In theory, yes, there are people who won’t buy your book if it’s not in the ideal format for their preferred reader. But that’s theoretical money you might make if everything is perfect. 

But if you don’t ship, NOBODY buys. NOBODY gets your fix. You get no money.

Compare those two options: fewer sales (hypothetically) vs. no sales at all (proven fact).

Labels: business, email, table stakes

From the Tim Cook talk at the Goldman Sachs Conference, as transcribed by iMore:

And y'know, for everyone at Apple, we're all there to make great products, and really enrich peoples' lives, and we believe in leaving the world better than we found it. And so, along those lines, our greatest contribution to society will always be through our products, because we can empower people to do some incredible things there, but we also put our energy into a program called ConnectEd, and are working with the administration on bringing our technology to kids in very underserved schools that desperately need technology.

We partnered with the Global Fund, with a focus on eliminating the transmission of AIDS from mother to child, made a huge — we're up over a hundred million dollars in donations here, and this saves millions of lives.

...

And just today, we're announcing our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious project ever: We are building — we're partnering with First Solar — to build a solar farm in Monterey County, so not too far from here. It's 1300 acres. It's enough power for almost 60,000 California homes. ...

And I think, just to make this point, because I know this is a financial conference, and I'm sure some of you are interested in, well, "Is that a good use of funds or not," and, y'know: quite frankly, we are doing this because it is right to do, but you may also be interested to know that it's good financially to do it. We expect to have a very significant savings because we have a fixed-price for the renewable energy, and there's quite a difference between that [renewable energy] price and the price of the brown energy. And so we're thrilled to continue on this course of doing things that really leave the world better than we found it.

Emphasis mine, of course.

Let's not beat around the bush -- Tim Cook sees himself (via Apple) as much more than a CEO of a successful company. He sees being CEO of Apple as the chance to be a corporate savior. He wants to solve the world's problems, and, bless his heart, make a buck while doing it.

And you know what? Good for him. If you're sitting atop the company with the largest market cap in the world (ironically and tellingly beating out Exxon/Mobil for the crown), the only one whose culture's really not worried about answering to shareholders worried about tomorrow's profits, and you're driven to push that money for real, significant change, good heavens, kudos for you. It worries me that the Jobsian reality distortion field crops up a little -- has Apple really saved millions of lives with a hundred million dollars of AIDS donations? No. No, you haven't. To even imply that you have is, at best, horrendous marketing bluster. But let's stipulate Cook wants to find the overlap between profit and the ability to do good.

And man, to think about a company looking to do good with "first world problems" blows my mind. Gates didn't start doing Good with a capital G until he cashed out, didn't he? (If he started earlier, I'm not giving him enough credit. Looks like he did, but look at how Gates' Good work is separate from profit -- this really is Cook's trick.) And for Gates to start with issues like malaria, where a few bucks really can save a life, is brilliant. I've taken a few bucks of Fansidar and had the malaria beasties go away.

But malaria and water and some of the Gates' Foundation's other initiatives aren't where you can get a company to do the most good. If malaria was a profit-making enterprise, pharmaceuticals would've already jumped in and treated it. (This is far from a condemnation of Gates! Selfish sacrifice is A Good Thing, but that has to come from somewhere. Profit-driven Good is simply another, sustainable way to get a different sort of Good done.)

So, in a fairly Deleuzian move, Cook is going to find the intersection of capital and Good. It can happen with energy. More importantly, it can happen, as Tesla shows us, with cars.

Short of electric cars powered by coal plants, I can't think of anything much worse for the environment, once you multiply pollution by population, than cars powered by internal combustion engines burning gasoline. Can you imagine how much cleaner the world would be if just the cars in the US went to clean power? If just the commuter cars?

Think about this. I remember reading a few years back when interest rates on new cars were about zero that just getting new cars onto the road and the old ones off helped make us significantly cleaner. We weren't even buying cars with better MPG, just ones that burned more cleanly.

The pollution caused by gasoline powered commutes is mind-boggling, and the technology for replacing them is finally here. And so is profit. And that makes this not just the right thing to do, but the Right Thing for Tim Cook's Apple to do with its capital.

As many have already noted, Apple knows a thing or two about batteries. It knows something about software. And it certainly knows about designing something end users want. If you can combine these skills with a new proficiency for creating car-sized hardware, well, maybe the "BMW of computers and smartphones" can become the BMW of battery-powered cars too.

Labels: apple, ethics, gates, hats of money, pollution

The relationship with Superfish is not financially significant; our goal was to enhance the experience for users.  We recognize that the software did not meet that goal and have acted quickly and decisively.

Labels: fail, lenovo, windows

So let's have fun with Perl variable scoping.

sub spam {
    my $mySpam = "my spam";
    our $ourSpam = "our spam";
    local $localSpam = "local spam";

    print "mySpam: " . $mySpam;
    print "ourSpam: " . $ourSpam;
    print "localSpam: " . $localSpam;

    spam2();
}

sub spam2 {
    print "mySpam: " . $mySpam;
    print "ourSpam: " . $ourSpam;
    print "localSpam: " . $localSpam;
}

spam();
print "mySpam: " . $mySpam;
print "ourSpam: " . $ourSpam;
print "localSpam: " . $localSpam;

Results:

mySpam: my spam
ourSpam: our spam
localSpam: local spam
mySpam: 
ourSpam: our spam
localSpam: local spam
mySpam: 
ourSpam: our spam
localSpam:


----------------
*** WARNINGS ***
----------------
Use of uninitialized value $mySpam in concatenation (.) 
    or string at C:\tmp\temp.pl line 14.
Use of uninitialized value $mySpam in concatenation (.) 
    or string at C:\tmp\temp.pl line 20.
Use of uninitialized value $localSpam in concatenation (.) 
    or string at C:\tmp\temp.pl line 22.

What's not to like about Perl scoping? Weird, weird language.

Pretty good summary at this SO answer that boils down to...

• my is the most restrictive. Exists only between the nearest containing brackets.
• local additionally gets shared with anything called within the nearest containing brackets.
• our gets pushed everywhere within the script or module context (including things that import your module).

Mostly I'm just happy how well, relatively speaking, PerlRunner is working as a Perl !IDE. I really should take the time to integrate the syntax aware textbox from the CodeProject rather than continuing to hack away to get code editing behaviors in this one (like autoindent, faux tab deletion, and block tabbing). Honestly, his text box has everything, it appears: code folding, export to HTML, lazy-loading, column selection, even autocomplete if you set it up.

But sometimes it's fun to teach yourself to fish a little.

Labels: noteToSelf, perl

What shortcut keys can I use in Remote Desktop Connection?

I feel pretty stupid that I only learned Ctrl-Alt-End in the last few months, and Alt-Home for the Windows key *today*. That's sad. You can even access the tiny menu that belongs to each window through Alt-Delete. For a guy who hits Alt-Space, E, K as many times as I do (to start copying from a cmd.exe window), you'd think I would've been to this party a little earlier.

Labels: noteToSelf, windows

I like, obviously enough, "Single Page" viewing in pdf readers. But how do I get that in Word?

Googling for a "single page" setting in Word would be a mistake, I've found. What you're really looking to do, in Word's parlance, is zoom to the whole page. If you have a little less or more than a whole page on your screen, it'll start getting creative when you hit page up and page down, which stinks. But if you zoom to exact page size, it'll behave as if you were viewing as a single page in your favorite pdf viewer, even if you resize the window.

On most Words I've used, from the 90s on up, you can get to this setting by hitting `Alt-V` then `Z`, the selecting "Whole page".

Labels: noteToSelf, Word

From StatCounter as recounted by Gruber:

Interesting results from Yahoo’s deal to serve as the default web search for Firefox:

StatCounter has also run a special report on US search engine usage by Firefox users only. Yahoo-on-Firefox usage in the US increased from 9.9% in November 2014 to 28.3% in January. Over the same period Google-on-Firefox usage in the US fell from 81.9% to 63.9%.

There's no way that lasts. I wonder what percentage is permanent.

Firefox hijacked my search bar at some point in the recent past, and after trying a single search, I was setting Google as the default search engine, peeved at the audacity of the sinking Mozilla ship to change my setting without asking. Maybe on that box I'd never swapped from Google as my default, but I certainly have played around with Bing on other Firefox installs and quickly gone back to Google.

Other folks will probably go more than a single search before getting upset enough to learn how to swap their engine, but eventually they'll notice Yahoo ain't as good as what they had before, and ask their tech-savvy friends to swap them back.

I hope. Man, can you believe it if 19% of Firefox users, already probably a slightly above-the-mean group of techies, just don't care, and figure the default search engine is always good enough?

More telling is probably, if Firefox hijacked everyone like they did me, that over 70% of Firefox users immediately swapped back to Google.

Labels: firefox, Google, yahoo

>Traditionally, visudo opens the /etc/sudoers file with the "vi" text editor. Ubuntu, however, has configured visudo to use the "nano" text editor instead.

I know `vi` isn't particularly accessible, and there were more than a few times `vi` popped up when I was writing a usenet post or composing an email *years* ago and I had to ask how to write and quit, but isn't making nano the default for a command named `visudo` taking things a little too far? I mean, if you can't google `:wq!` and you're editing sudoers, well, I think your box is in trouble.

Labels: linux