"Business leaders need to incorporate innovation, efficiency and abandonment as a means for reaching greater success.

Jeff Bezos is not one to let dust settle on his shelves. The founder and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online reseller, routinely abandons operations and ideas that aren’t yielding their intended results. He calls these “defects,” or inefficiencies in operations. When these defects are eliminated, costs fall and result in Amazon being able to offer customers lower prices and new frills."

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"An independent developer has created a free plug-in for the open-source MySQL database that lets users inexpensively store their data on Amazon.com Inc.'s Web storage service, S3.

Mark Atwood, a Seattle-based developer, said his plug-in would be ideal for Web-centric companies that need cheap, reliable storage -- Amazon Web Services charges 10 cents per gigabyte per month -- over fast performance."

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I have been doing a lot of reading lately.  More specifically, I have been reading a lot of IT reference books.  In fact, I venture to say that I'm probably one of the few people who ever brought a book on version control systems to the hospital while waiting for neurosurgery.  I really didn't  get much read that day, but I think I still get bragging rights!

Below are the list of IT books I'm currently reading.  Except for the book on Subversion, the other two books are more to refresh my memory and keep me up to date with the latest changes taking place in Fedora Core (Linux) as well as PHP/MySQL.  I wouldn't call any of the three books required reading, but I would say that these type of books do assist those in IT  in the areas of professional development.  Let me also give notice that the links provided to Amazon.com reference my associates account with them.

• Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion (The Pragmatic Starter Kit Series)(2nd Edition)
• Red Hat Fedora Core 6 Unleashed
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (3rd Edition) (Developer's Library)

Various online companies provide services where you embed code in your Internet pages which display ads pushing their products or products of their clients. A number of these services will use keywords on your site's pages as clues for displaying the products your visitors most likely want to see.

Amazon of course provides such a service through their associates program. Since I've been using a beta version of their code, I've seen an increase in the number of ads featuring content management systems related products. That is good news. However, every now and then, I also see a book advertised called The Art of Exotic Dancing. When you are showing your co-workers or significant other an article on this site and they see the ad about exotic dancing...how much more embarrassing can it get?

This isn't the first site that I have seen the books about exotic dancing be displayed at my site. I have also seen the ads get displayed at WebCMS Forum which is a forum I manage. (As you can also see via the link, this is also not the first time I've whined about the advertisements). I have two theories as to why Amazon may be displaying the more racy content in its advertisements: