, most enjoyably, when navigating the long waits and cramped spaces of air travel. For a know-it-all like me, using that "wasted" time to improve my stores of useless knowledge is a great way to multitask.

—Kyle Orland

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Shawn Campbell/CC BY 2.0

Twitter has pledged to update its policies regarding abuse and user safety, following a series of distressing incidents that caused Zelda Williams, daughter of the late comedian and actor Robin Williams, to leave the social network.

Two accounts have been removed by Twitter after Zelda Williams received abusive messages and doctored pictures and subsequently announced she would be leaving the social network. In a statement, Twitter's Vice President of Trust and Safety Del Harvey said the company would be addressing a variety of different issues that the event had raised and would update its policies accordingly.

"We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter. We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules, and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users."

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New research suggests that the idea of "the thieving magpie" being attracted to shiny objects may be a myth.

Rendered image showing the electric motor between the rear wheels, and the battery compartment stretching forward. Tesla Motors

In a Friday blog post, Elon Musk wrote that Tesla will remove mileage limits on its warranty policy for all Tesla Model S drive units. The warranty, which will still span eight years, won't have a cap on the number of owners for each vehicle.

People who purchased Teslas before today were told that the warranty period for the drive unit expired after eight years or once the car logged over 125,000 miles.

The revised warranty applies to new vehicles and Model S cars that are already on the road.

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One of the slides Vringo lawyers showed the jury to win their case. Vringo

Vringo's win over Google was one of the biggest and most public jury wins for a "patent troll" in recent years. It won $30 million from a jury verdict in 2012, far less than the half-billion-dollar verdict it was seeking.

But last year, the judge overseeing the case revived Vringo's hopes, ordering Google to pay a running royalty amounting to 1.36 percent of US AdWords sales. Those additional payments could have been more than $200 million annually, pushing Vringo investors toward the billion-dollar payday they were pining for.

Today, the dream of getting rich by trading Vringo's lawsuit-driven stock is dead. A three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has eviscerated (PDF) Vringo's patents, ruling 2-1 that they are obvious.

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While most of the time enthusiasts are playing around with the latest and greatest, the cheaper low performance platforms are usually the high volume movers. As we explained in our Kabini review, AMD has taken the unusual step of producing an upgradable platform for as little as $74. The motherboards for the AM1 Kabini platform range from $31 to $47, and today we are reviewing the GIGABYTE AM1M-S2H which retails at $35.

Images Money

Two major supermarket chains announced that their customers' credit card information may have been stolen during a network intrusion.

SuperValu, the Minnesota parent company of Cub Foods, Farm Fresh, Hornbacher’s, Shop ’n Save, and Shoppers Food and Pharmacy, announced that 180 stores in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Missouri, North Dakota, and Minnesota were affected.

"The Company has not determined that any such cardholder data was in fact stolen by the intruder, and it has no evidence of any misuse of any such data, but is making this announcement out of an abundance of caution," SuperValu said in a statement Friday.

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The English Premier League is planning to "clamp down on fans posting unofficial videos of goals online" and is developing technologies and working with Twitter to aid its quest, the BBC reported today.

"You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law," the league's director of communications, Dan Johnson, told the news organization. "It's a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it. We're developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity... I know it sounds as if we're killjoys, but we have to protect our intellectual property."

Football—also known as "soccer," a word coined by English people to describe their favorite sport—involves the kicking of a ball into a goal, feet-first slides into opponents' legs, and a variety of acrobatic dives. While players other than the goalie are not allowed to use their hands to touch the ball, they may use their heads, and—though generally frowned upon—occasionally attempt to influence the course of play by biting each other.

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A study of trained dolphins has suggested that the marine mammals use express pleasure with squeals of delight.

Not all links on Facebook will get slapped with a "satire" tag, but if users click through an Onion article and return to their feeds, they'll probably find some stuff that's been tagged.

Facebook is already an unbearable enough place as of late, at least in my case. Awful national and international news stories continue to appear in my personal feed alongside friends' amateur political commentary and personal quibbles, and that mix makes the occasional ray of satirical, hilarious sunshine from off-kilter sites like The Onion welcome. Sadly, Facebook has begun trying to ruin even these fun articles by appending their titles with a "satire" tag.

The major catch to this auto-tagging is that it only appears in a "related articles" box. Here's how it works: If a friend posts an Onion link to his or her Facebook feed, click on it for a laugh. Once you're done at The Onion and come back to your desktop or laptop browser, Facebook will have generated three related articles in a box directly below whatever you'd clicked on. In the case of an Onion link, that box will usually contain at least one article from the same site, only that article's headline will begin with the word "satire" in brackets. As of press time, we were able to duplicate this result on three different computers from different accounts, one of which is shown above.

We can only assume this was implemented as a reaction to users believing that Onion links are nonfiction reports (you can lose hours flipping through Literally Unbelievable, a site that catalogs such boneheaded moments), but we're not sure what compelled Facebook to go so far as to assert editorial control. Maybe the company still feels bad about how users reacted to its intentional News Feed manipulation from 2012.

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Microsoft could be shipping a preview release of the next major version of Windows—codenamed "Threshold" and expected to be named "Windows 9"—in either late September or early October, according to sources speaking to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. The preview will be widely available to anyone who wants to install it.

The final version of the operating system is currently believed to be scheduled for spring 2015.

Microsoft has all but confirmed some of the features that Threshold will ship with, including a new hybrid Start menu that includes bits of the old Windows 7 Start menu alongside new live tiles and the ability to run modern Metro applications in windows.

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FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn (right) with former FCC Chairman and current NCTA CEO Michael Powell. National Cable & Telecommunications Association

Comcast and Time Warner Cable were planning to spend $132,000 to sponsor a dinner honoring FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn but are now redirecting the donations after accusations that the companies are trying to curry favor with Clyburn during the FCC's review of Comcast's proposed $45.2 billion acquisition of TWC.

Comcast was going to be a "presenting sponsor" with a $110,000 donation for next month's annual dinner of the Walter Kaitz Foundation, which seeks to "advance the contributions of women and multi-ethnic professionals in cable." TWC paid $22,000 for the event.

The dinner's previous honorees include Comcast itself, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, and Roberts' father, Comcast founder Ralph Roberts. Time Warner Cable and three of its employees have also been honored at previous fêtes. The annual dinners have raised $35 million, including $1.75 million last year. Kaitz uses that money to make grants to other organizations that promote diversity.

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Following the announcement of 10 million PS4 sales worldwide earlier this week, Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 4 continues to outsell its console competition in the US. July was the seventh straight month that Sony's system has been the best-selling console in the country, according to Sony and NPD data.

Neither Sony nor Microsoft offered concrete sales numbers for the month of July, following NPD's monthly report on US retail video game sales, but Microsoft did say the console "continues to sell at a strong and steady pace following the release of the $399 console in June." Microsoft previously announced that US sales for the Xbox One had doubled in June following the unbundling of the Kinect sensor, and it said this month that "we continued to see this momentum in July.”

Combined, US sales for the Xbox One and PS4 are up 80 percent compared to the first nine months of sales of last generation's Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, NPD said. Those consoles sold a combined 3.82 million units in their first nine months in 2005 and 2006, putting current combined US sales of Sony and Microsoft's new consoles at around 6.87 million.

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USGS

The world's glaciers are melting, driven to retreat by a warming trend that has persisted for well over a century. But glaciers are slow-moving bodies in more ways than one, as their huge mass of ice melts slowly, even when the temperatures rise rapidly. Since the onset of the current retreat traces back to the middle of the 19th century and the end of the Little Ice Age, it can be difficult to tell how much of recent ice dynamics is driven by recent warming.

Now, a new study has taken a close look how the world's glaciers have responded to natural and human-driven climate change. The results show that the majority of melting in the last century was still a hangover from the Little Ice Age, but a clear signal of human influence has emerged over the last few decades.

The authors of the new paper, who hail from Austria and Canada, recognize the challenge of discerning climate influences by following the behavior of glaciers. But they also suggest that there's a great opportunity in doing so. "Because glacier extent responds to changes in the glacier mass balance with a lag of decades to centuries," they write, "glaciers provide an opportunity to directly perceive long-term climate change, unobscured by interannual variability." In other words, the erratic behavior of short-term climate trends gets smoothed out by the slow adjustment of the glaciers.

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Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan says that PrivateCore is a "perfect fit" for the social media company. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

On August 7, as Def Con was kicking off far below in the bowels of the Rio Hotel’s convention center in Las Vegas, I was ushered into a suite on the 19th floor to see a man who has one of the most high-profile security gigs in the industry: Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer. An acquisition of a security startup company announced that same day and a huge internal investment in security technology development have created a software security giant that has but one paying customer—Facebook itself. Sullivan explained the PrivateCore deal as an investment in Facebook’s future—especially when viewed within the context of the company’s Internet.org effort to bring affordable Internet access (and Facebook) to the still-unwired parts of the planet. “PrivateCore is a perfect fit for the future of Facebook,” Sullivan told Ars.

A VM in a vCage

The technology PrivateCore is developing, vCage, is a virtual “cage” in the telecom industry’s usage of the word. It is software that is intended to continuously assure that the servers it protects have not had their software tampered with or been exploited by malware. It also prevents physical access to the data running on the server, just as a locked cage in a colocation facility would.

The software integrates with OpenStack private cloud infrastructure to continuously monitor virtual machines, encrypt what’s stored in memory, and provide additional layers of security to reduce the probability of an outside attacker gaining access to virtual servers through malware or exploits of their Web servers and operating systems. If the “attestation” system detects a change that would indicate that a server has been exploited, it shuts it down and re-provisions another server elsewhere. Sullivan explained that the technology is seen as key to Facebook’s strategy for Internet.org because it will allow the company to put servers in places outside the highly secure (and expensive) data centers it operates in developed countries.

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A strange new type of USB cable that aims to solve an age-old problem. Dianxinshouji.com.cn

If reader reaction is any indication, most of you are looking forward to the new reversible USB Type-C connector spec that was finalized earlier this week. Some pictures snapped today by dianxinshouji.com.cn (and spotted by MacRumors) claim that Apple is already working on its own solution for its next-gen Lightning cables, a type of reversible connector that will fit into a USB Type-A port in either orientation. These cables would have this reversible USB Type-A plug on one end and the current Lightning connector on the other.

Such a cable would have to use very thin parts to fit into existing USB ports, and making these parts thinner is only going to increase the chances that they'll bend or break. Still, assuming the rumor is true and that the cables work well, it could be a good stopgap measure while we wait for USB Type-C connectors. While those connectors are small, reversible, and support the fast new USB 3.1 specification, it will also take many years for them to replace the current USB Type-A and Type-B connectors on various devices.

Since all we have are blurry photos grabbed from a Chinese blog, take them with a few grains of salt. They could be faked altogether, or they could be cables from an ambitious third-party and not from Apple itself. Still, the frequency and accuracy of these part leaks usually increases as we draw nearer to a new iPhone's release date, and we have less than a month to go until the next iPhone is expected to be unveiled. We've already gathered the most credible rumors here, and we'll be revisiting them again in the days before the event.

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Following our interviews previously with Rod O’Shea at Intel UK, Kris Huang at ASUS and Jackson Hsu at GIGABYTE, I was offered the opportunity to spend some time with Dr Albert Chang, the Senior Division Director in R&D for the entire Motherboard Business Unit at ASUS. The motherboard design and testing facilities span several floors of their headquarters, which we toured during Computex. I would like to thank ASUS and Dr Chang for their time and this opportunity.

Ian Cutress: Everyone sees a corporation, but there are always interesting people to talk to. Everyone has a back story and it is always interesting to hear how people have risen to where they are. Your business card says ‘Division Director’ – what exactly does a Division Director do?

Albert Chang: I am the ASUS motherboard R&D head, so I have three major teams. One of these is in Taiwan, with two others in China. The team in Taiwan focuses on ROG, with the other two in China for channel motherboards and SI customer designs.

IC: What is your typical day?

AC: Usually I have to review all the projects. We usually have 20-30 projects running at the same time. Being one person it can be hard to review all details, but I have staff that report to me and then I can discuss any problems in case any department needs assistance or approval.

IC: How long have you been in this position at ASUS?

AC: I have been Division Director for two years and at ASUS since 2002 straight after finishing my PhD from the National Taiwan University. I started as an engineer, checking datasheets and layouts. At ASUS, as a motherboard engineer, you are the project owner and you have to discuss everything with the Product Manager (layout, engineering) and others like the power and layout engineers. We had to design based on the specification sheets and confirm with layout engineers. I managed a couple of people at that time, and a lot more now!

IC: With regards to your education, what were your courses?

AC: I majored in Electrical Engineering, with a focus on Power Electronics. I finished my PhD at 28 and joined ASUS at that time.

IC: In your position, do you work a ‘9-to-5’, or do you have to come in on weekends?

AC: Sometimes at weekends, especially to have meetings with either North America or Europe, or to fix major issues that rise up. I have a family, but they are not too keen on me coming in on weekends! I sometimes have to buy cake or a gift when I get home!

IC: As Division Director, do you get final say on what happens with the motherboards?

AC: On the engineering side, yes, but there are also the firmware and software teams.

IC: Does the sales department ask you to do certain designs?

AC: All requests of that nature go through the product managers, who relay information through to R&D. So for ROG, Kris Huang (we interviewed him in 2012) is the product manager.

IC: How does user demand get fed back into designs?

AC: Typically I will speak to our product managers (both sales and marketing), or our technical marketing teams directly who monitor the forums and produce reports about user experience. Sometimes I like to hear direct from the teams gathering this information and interacting directly with the users, especially with our major regions such as North America. We have to look at the global market, and decide on ideas or features that benefit everyone.

IC: In terms of ideas for future platforms, who gets them/where do they come from?

AC: We initially look at our competitors’ product, to see which direction they are going, and also examine media reviews to see which options they like or want to see improved. Features like the OC Panel come from the engineers in the ROG team. Because I am only one person, we encourage every engineer to share any ideas in meetings so we can discuss them. There are multiple streams – some from in-house engineers, some from feedback, and some from product managers.

IC: What percentage of users need to request a feature before it is implemented?

AC: If a request comes up repeatedly, we evaluate the idea based on relevance and increased cost on the motherboards. For example, adding DC and PWM fan control on the motherboard came from a core group of users that wanted to be able to have the control. It also helps if the media notice the new feature as well, and can help relay this to other users.

IC: How is market research for new ideas performed?

AC: We have the forums, but also social media plays a role. We sometimes give users a choice between two features (for example, audio codec A or B), and even if we only get 40 or so responses, we weigh up the percentages. The product managers for each region that understand their customers can also have input on new ideas.

IC: At what point in the product cycle to you start looking at the next generation of motherboards?  If you released a motherboard today, how far back would you have to start planning for it?

AC: At least nine months, in terms of the start point in thinking about what we want to do.

In the first three months, we will start analyzing the new major features for the CPU and chipset generation from the CPU manufacturer guidelines, paying attention to the differences to the old platform. We also look over bugs from the old generation, or ideas that we could not implement in the last generation. We also check the competitors’ products for the last generation, including the feedback from their users. At that point we talk to the major IC vendors (Renesas, ASMedia, Qualcomm Atheros) for their plans and roadmaps for the next 6-9 months so we have the latest for launch.

In month four, we finalize the segmentation for the product line, including form factor, and start the circuit design. We also work with Intel with early samples which can have a lot of bugs, so we report back to Intel in terms of processor and chipset evaluation for their PVT/first stepping samples. The microcode gets revised several times. We take 4-6 weeks for the circuit design before we get the first motherboards ready for testing, and by this time we have those Intel CPU samples for testing.

We build 60-100 boards for a sample run when the design is coming together, for validation, reliability, checking the power and everything. This includes the aging tests, such as high temperature stress testing. Typically our rule is a 12 hour test at this point, and if there are any errors in those twelve hours for these pre-production models, we then have to check it. The process of testing, changing and retesting can take up to three months to catch any bugs. At every change or iteration due to hardware bugs, we need to retest and revalidate.

At 7.5 months, we are at PVT stage before mass production. We ensure all the third party IC orders are in and will work with the motherboards. We work with factories in China for mass production and place our orders with them to build our motherboards. We have to check the production quality of the factory output. We typically send project managers or leaders to manage production and work with the factories in terms of managing the schedules as well as quantity.

Mass production starts about a month before launch, and in that time we also distribute hardware around the world. This also involves the sales teams talking to their local regional SIs, as well as inviting media to preview events. Typically the media receive samples from the first mass production batch.

IC: So by the timeline, users and media need to start asking for certain features around 5-8 months before a launch!  We normally do not know that there is a launch until it almost happens.

AC: Yes, sometimes changes late in the day are difficult to do. But we keep the ideas generated throughout the generation and see what we can apply next time around. But for example, with the memory design, we do not always follow Intel guidelines. We have our own memory team and do a lot of simulations based on layout and tracing to find the best way to get the most out of the memory. We want to better than the reference design, and ROG team is the best at pushing the new designs. So if we want the best memory records, we need to have the best design.

IC: How long is the lead time, from placing an order to receiving stock, for the controllers?

AC: For the testing motherboards, we usually can get stock within a week or two. For the mass production, if it works in our design, it is more like 4-6 weeks. This includes other things like the PCB, which can sometimes be over 6 weeks.

IC: When do you start designing the additional materials (box, foam inserts, manuals)?

AC: We go through a lot of internal discussions, and there are a lot of revisions when it comes down to design. The design teams talk to sales and see what the competition are doing, but early design talks can be 6-9 months away from a launch, as the tracing teams are designing the motherboards.

IC: When you mention 60-100 motherboards for a sample run, is that 100 motherboards for every SKU? So for the seven Z97 channel motherboards, you would have almost 700 samples?

AC: Yes, every SKU, of course! 

IC: In terms of product production goals, what would be your main goals in the next twelve months?

AC: In the first two months of a launch, we check to see if our features meet the customers’ needs. After that, we start to study the next generation. For me, I hope that each generation we can make the boards that everyone likes, because this is my product line at ASUS.

IC: How about the next five years?

AC: I will still be at ASUS, and I want to help expand PC applications in the home. Our chairman Jonney Shih has mentioned at Computex that this is a primary focus for ASUS.

IC: What do you think are the most important innovations that ASUS has created in the motherboard segment recently?

AC: Too many, cannot pick! Our ROG features span so many projects, for example. We have made our overclocking features easier to use than before, especially with automatic overclocking in BIOS and software, but also with the ROG OC Panel. Not many users know how to overclock, so we want to make it easier with our Auto Tuning, especially with voltages and stress testing. But we also cater for the extreme tweakers that use ROG.

IC: What element or feature from the ASUS Motherboard Business Unit do you think users need to know more about?

AC: We use separate components on the motherboard to help manage features like overclocking, but not many users know that we also do the same for other features like power saving. This is separate from the CPU and chipset, for example our Dual Intelligent Processors design. This is our own custom designed chip for our motherboards, not something off the shelf, which users may not realize.

IC: Do you see a gap in the market that ASUS or the Motherboard Business Unit should move in to?

AC: Gaming and small form factor markets are growing, and other ultra-small form factors like the NUC and Chromebox are interesting. We announced the GR8 at Computex, which is a combination of this for around 1.5 liter of volume. The sub 1-liter market should be a focus in the future.

IC: A question I like to pose in our interviews – what advice would you give to a high school student wanting to work for ASUS or to be in the position where you are today?

AC: The best thing is to be interested in electronics and computers. An engineer has to be familiar with this industry, especially the DIY market. Part of being an engineer is building PCs every day, up to 20-30. At the start of my career I had to build every machine by myself. At university, studying electronics or electronic engineering is vital. Out of the ~100 engineers on the fifth floor of HQ, the motherboard engineering floor, three or four have PhDs, most (70%+) have a Master’s and the rest have a Bachelor’s degree.

IC: If you were not working at ASUS, what would you be doing now? Would you still be in engineering?

AC: I would enjoy trying my hand at marketing! I like to promote the products.

IC: To what extent do you look at your competitors’ products?

AC: Our competitors are very aggressive and focused. We use our testing and validation processes on their products to see if they qualify.

IC: What has been your best day working at ASUS? Is there one specific moment that stands out compared to any other?

AC: When I started at ASUS, there was (still is) a philosophy of doing it right first time. Any engineer that produced a product that did not need a second revision (or a revision 1.01) who achieved this got a small bonus, something like 10000NT$ (~$300). In the R&D team, I was the first person to get this award, and it was in my second project ever at ASUS, just after I had started. Normally there might be some layout bug, or signaling bug, but I was very pleased to get it right first time so early in my career.

IC: Do you remember the model name?

It was an AMD motherboard, the SK8V. (We actually reviewed this, back in 2003)

Many thanks to Dr Chang for his time!

There are millions of these lurking in Earth’s back yard. NASA

Millions of asteroids of all shapes and sizes are littered throughout the inner Solar System. In the past three decades, scientists have spotted as many as 500,000, but plenty more remain unseen. And many of them have a “rubble pile” internal structure, which is rather unusual compared to other bodies in the Solar System.

Rubble-pile asteroids are exactly what they sound like: a grouping of different sized rocks brought together under the influence of gravity. Its constituent pieces could be anything from large boulders tens of meters in size to dust particles smaller than a thousandth of a meter in diameter.

Until now, it was assumed that the main forces that hold all these pieces together were gravity and friction. But a rubble-pile asteroid named (29075) 1950 DA, with a diameter of 1.3km, is an exceptional case, one where some other force must be involved.

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One of the problems of Intel’s high end desktop platforms is size: the sockets are large, and all the DRAM slots take up a fair amount of space.  Couple this with the PCIe lane potential of the CPU, then restricting the motherboard size smaller than ATX limits the number of features and multi-PCIe capabilities afforded by the platform.  Nonetheless we saw a couple of motherboards for X79 move down to the micro-ATX size, as well as a few system designer builds that offered other sizes.  In that vein, ASRock is moving from its X79 Extreme4-M (our review) and sent us pictures of the upcoming X99M Killer.

One thing that a micro-ATX layout does is free up some of the PCIe lanes for extra controllers.  The X99M Killer will have ASRock’s Ultra M.2, giving PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth for devices up to 22110.  Being part of ASRock’s Killer range we get an E2200 series network interface, which also incorporates an EM shield similar to the Purity Sound 2 upgraded audio.  The Killer NIC is paired with an Intel NIC as well, with the Fatal1ty Mouse Port also appearing.

Due to the size, if any other mATX motherboards are released I would assume that like the X99M Killer there will only be four DDR4 memory slots, and here ASRock have used thinner slots in order to fit the power delivery and other features on board. I count five fan headers on the board, along with ASRock’s HDD Saver connector and ten SATA 6 Gbps ports.  I can just about make out that some of these are labelled SATA3_0_1 and some are labelled 5_SATA3_0_1, perhaps indicating the presence of a controller or a hub.  There is also a USB 3.0 header on board with power/reset buttons, a two digit debug, two BIOS chips, two USB 2.0 headers, a COM header and additional power to the PCIe slots via s 4-pin molex. We also have an eSATA on the rear panel, with a ClearCMOS button.

We can make out the final PCIe slot as having only four lanes of pins, suggesting an x16/x16/x4 layout.  Whether these four lanes are from the CPU or the chipset is unclear, especially with the presence of the PCIe 3.0 M.2 x4 slot in the middle.

The box lists XSplit, indicating a bundling deal with the software, as well as ECC and RDIMM support. I believe the X99M Killer will be due out at launch, or relatively soon after, although ASRock has not released the pricing details yet.