In case you were still doubting whether or not Apple's lawsuits against Samsung were a case of 'if you can't compete, litigate', Samsung's financial results should seal the deal. The company shipped round and about 50 million smartphones, twice as many smartphones as Apple shipped. So, not only is Android doing better on smartphones than iOS, there's now also a single manufacturer outselling Apple. Oh, the next avenue for de-emphasizing this achievement has already reared its head: Samsung has a wider portfolio, and as such, the comparison isn't fair. Nonsense, of course - Volkswagen sells lots more models than, say, Mazda, but that doesn't mean you can't compare them. Maybe, just maybe, having a wide portfolio of devices to meet the various different needs of the market is simply a very good strategy. It'll be interesting to see just how much Apple can take back with the next iPhone, especially since the full potential of the Galaxy SIII hasn't been realised yet and will be accounted for in Samsung's next quarter as well. Fun, such a fight between titans. Just too bad one of the two titans plays dirty by opting for the courtroom.

Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

In agreement with Marco Arment? I shall quickly venture outside and inform myself of the possibility of catching a fleeting glimpse of an avian sus scrofa domesticus. "The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases. And I bet that's not what Apple had in mind at all." There's an issue with the Mac App Store: Apple runs the danger of chasing most serious applications away from the store. While I would personally consider this to be a big win for computing, I'm sure Apple doesn't exactly see it that way.

"Andre Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a wife, four young children and many friends. Andre made a significant contribution to personal computing history in a way few people fully realise." I indeed had no idea. It's subtle, but quite important indeed. Worth reading, and our thoughts and condolences with his family and friends.

Valve's Gabe Newall on Linux and Windows 8: "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It's a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that's true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality."

Samsung's filings in one of the cases with Apple (I lost track because I have a life) are actually pretty cool. "Samsung has been researching and developing mobile telecommunications technology since at least as early as 1991 and invented much of the technology for today's smartphones. Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung's patented technology." Another gem: "Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them."

Apple has just released Mountain Lion to the Mac App Store. For a measly $20, Lion users can move to the new release right now, and honestly, at that price, there's little reason not to for the Mac users among us. It's not a huge or massive release or anything, but if you're a fan of iOS, you're going to love all the OS bits and pieces that are being transferred to your desktop. Have fun installing, and, as always, be sure to read the only review that matters: John Siracusa's 25000 words long review (that's almost as long as the thesis I wrote to earn my master's degree, holy cripes!). I know what I'll be reading today on my brand new Nexus 7. If you can, please support Siracusa by buying the ebook version on Amazon (currently stuck in the review process, should show up any minute now). Why? Because Siracusa's kind of technology writing is something we need to cherish, because we have less and less of it.

Java (OpenJDK) version 1.6.0 Build 25 GA3 had been released for OS/2 and eComStation. This release contains the long awaited OS/2 version of the Java plugin for Mozilla, IceTea-Web 1.1.2.

"Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 third quarter ended June 30, 2012. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $35.0 billion and quarterly net profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $28.6 billion and net profit of $7.3 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 42.8 percent compared to 41.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter's revenue. The Company sold 26.0 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 28 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 17.0 million iPads during the quarter, an 84 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.0 million Macs during the quarter, a two percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 6.8 million iPods, a 10 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter."

"Though Windows 7 doesn't quite have the same experience when it comes to resolution and scaling control as OS X does - it can be a bit of a chore to get it just the way you like it - it's still quite useable on the Retina MacBook Pro's 15" 2880 x 1800 pixel screen. I recommend running Windows at full resolution with the 150 percent scaling setting - that seemed to give the best overall usability. 'Retina' class desktop displays are still a relative rarity today, so it will be some time before software developers adapt applications to best take advantage of such a resolution. In the meantime, you should have no trouble running Windows on the Retina MacBook Pro if the need arises." A look at how Windows 8 handles the display would've been nice, too.

A very detailed post at the Building Windows 8 blog about the graphics subsystem in Windows 8 - very interesting. One part stood out to me, though: "The Metro style design language is typographically rich and a number of Metro style experiences are focused on providing an excellent reading experience. DirectWrite enables great typographic quality, super-fast processing of font data for rendering, and provides industry-leading global text support. We've continued to improve text performance in Windows 8 by optimizing our default text rendering in Metro style apps to deliver better performance and efficiency, while maintaining typographic quality and global text support." All this still doesn't explain why text rendering on Metro (so not the classic desktop) had to be made as horrible as it is. Please, for the love of god, give us the option of turning ClearType's subpixel RGB optimisation back on for Metro applications. Fonts look horrible without it, which is kind of ironic given how font-heavy Metro is.

"It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens - and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way."

Linux kernel 3.5 has been released. New features include support for metadata checksums in Ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with systemtap/perf, a simple sandboxing mechanism that can filter syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Here's the full list of changes.

Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac: "It must surely be a sign of the impending apocalypse that Microsoft's operating systems have 'more taste' than Apple's. I'm referring, of course, to Apple's inexplicable use of skeuomorphic design in iOS and OS X apps, and contrasting that with Microsoft's stark avoidance of such cheesy gimmickry in the Windows 8 and Windows Phone user interfaces. A skeuomorphic design in software is one that 'decorates' the interface with fake reality - say, analog knobs or torn paper. The problem is worse than it sounds." Won't come as a surprise to anyone that I wholeheartedly agree with this one. iOS and Mac OS X are ruined by an incredibly high Microsoft BOB factor. I have no idea how - or if - Apple will address this, or if the current downward spiral is going to continue.