Intel has a strange age-related by-law, that requires all corporate officers to be aged 65 or under. This has forced Intel's Chief Technology Officer, Justin Rattner, out of his position as he is now 65 years old.

Rattner joined the company in 1973, becoming Intel's first Principal Engineer in 1979, the fourth Intel Fellow in 1988 and one of the first Intel Senior Fellows in 2001. He has participated in more Intel keynotes than any other Intel presenter, and has four important patents with his name stamped to them: a data processing system; a hardware scheduler/dispatcher for said data processing system; an interprocessor communication system, and a programmable I/O sequencer for use in an I/O processor.

Rattner will step down from his position with Intel Labs, and report to Intel's President, Renée James, in the meantime. It has worked out well, as his departure is straight away, with Intel stating that a "pressing family matter" has happened, and he needs to take an unspecified amount of personal leave from Intel. Upon his return, he will be an a non-officer role.

Google continue to impress, where they're offering applications to individuals who want to help out with their Google Maps coverage: "If you're a tourism board, non-profit, university, research organization, or other third party who can gain access and help collect imagery of hard to reach places, you can apply to borrow the Trekker and help map the world."

The Trekker sounds like a great idea, especially for those who love to travel and have special places around the world that are hard to access, so that they can personally share them with the world. The Trekker is quite the backpack, which weighs in at a back-breaking 42 pounds. Google have mapped it out in detail:

The Trekker is operated by an Android device and consists of 15 lenses angled in a different direction so the images can be stitched together into 360-degree panoramic views. As the operator walks, photos are taken roughly every 2.5 seconds. Our first collection using this camera technology was taken along the rough, rocky terrain of Arizona's Grand Canyon.

Jumping over to the UK for this piece, where Microsoft have lost a trademark case over their branding for cloud storage service SkyDrive. The ruling, which covers both the UK and EU, stated that Microsoft infringed on British Sky Broadcasting's trademark of the Sky brand with SkyDrive.

The ruling saw that it is possible for consumers to confuse the two brands, somehow. Sky, from BSkyB, offers their satellite broadcasting service, mobile apps and streaming to customers, and previously a cloud storage product but it fell under the name of Sky Store & Share. Microsoft have of course thrown in a counterclaim to invalidate four Sky trademarks "on the grounds of descriptiveness for cloud storage services."

Samsung have done quite well for themselves over the last couple of years, fighting against the near-invincible iPhone. How does it compare to Apple in regards to phone subsidies, something Apple usually have the most control over?

Samsung are actually out and ahead, according to market research firm ABI Research and their latest report. They've said that the average implied carrier subsidy for a Samsung smartphone in the US is around 84%. What this means is that phone carriers cover 84% of the up-front costs of a Samsung phone when a consumer buys one on a contract.

The carrier then makes the money back on the two-year contract you've just signed through various fees and monthly charges. HTC see a subsidy of around 80%, with the iPhone sitting at 74%. ABI analyst, Stuart Carlaw, says: "Samsung continues to squeeze its competitors at every turn. The Samsung [Galaxy S4] is now considered on a par with Apple's iPhone 5. Coupled with better subsidy, the breadth of its device portfolio, increasingly savvy marketing, and its excellence in channel execution, it is little wonder Samsung is dominating the mobile handset market from top to bottom."

Well, DirectX 11.2 is coming folks, and it will be exclusive to Windows 8.1 and Xbox One. Microsoft have confirmed the news, with the new iteration of Microsoft's software including tiles resources, which will allow developers to cram more detail into our games, and much more.

DirectX 11.2 is built to use both system RAM and graphics RAM to store textures, with Microsoft's Antoine Leblond saying that the tiled resources will see DirectX 11.2-based games have much better resolution of textures displayed in-game. Leblond used a live example, showing off a demo that used 9GB of texture data that was held in system RAM compared to graphics RAM.

This is great for PC gamers, but it also means gamers will be looking at a new OS once again. Microsoft are doing it strangely, too, as they won't be offering DirectX 11.2 to Windows 8 - so it looks like Windows 8 is done and dusted for if you're a gamer. Glad I haven't made the switch yet.

If you haven't heard about the NSA's PRISM program yet, you really are behind in current events - and I suggest you check out the countless pieces we've all written on it here at TweakTown. Now we have The Washington Post unveiling a heap of new slides about the NSA's PRISM program, as shown below, or here.

The new slides give us a much better look into just how much, and how far this data collection goes. It also includes information on how an NSA analyst requests information from a particular company, the number of current surveillance targets in PRISM's database, as well as the dates the big players on the Internet began participating.

As you can see above, there are some serious companies involved, and they're taking everything. This includes e-mail, video, VoiP, file transfers, social networking details and more. Pretty much anything that is done electronically by any human being on Earth, is recorded by this program. Every company that matters is on there - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and more.

My fondest memories as a kid growing up was growing up through the network area of connecting PC's together for some Quake, Duke Nukem, Command & Conquer and good old file sharing - but those days could be ending in Sweden, where there is now a "LAN party tax".

From now on, organizers of LAN parties will have to pay a fee of up to $5,000 so that they can receive a "permit" that will allow them to connect together PC's or gaming consoles. The ruling was made legal by the Gambling Board, who are the supervisory authority for gaming and lottery and in accordance with the liberal government's revised slot machine regulation of last year.

Now video games fall under this umbrella, and LAN gamers and organizers are only going to suffer. General Counsel at the Gaming Board, Johan Rohr, has said that "in the eyes of the law, these are slot machines." Not only will the LAN organizers be slapped with a fee for the "permit", but they could also be up for paying extra for an inspection fee if the Gambling Board decide to check the party out.

We've been on m.2, or NGFF (Next Generation Form Factor) watch since Computex earlier this month and we've finally found a notebook/ultrabook with an NGFF option. The Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E431 is the first of its kind, at least the first we've actually found.

The options list is very limited at this time. You either order their $50 24GB NGFF SSD for cache or you don't. The description is pretty light as well. We've already ran a few tests on ADATA NGFF drives, one with a JMicron controller and another with an LSI SandForce controller.

It's not much but it's a start. Next week a package arrives with new tools for measuring performance of NGFF products and at that time we'll have everything we need to write a proper review of the new ADATA NGFF SSD's.

BlackBerry reported its earnings and sales figures today. Unfortunately for the company, those numbers were lower than expectations. Because of this underwhelming performance, BlackBerry shares declined by over 27 percent today. The price per share for BlackBerry now sits at around $10.46, or the lowest they have been since November of last year.

Many analysts expected BlackBerry to sell around 3.5 million BB10 devices this quarter. Instead, the company managed to sell just 2.7 million. To put this figure in perspective, Nokia sold nearly double the amount of devices as BlackBerry, which still isn't saying much. BlackBerry sat at an operating loss of $84 million, or 16 cents per share. This is quite a bit better than this quarter last year in which BlackBerry lost of $500 million. Revenue was also up 9 percent to $3.1 billion.

BlackBerry still has quite a bit to do if they want to stick around. Some have called for the company to split its hardware and software business, something that the company says it isn't planning to do. Do you think BlackBerry has a chance at sticking around?

Yahoo announced today that they would be doing a Google-like summer cleaning in which they sunset older and out-of-date products. One of the most notable products to make Yahoo's sunset list is the ancient search engine AltaVista. There are many other products on list, which you can see below. Most of the product closures take place by the end of July, though two don't happen until the end of September.

Yahoo! Axis (June 28, 2013)

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