Have seen jobs where PhD is "required". (Many data scientists tend to push this view as they feel it protects them and gives them elevated status).
Am also in the middle of training a group of future data scientists. The company is having issues hiring, and believe it is easier to train SME's in data science than the reverse.
First, Leanpub allows you to simultaneously publish on Amazon or anything else if you wish. So... If that's what you want to do, you can.
I choose not to publish on Amazon because I have philosophical reasons for not wanting to do business with them. As it is my lifestyle hobby, I needn't worry about leaving money on the table. But if this was my business, that might be important.
This sponsoring is cool. I wonder if they would work with self-published books.
Writing a book is a huge effort (I'm the author of a couple Python books, one of which is on the current Python Humble Bundle). From speaking with (many) other Python authors, most would do better financially self-publishing. There are few titles that sell very well from publishers (they do 2nd, and 3rd versions), but these would probably do even better if they were self-published.
Of course, there are other reasons for publishing. (People really want their name on an animal book). One of those reasons is that a book is a really good business card. This is especially useful for consultants or when looking for a job. "Why yes, I do know about ...., in fact, I wrote a book on it".
I could blame quite a bit of my business (I do consulting and corporate training) on writing books.
Probably not. The marketing programs people who are mostly the ones paying for these things are mostly looking for predictable content from the publishers who do this sort of thing regularly.
I like Divvy, too. I wonder how hard it would be to snap Divvy's GUI overlay onto these Linux tools. I frequently want to arrange windows not just in halves of the screen, but in thirds. I find that gets cumbersome with keyboard shortcuts alone.
i used divvy for one thing: making a window take up the full screen. on my laptop, i dont ever want to use half a screen... or at least i dont think i do. so dumb that i need to use divvy for this one thing. or maybe i dont? havent checked in forever.
It's rather limited - make window fill quarter/half screen, make window fill whole screen, move window to next monitor - but it's very easy to configure, and supports XQuartz windows.
