> I have to say that I am happy to see a major company saying what everyone is thinking.

Many of us are not thinking that. Many of us are thinking Apple didn't claim to have invented 3G radio, but purchased Qualcomm chips, and as the UK courts found, in licensing the technology to Qualcomm and its customers, Samsung had already "exhausted" its patent rights.

It's on the record that Samsung changed its tune on these patents in April 2011, looking for something to use to counter Apple's concerns about the wholesale appropriation of iPad trade dress (device, packaging presentation, box cover art) by Samsung's me-too tablet.

As Samsung's own quote notes, "Apple relied heavily on Samsung‘s technology to enter the telecommunications space, and it continues to use Samsung‘s technology to this day in its iPhone and iPad products. For example, Samsung supplies the flash memory, main memory, and application processor for the iPhone." Apple was happy to pay for those, just as they paid for radio chips.

Samsung now claims they want an astonishing percentage of Apple's revenue from phones for these patent rights that courts have found they'd already exhausted, even though Apple sells versions of the devices w/o 3G radios, indicating the majority of value of the device has nothing to do with Samsung's 3G even if the patent rights were not exhausted. Even aside from how much of the device value is thanks to Samsung's chip (Samsung says all of it, while even you say the UI/UX must be part of it), Samsung's percentage demand is not FRAND.

At least, this is what some people think.

> they are nothing but another company selling cellphones and tablets

Apple is not a hardware company. As someone recently put it on HN, "ALL Apples success is derived from the UI/UX side". And I'm also not sure that's true, considering the success of Macbook Air containing the same UI/UX as the rest of the Macbook line. The truth is they are a platform company, as noted in other threads here.

> "In my testing, reading the 10.8 review took approximately 128 minutes. But I walked my dog briefly in the middle."

> "At medium brightness, my iPad (3rd-generation) battery fell from 73% to 56% while I read the review on it."

I... I think I love Marco Arment.

A great way to start my day, thanks for the chuckles, Marco.

I think the headline of the article is pretty misleading as he means that Windows 8 is a catastrophe for Steam because of the Windows 8 app store. Looks like everyone's upvoting the article because they seem to think that Gabe meant that Windows 8 will be a failure.

Instead of having to go through Steam's distribution, games will have the option of going directly to the Windows 8 app store and get featured there, not to mention XBox Live coming to Windows.

Anyone know what Steam's cut for game devs is? Microsoft is charging between 20 to 30%, so Steam seems to be very worried about their revenue stream and thus supporting Linux as a hedge.

Of course the regular desktop Steam client will keep working, but not on Windows RT ARM devices. Also, doesn't the WinRT support full DirectX?

Ref. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/07/randy-pitchford-on-steam-v...

Says Pitchford, "It would be much better if Steam was its own business." If Valve spun off the content delivery system, it would also remove the perceived conflict of interest Pitchford takes umbrage with. "Steam helps us as customers, but it's also a money grab, and Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that's not totally fair," Pitchford says. "Valve is taking a larger share than it should for the service it's providing. It's exploiting a lot of small guys."

Hmmm, LG panels...

These panels were available since a few years ago on Taobao.com (China's eBay if that helps) in small quantities, and there were lots of excitement to make your own “Cinema Display” at 1/3 the price. As a big screen lover, I was also intrigued. So I did some research.

Here's the background story I heard a year or two ago from an anonymous guy claiming he's working in LG's factories in China. I didn't verify if it's true (unless I saw LG's contract with Apple, which means impossible), but it makes a lot of sense to me anyway. You have to judge by yourselves.

These 27" S-IPS (yes, not e-IPS) panels were indeed manufactured for Apple's iMacs and Cinema/Thunderbolt Displays. Apparently Apple has pretty high and tight standard (which they do, if you've ever used authentic ones) about these panels. Once in a while a production run will not meet Apple's expectation for some reason (e.g. color/brightness/contrast uniformity). So Apple rejects the faulty batch, and LG has to find some creative ways to deal with the rejects without losing too much (these are expensive panels) AND not breaking the contract with Apple.

Turned out Apple forbids LG to resell rejected 27" panels to any well-known brands in meaningful quantity. The restriction makes a lot of business sense: you don't want a major brand suddenly floods the market with comparable displays but at less than half of the price of iMacs and Cinema/Thunderbolt Displays. Especially so when you had spent a lot of money to secure the supply of such giant panels.

So what does LG do in the end? They first sort the faulty batch into two categories: the better ones that can be salvaged by LG itself, and the worse ones that have to go somewhere else. LG re-cuts the slightly better ones into smaller panels (24" and below), and re-sells these to its partners as high grade IPS panels, as this is not forbidden by the contract with Apple (only 27" ones are forbidden). And worse ones? They go to various unknown brands in small quantities (again, this is not forbidden by the contract).

My bet is that these Korean panels are from the second category.