Artists also tour for two completely different - to get known and to make money once they have an audience.
All of the acts in the BBC article have careers that are least two decades long. Madonna, Bowie and U2 could never release another record and still make a sizeable income from their back catalogs. So the BMW analogy is especially true - these are extremely well known artists.
On the other hand, lesser known artists often tour while making very little money - their goal is just to get an audience and hopefully pay for the trip. A good example of this is the Magic Numbers. I saw them here in the U.S. for $15 in a club that holds about 300 people. In the U.K., they sell out large venus at more than double that price. Why? Because in the U.K., the Magic Numbers already have several top 20 hits. In the U.S., they're still only known to music afficiandos. However, by getting in front of U.S. audiences, they have a chance to break into a much larger market. And FWIW, the Magic Numbers put on a great show in that little club.
I read the article and had the same "meh" reaction as well. There's really nothing about porn as a business - I assume there is some actual reason for entertaining lavishly at one of these conventions. The article makes a brief mention of business connections, but doesn't really go into how they work.
Porn jokes aside, I'm kind of interested in how that business actually works. Does Jones generate all of his own content? Does he license content from other providers? How does he handle distribution of physical inventory? How do contracts with stars work? How does he deal with credit card fraud? There actually could be a business story behind this. WSJ just decided to say that porn is naughty and pornographers have to live in secrecy. Ho-hum.
Actually, it's not as great a job as you think. Since the female stars are the name draws, they pretty much pick who they will work with. Male performers make less than the female actors for the same amount of time on camera.
Interestingly, Viagara has changed the industry a great deal. Where before they'd hire any ugly shmoe who could become "camera ready" on demand, Viagara has made that qualification less important. Now, male performers have to look good...and be willing to take double or more the recommended dose of Viagara.
I guess all that Viagara is tax-deductible though...
Well, at my Fortune 500 employer, 2/8 folks on my team telecommute full-time from out of state and one guy works at home in the morning then comes in for the afternoon. However, telecommuters have to start out full time on-site; no one can telecommute until they've worked for the company for at least 6 months. Also, telecommuting limits some opportunities for growth - you might be a technical lead as a telecommuter, but you won't be a project lead. Managers are all on-site.
Now, we're located in a smaller job market and frequently have to hire folks from out of town if we want experienced people. Flexibility in things like telecommuting and leave gives us a slight edge, especially when the gross salary won't be as much as in a larger market.
Games are just like any other form of entertainment (ie music and movies) when it comes to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sells to the lowest common denomination of tastes. If you buy more than a half dozen CDs a year or buy DVDS for a reason other than keeping the kids quiet for two hours, you're not shopping at Wal-Mart for entertainment. However, when Mom or Grandma need to buy a game for a birthday, Wal-Mart is probably a closer drive. Also, they don't want a hundred titles to choose from.
However, this lowest common denominator goes to Wal-Mart every week for everything from sweat socks to jars of pickles. Having a product in a Wal-Mart means that thousands of pairs of feet pass by it every day.
As pointed out in the article, the mug "breaks"...at least part of it does. However, the coffee doesn't spill. I'm not sure how likely I would be to finish my coffee in a mug that has bits of broken ceramic hanging off of it (though some mornings, it's a real possiblity). Beer on the other hand...well, the very idea of split beer...I... just...can't... talk about it.
Coffee and beer drinkers aside, I wonder if a design that that could be used to transport hazardous or toxic liquids.
I could not agree more. I started playing with friends who were racing up levels. I tried to keep up, but got tired of staying up late at night and plowing precious weekend time into the game. Once they levelled up past me so that I couldn't play with them, I bailed on that character then suspended my account.
I've since rerolled a new character with a friend who's restarted the game. For us, it's a high tech "bowling night". We get one once or twice a week and kill monsters. It's fun and casual. Sometimes, we tear through monsters like they're made of wet toliet paper. Other times, we've had to run like crazy to save our hides. I hang out with him and his wife at least once every other week in RL, but this gives us a chance to have fun together without going out. We each do a little crafting from time to time, but mostly, we play to enjoy the challenge of the game and chat together.
The least fun we've had is when a high level character has dragged us through a dungeon - at that point, the game seems like a chore that you're trying to get through. The idea of "getting more stuff" seems absurd to me. Grinding in the game to get some small material rewards resembles work in RL just a little too much.
The best thing you can learn from the game is to enjoy the ride and make some friends along the way. You could even apply that to real life I suppose.
If you think about it from an undergraduate perspective, students qualified to be nurses (science intensive) are similar to students qualified to be other technical graduates. One difference is that there are more likely to be female peers in a nursing program than a technology program. Depending on how far a nursing student pursues her studies, there are some very technical fields in nursing. Outside of nursing, there are many fields in medical technology that attract women as well.
Also, nursing has become a field that is very welcoming of women who want to spend time raising their children. Demand for RNs and higher is so strong that most hospitals will hire a nurse to work as many or as few hours as she wishes. Most IT jobs are not that flexible, especially when a part/flex time female employee may be competing for advancement with a full-time male employee. Development is especially crazy with its intense bursts of work to meet deadlines.
During a round of layoffs at my employer, one of our Unix admins decided to leave to become a nurse. At the height of the outsourcing frenzy, she figured that nursing care was pretty hard to offshore. Given the rapidly aging baby boom generation and their care requirements, I'd probably encourage a young woman or young man to look at nursing or medical technology rather than IT for job security.
Having used Excel for over a dozen years, I'm still saddened by how few folks use it for more than a poor man's database. Even basic mathematical tasks - making a budget, figuring out the total cost of a purchase - escape most people. The features covered in the book are truly powerful, but probably too complex for over 90% of Excel's userbase.
I was a software trainer for five years and I ran into many adult students whose lack of math skills kept them from using many of Excel's features. Now, for students without college degrees, I didn't assume too many math skills. However, even folks with four-year degrees would shock me. One time as I was showing students how to use the Auto-Sum tool, one student asked me if there was an "auto-percent" tool.
I was puzzled, "Do you mean formatting percentages? We'll cover that later in the class".
"No, my boss asked me to add up some numbers and then show the percent each one is of the total. Is there a tool for that?"
"Um, you mean the division operator?" I then proceeded to show her how she could divide the individual numbers against the total to get their share of the total. It wasn't a bad question, since it let me show the rest of the class how to combine formulas (which they had learned earlier) and functions. The scary thing is that the student had just graduated that past spring with a degree in finance.
Hmmm, the idea of computer education being like driver education actually sounds good to me. Focus on what it takes to operate it safely (basic security), the rules of the road (online etiquette) and some basic maintenance (backing up data, file management, etc).
On the other hand, I think about the Herculean levels of serenity that it must take to be a drivers' ed instruction and just shudder.
Actually, many retailers can retrieve an order by credit card. While doing so isn't as secure for the retailer as a physical receipt, it does mean that the retailer can exchange a faulty product without holding the customer to task for losing a tiny piece of paper. Since a customer making a return or exchange is probably unhappy, executing the transaction quickly and conveniently is very crucial.
Well, part of it is the nature of the FM spectrums. Only a fixed number of stations can broadcast over an area without starting to interfere with each other. Also, the FCC has allowed these massively powerful FM stations that hog frequencies far beyond their market. Unfortunately, once someone has a license to broadcast at a specific frequency and power, they're unlikely to give up that section of the dial.
I get a laugh from comments that just parrot the internal variable name for a getter/setter. For example -
setItemIDCode(String itemIDCode) /** sets the itemIDCode **/
Usually, you see this kind of stuff in IDE generated code. It's stupid but often not worth the effort to go back and delete.
If you name your member variables so that they're easily understood, the getters and setters should be self-evident. However, if you have a class with members that could be confused, use the comments to explain the specific fields. For example, if you have a class with fields like
getQuotedPrice getAdjustedPrice
new developers might not know the business differences between the fields and end up misusing them.
Back when IBM bought Lotus, Notes was a very unique platform for document databases. I wonder if they've taken the old Notes document database concept and exapanded it to XML. IBM owns so much esoteric intellectual property; you would hope they could find some interesting overlaps.
As IBM indicates in their press release, they're making sure it integrates with PHP as well.
I got several of those cameras and was disappointed with the results. Apparently, bikini clad women were not lounging around my house when I was away at work. If they had been, I would have asked them to do a litle vacuuming.
Okay, at least his dad. According to the BBC article,
Francis-Macrae, who made more than £100,000 per week from the scam, spent £28,000 on designer clothes and on learning to fly helicopters
If any of my offspring are over 18 and wandering around the house in an outfit that's more than my mortgage payment, they best get packing - quickly. Oh, and they need to get that helicopter out of the front yard - it's murder on the azaleas.
As copiously posted above,just reviews would be a very hard patent to enforce since reviews are essentially a type of moderated message board - a very old concept for computer systems. Also, as the parent post points out, Amazon ties reviews to three other components-
*Prompting a customer who has made a purchase to post a review. *Using the review to recommend other products to the customer. *Using the review to recommend that product to customer's who have made similar purchases.
It's the combination of reviews and previous shopping data that makes the Amazon patent unique.
Now there are software companies looking to provide this kind of services to other retailers. This ability to match customer's evaluations of products to recommendations is a fundamental advantage that Amazon has over competitors in books, music and electronics. While it doesn't put the squeeze on independent review sites, it will pre-empt other retailers from putting in social-based recommendation systems similar to Amazon's. Most online retailers are still little more than electronic catalogs. Few sites attempt to match products to consumer interests unless the site is dedicated to a sub-market - like ThinkGeek in electronics or Insound in music.
Actually, I'm just bummed that it will ruin PvP for the Horde. With Elves on the Horde side all the twelve-year-old boys will be rolling Horde. Well, at least both sides will have an even number of Elf rogues named Riddick (Ridik, Ridic, etc) running wily-nilly to get Honorable Kills.
Draenei would be...interesting...kind of like playing a moldy muppet.
...I'd agree that you're just as well off working in a text editor. However, most software projects involve using other folk's libraries - whether Microsoft's, other vendors' or just libraries created by your co-workers.
I just finished a project where a co-worker of mine worked on the business logic objects for a system and I did the presentation and screen flow. Yeah, I could've fished through his JavaDocs and designs. That would have added 10-30 minutes everytime I had to figure out a new call to one of his libraries. Instead, I could hit "." in Eclipse, pull up the methods and select the one that I needed. In the future, other folks on my team will need to support that code. Being able to receive documentation from within the editor will make their jobs much easier.
It's interesting that the project that author most enjoyed was a C program he wrote for his own amusement. Unfortunately, most of the coding folks do for money involves working with others. While working individually on a project is more fun, being able to do so is typically a luxury.
From what little I know about credit card transactions, you can't really validate a card with its bank without making a transaction. While you can make a transaction and roll it back, both of those acts would cost the website money. Also, banks don't like it when you put charges on a card that you don't intend to complete. Because of that, I'd imagine that the above post is correct. In fact, they probably don't even store the card number and revalidate it if you log in - they just keep a flag stating that you at one time did give them a possibly valid card.
What tickles me so much is that something so easy to do in real life (verify someone's age) is so inherently difficult to do online with computers.
The story was interesting to listen to, but I think that some of the scientists quoted in the story over-estimate how "real" most players view the game. Several talked about players' strong emotional attachments to their characters and how the game was a part of their lives. Howevever, I don't think all players have the same level of attachment - there's a scale between serious role playing and viewing it as "just a game" or "just a piece of software". I think many of the players who "infected" the major cities would be on the "just a game" side of the scale- they figured out how they could take a combination of particular game features and cause something unforeseen to happen. They knew that all they were doing was decrementing a value in a data structure - not harming a living being.
If anything, it'd be interesting to see if infections ever happened on the Role Playing servers at all - since intentionally infecting your home town would essentially make you a traitor if you're role playing.
I'd agree that you want to do some reading outside programming but related to the industry you're working in. Outside of technical knowledge, you can advance your career knowing two more things - *By better understanding your industry and its current climate, you can provide technical solutions that better meet your employer's needs. If you're a contractor, your clients will appreciate it if you understand some basics about their industry. *By knowing about other players in your field, you can better identify opportunities both inside and outside your organization. Inside your company, you can better identify projects that will really affect the company (and provide you with opportunities for advancement). If you decide to change jobs, knowing your industry will let you find employers that have a strong business and may be doing things that interest you.
On the business side, CIO magazine's good (and CFO isn't bad if you work in the financial industry). While it's a little fluffy, Fast Company is both informative and entertaining. If your local paper has a well-edited business section, that can be useful as well. I also like The Economist both for it's general and business news.
I started out as a computer trainer at the time that the first in the Dummies series came out - DOS for Dummies. As much as the series is now rather overdone, I have to admit that Dan Gookin and IDG had come up with an excellent formula for regular folks to learn technology. Dummies' competition at the time were gargantuan software books by Queue and Wiley that often were padded with lengthy chapters of software esoterica. Instead, the Dummies books focused on how to get things done rather using specific software than enumerating all of the software's features. They then used a layout to make the books both readable as well as useful as a quick reference.
I think O'Reilly has picked that up some tricks in their Cookbook series as well as the Head First series to a lesser degree. Both series use layouts appropriate for their respective audiences. As others have mentioned, O'Reilly has likewise been good at focusing on the essentials of a technology.
Overall, I give kudos to anyone who can make computer technology more useful to human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
Artists also tour for two completely different - to get known and to make money once they have an audience.
All of the acts in the BBC article have careers that are least two decades long. Madonna, Bowie and U2 could never release another record and still make a sizeable income from their back catalogs. So the BMW analogy is especially true - these are extremely well known artists.
On the other hand, lesser known artists often tour while making very little money - their goal is just to get an audience and hopefully pay for the trip. A good example of this is the Magic Numbers. I saw them here in the U.S. for $15 in a club that holds about 300 people. In the U.K., they sell out large venus at more than double that price. Why? Because in the U.K., the Magic Numbers already have several top 20 hits. In the U.S., they're still only known to music afficiandos. However, by getting in front of U.S. audiences, they have a chance to break into a much larger market. And FWIW, the Magic Numbers put on a great show in that little club.
I read the article and had the same "meh" reaction as well. There's really nothing about porn as a business - I assume there is some actual reason for entertaining lavishly at one of these conventions. The article makes a brief mention of business connections, but doesn't really go into how they work.
Porn jokes aside, I'm kind of interested in how that business actually works. Does Jones generate all of his own content? Does he license content from other providers? How does he handle distribution of physical inventory? How do contracts with stars work? How does he deal with credit card fraud? There actually could be a business story behind this. WSJ just decided to say that porn is naughty and pornographers have to live in secrecy. Ho-hum.
Actually, it's not as great a job as you think. Since the female stars are the name draws, they pretty much pick who they will work with. Male performers make less than the female actors for the same amount of time on camera.
Interestingly, Viagara has changed the industry a great deal. Where before they'd hire any ugly shmoe who could become "camera ready" on demand, Viagara has made that qualification less important. Now, male performers have to look good...and be willing to take double or more the recommended dose of Viagara.
I guess all that Viagara is tax-deductible though...
Well, at my Fortune 500 employer, 2/8 folks on my team telecommute full-time from out of state and one guy works at home in the morning then comes in for the afternoon. However, telecommuters have to start out full time on-site; no one can telecommute until they've worked for the company for at least 6 months. Also, telecommuting limits some opportunities for growth - you might be a technical lead as a telecommuter, but you won't be a project lead. Managers are all on-site.
Now, we're located in a smaller job market and frequently have to hire folks from out of town if we want experienced people. Flexibility in things like telecommuting and leave gives us a slight edge, especially when the gross salary won't be as much as in a larger market.
Games are just like any other form of entertainment (ie music and movies) when it comes to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sells to the lowest common denomination of tastes. If you buy more than a half dozen CDs a year or buy DVDS for a reason other than keeping the kids quiet for two hours, you're not shopping at Wal-Mart for entertainment. However, when Mom or Grandma need to buy a game for a birthday, Wal-Mart is probably a closer drive. Also, they don't want a hundred titles to choose from.
However, this lowest common denominator goes to Wal-Mart every week for everything from sweat socks to jars of pickles. Having a product in a Wal-Mart means that thousands of pairs of feet pass by it every day.
Step 1. Collect underpants.
Step 2. Web 2.0
Step 3. Profit!
As pointed out in the article, the mug "breaks"...at least part of it does. However, the coffee doesn't spill. I'm not sure how likely I would be to finish my coffee in a mug that has bits of broken ceramic hanging off of it (though some mornings, it's a real possiblity). Beer on the other hand...well, the very idea of split beer...I ... just...can't... talk about it.
Coffee and beer drinkers aside, I wonder if a design that that could be used to transport hazardous or toxic liquids.
I could not agree more. I started playing with friends who were racing up levels. I tried to keep up, but got tired of staying up late at night and plowing precious weekend time into the game. Once they levelled up past me so that I couldn't play with them, I bailed on that character then suspended my account.
I've since rerolled a new character with a friend who's restarted the game. For us, it's a high tech "bowling night". We get one once or twice a week and kill monsters. It's fun and casual. Sometimes, we tear through monsters like they're made of wet toliet paper. Other times, we've had to run like crazy to save our hides. I hang out with him and his wife at least once every other week in RL, but this gives us a chance to have fun together without going out. We each do a little crafting from time to time, but mostly, we play to enjoy the challenge of the game and chat together.
The least fun we've had is when a high level character has dragged us through a dungeon - at that point, the game seems like a chore that you're trying to get through. The idea of "getting more stuff" seems absurd to me. Grinding in the game to get some small material rewards resembles work in RL just a little too much.
The best thing you can learn from the game is to enjoy the ride and make some friends along the way. You could even apply that to real life I suppose.
If you think about it from an undergraduate perspective, students qualified to be nurses (science intensive) are similar to students qualified to be other technical graduates. One difference is that there are more likely to be female peers in a nursing program than a technology program. Depending on how far a nursing student pursues her studies, there are some very technical fields in nursing. Outside of nursing, there are many fields in medical technology that attract women as well.
Also, nursing has become a field that is very welcoming of women who want to spend time raising their children. Demand for RNs and higher is so strong that most hospitals will hire a nurse to work as many or as few hours as she wishes. Most IT jobs are not that flexible, especially when a part/flex time female employee may be competing for advancement with a full-time male employee. Development is especially crazy with its intense bursts of work to meet deadlines.
During a round of layoffs at my employer, one of our Unix admins decided to leave to become a nurse. At the height of the outsourcing frenzy, she figured that nursing care was pretty hard to offshore. Given the rapidly aging baby boom generation and their care requirements, I'd probably encourage a young woman or young man to look at nursing or medical technology rather than IT for job security.
Having used Excel for over a dozen years, I'm still saddened by how few folks use it for more than a poor man's database. Even basic mathematical tasks - making a budget, figuring out the total cost of a purchase - escape most people. The features covered in the book are truly powerful, but probably too complex for over 90% of Excel's userbase.
I was a software trainer for five years and I ran into many adult students whose lack of math skills kept them from using many of Excel's features. Now, for students without college degrees, I didn't assume too many math skills. However, even folks with four-year degrees would shock me. One time as I was showing students how to use the Auto-Sum tool, one student asked me if there was an "auto-percent" tool.
I was puzzled, "Do you mean formatting percentages? We'll cover that later in the class".
"No, my boss asked me to add up some numbers and then show the percent each one is of the total. Is there a tool for that?"
"Um, you mean the division operator?" I then proceeded to show her how she could divide the individual numbers against the total to get their share of the total. It wasn't a bad question, since it let me show the rest of the class how to combine formulas (which they had learned earlier) and functions. The scary thing is that the student had just graduated that past spring with a degree in finance.
Hmmm, the idea of computer education being like driver education actually sounds good to me. Focus on what it takes to operate it safely (basic security), the rules of the road (online etiquette) and some basic maintenance (backing up data, file management, etc).
On the other hand, I think about the Herculean levels of serenity that it must take to be a drivers' ed instruction and just shudder.
Actually, many retailers can retrieve an order by credit card. While doing so isn't as secure for the retailer as a physical receipt, it does mean that the retailer can exchange a faulty product without holding the customer to task for losing a tiny piece of paper. Since a customer making a return or exchange is probably unhappy, executing the transaction quickly and conveniently is very crucial.
Well, part of it is the nature of the FM spectrums. Only a fixed number of stations can broadcast over an area without starting to interfere with each other. Also, the FCC has allowed these massively powerful FM stations that hog frequencies far beyond their market. Unfortunately, once someone has a license to broadcast at a specific frequency and power, they're unlikely to give up that section of the dial.
If you name your member variables so that they're easily understood, the getters and setters should be self-evident. However, if you have a class with members that could be confused, use the comments to explain the specific fields. For example, if you have a class with fields likenew developers might not know the business differences between the fields and end up misusing them.
Back when IBM bought Lotus, Notes was a very unique platform for document databases. I wonder if they've taken the old Notes document database concept and exapanded it to XML. IBM owns so much esoteric intellectual property; you would hope they could find some interesting overlaps.
As IBM indicates in their press release, they're making sure it integrates with PHP as well.
BTW, the register has some good coverage on the new XML integration.
I got several of those cameras and was disappointed with the results. Apparently, bikini clad women were not lounging around my house when I was away at work. If they had been, I would have asked them to do a litle vacuuming.
They've also negotiated via press-release regarding their potential merger with Warner Music.
0 45,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,16781,1644
Okay, at least his dad. According to the BBC article,
Francis-Macrae, who made more than £100,000 per week from the scam, spent £28,000 on designer clothes and on learning to fly helicopters
If any of my offspring are over 18 and wandering around the house in an outfit that's more than my mortgage payment, they best get packing - quickly. Oh, and they need to get that helicopter out of the front yard - it's murder on the azaleas.
As copiously posted above,just reviews would be a very hard patent to enforce since reviews are essentially a type of moderated message board - a very old concept for computer systems. Also, as the parent post points out, Amazon ties reviews to three other components-
*Prompting a customer who has made a purchase to post a review.
*Using the review to recommend other products to the customer.
*Using the review to recommend that product to customer's who have made similar purchases.
It's the combination of reviews and previous shopping data that makes the Amazon patent unique.
Now there are software companies looking to provide this kind of services to other retailers. This ability to match customer's evaluations of products to recommendations is a fundamental advantage that Amazon has over competitors in books, music and electronics. While it doesn't put the squeeze on independent review sites, it will pre-empt other retailers from putting in social-based recommendation systems similar to Amazon's. Most online retailers are still little more than electronic catalogs. Few sites attempt to match products to consumer interests unless the site is dedicated to a sub-market - like ThinkGeek in electronics or Insound in music.
Actually, I'm just bummed that it will ruin PvP for the Horde. With Elves on the Horde side all the twelve-year-old boys will be rolling Horde. Well, at least both sides will have an even number of Elf rogues named Riddick (Ridik, Ridic, etc) running wily-nilly to get Honorable Kills.
Draenei would be...interesting...kind of like playing a moldy muppet.
...I'd agree that you're just as well off working in a text editor. However, most software projects involve using other folk's libraries - whether Microsoft's, other vendors' or just libraries created by your co-workers.
I just finished a project where a co-worker of mine worked on the business logic objects for a system and I did the presentation and screen flow. Yeah, I could've fished through his JavaDocs and designs. That would have added 10-30 minutes everytime I had to figure out a new call to one of his libraries. Instead, I could hit "." in Eclipse, pull up the methods and select the one that I needed. In the future, other folks on my team will need to support that code. Being able to receive documentation from within the editor will make their jobs much easier.
It's interesting that the project that author most enjoyed was a C program he wrote for his own amusement. Unfortunately, most of the coding folks do for money involves working with others. While working individually on a project is more fun, being able to do so is typically a luxury.
From what little I know about credit card transactions, you can't really validate a card with its bank without making a transaction. While you can make a transaction and roll it back, both of those acts would cost the website money. Also, banks don't like it when you put charges on a card that you don't intend to complete. Because of that, I'd imagine that the above post is correct. In fact, they probably don't even store the card number and revalidate it if you log in - they just keep a flag stating that you at one time did give them a possibly valid card.
What tickles me so much is that something so easy to do in real life (verify someone's age) is so inherently difficult to do online with computers.
The story was interesting to listen to, but I think that some of the scientists quoted in the story over-estimate how "real" most players view the game. Several talked about players' strong emotional attachments to their characters and how the game was a part of their lives. Howevever, I don't think all players have the same level of attachment - there's a scale between serious role playing and viewing it as "just a game" or "just a piece of software". I think many of the players who "infected" the major cities would be on the "just a game" side of the scale- they figured out how they could take a combination of particular game features and cause something unforeseen to happen. They knew that all they were doing was decrementing a value in a data structure - not harming a living being.
If anything, it'd be interesting to see if infections ever happened on the Role Playing servers at all - since intentionally infecting your home town would essentially make you a traitor if you're role playing.
I'd agree that you want to do some reading outside programming but related to the industry you're working in. Outside of technical knowledge, you can advance your career knowing two more things -
*By better understanding your industry and its current climate, you can provide technical solutions that better meet your employer's needs. If you're a contractor, your clients will appreciate it if you understand some basics about their industry.
*By knowing about other players in your field, you can better identify opportunities both inside and outside your organization. Inside your company, you can better identify projects that will really affect the company (and provide you with opportunities for advancement). If you decide to change jobs, knowing your industry will let you find employers that have a strong business and may be doing things that interest you.
On the business side, CIO magazine's good (and CFO isn't bad if you work in the financial industry). While it's a little fluffy, Fast Company is both informative and entertaining. If your local paper has a well-edited business section, that can be useful as well. I also like The Economist both for it's general and business news.
I started out as a computer trainer at the time that the first in the Dummies series came out - DOS for Dummies. As much as the series is now rather overdone, I have to admit that Dan Gookin and IDG had come up with an excellent formula for regular folks to learn technology. Dummies' competition at the time were gargantuan software books by Queue and Wiley that often were padded with lengthy chapters of software esoterica. Instead, the Dummies books focused on how to get things done rather using specific software than enumerating all of the software's features. They then used a layout to make the books both readable as well as useful as a quick reference.
I think O'Reilly has picked that up some tricks in their Cookbook series as well as the Head First series to a lesser degree. Both series use layouts appropriate for their respective audiences. As others have mentioned, O'Reilly has likewise been good at focusing on the essentials of a technology.
Overall, I give kudos to anyone who can make computer technology more useful to human beings.