The real point behind having a large camera is to restrict the focal depth of field. This allows you to highlight a subject in the foreground whilst blurring the background (think portrait photography). And the laws of optics aren't going to allow a pinhole camera to ever manage that, sadly.

Incidentally, the laws of optics also mean that most of these camera phones are diffraction limited around 8mp (and that's being generous). I'm not sure why more manufacturers don't stick with a decent 5mp rather than throwing away dynamic range on silly sensors packed with unnecessary pixels ...

Well, 32Gb isn't exactly acres of space these days, but I think it'll be enough for me. 16Gb definitely isn't anymore.

I do wish they'd use SD cards (ext-formatted, of course) mainly because I'd know at least some of my data was safe if my phone ever died or bricked. But I realise it's never going to happen with a Nexus, and I'm more-or-less happy to pay that price.

But the screen, camera, battery and buttons are all extras; the point is that at the core of both devices is the LG G2's mainboard with a Snapdragon 800 sitting on it. If I take my desktop box here at work and change the monitor, keyboard and mouse, it's still the same box, and that's pretty much how most of us are viewing the Nexus 5.

I see this as a good thing, mind you. LG does the low-level stuff well; they just have no idea how to make an interface (either physical or graphical) to save themselves. Mate LG's tech with Google's design sense and you've got what should be the best phone of the year.

Editing is a huge job. An education editor will spend a lot of time working on the layout of the work as well as on the writing; a trade (i.e. popular fiction/non-fiction) editor will also interact with an author at every stage of the writing process and help sculpt the finished work. Just look at how much thanks fiction authors give to their editors in their acknowledgements to get an idea.

Amongst other things, yes. Publicity is pretty vital in getting your book noticed. But I suspect most go through the major publishing houses to (a) get the services of a good editor and (b) get an monetary advance ahead of publication to support their writing.

Yes, I'm sure that publishers are making a bit more profit on ebooks than on p-books. But I'm not sure it's as much as you think it is, and most authors don't have the ready cash to be able to replace all that infrastructure and support through hiring freelance staff.

Well, at least with linux we have the choice to switch to whatever we want :)

Fair enough. Personally, I like that behaviour (I have so many windows open all the time that I'd never have any space for a description left in a taskbar if I had one (hell, I often have so many PDFs open at once that even when they do their expose-thing I can't find the window I want ...) But I can see why it would irritate. FWIW, I believe the latest incarnation of Unity allows you to scroll on the dock icon to cycle through the windows of that app (but since I haven't upgraded from 12.10, I can't verify this ...)

Actually, you can do this one -- just middle-click on a dock icon to launch a new instance (the middle-click-opens-new-window paradigm is standard in many apps, so it shouldn't be a surprise). It's a minor point, though.

I guess I'm lucky/unlucky in that Unity fits my brain absolutely perfectly -- it's by far my favourite WM ever (and I've used pretty much every WM that was ever written for X over the years). Both the dock and the dash make my life so much faster, it's not funny. But I agree it's not a very customisable WM (and I'm not sure why either -- Shuttleworth and his design-gurus are clearly very particular!)

Well, I agree with that too :)

With regards to your first point, I do hope that ebooks will eventually move to a DRM-free format just as has happened with digital music. But we'll see ... in the meantime, thank god it's easy to strip the DRM straight off my kindle books.

How does Unity hide your windows??

My point was simply that people shouldn't begrudge paying for ebooks ...

Personally I quite like supporting authors whose works I enjoy by buying their books. I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming ...

(Not dissing PG for a minute, incidentally, and more power to it -- but there's times when the classics don't cut it)

Am I the only person who removes DRM from their ebooks?? (I mean, seriously, this is /. -- we're supposed to enjoy this sort of challenge!) A few google searches will tell you how to do it for most popular formats, and then you can give the book to your friends without issue.

What we should be pushing for is DRM-free ebooks at purchase, of course. A switch from DRM to DRM-free formats eventually happened with music files so I have every hope that it will happen with ebooks as well.

Dunno ... a nexus 7 is pretty light. Personally, the reason I still use a kindle is because of the battery life. If tablets ever ran for a couple of months without needing a recharge then I might consider swapping.

Thankfully, neither a kindle nor a 7" tablet is particularly bulky or heavy, so when I travel I carry both.

Um, I think reading novels (and non-fiction books) is the market. E-readers obviously can't replace reference works that you need to jump around randomly in -- page turns are far too slow on e-Ink.

Why on earth would you need any better font rendering than freetype happily provides?

Not to split hairs, but an anecdote is very much a single point of data.

I think you were looking for "the plural of anecdote isn't data", which isn't quite the same thing ... :)

Maybe so, but it seems silly in retrospect. That original Mac changed everything -- there just wasn't much software for it in 1985.