Joel Spolsky is always an entertaining read - he's started a series on How to find Great Developers:

"The corollary of that rule—the rule that the great people are never on the market—is that the bad people—the seriously unqualified—are on the market quite a lot. They get fired all the time, because they can’t do their job. Their companies fail—sometimes because any company that would hire them would probably also hire a lot of unqualified programmers, so it all adds up to failure—but sometimes because they actually are so unqualified that they ruined the company. Yep, it happens."

Genius.

Joel doesn't take into account the fact that people can get a little bored with what they do and decide to move on - then again if they were truly passionate about what they did in the first place they'd stick around.

I guess SGI were going down the drain anyway but its still a shame to see them turn into YALV (Yet Another Linux Vendor) - SGI To Drop MIPS, Irix, Moves to Itanium, Linux.

I guess there problems came as a result of over-pricing their gear, not forseeing the graphics-card revolution on the PC and their doomed foray into NT workstations.

Sigh.

I quite liked IRIX.

And then there were three - Solaris, AIX and HP-UX . . .

A couple of useful tools and tips -

Useful to prevent people getting carried away with permissions - Remove the security tab using group policy

A simple script to locate files which arent work related. Useful to discover where all your precious disk space has gone.

Nifty free tool from Stardock - Bootskin lets you customise the Windows XP boot 'animation'. Handy if you decide to add some extra branding to your corporate hardware (esp. laptops which seem to get nicked with frightening regularity).

One of the few times ArsTechnica has given out a 'X' - check out their review of the new Blutooth enabled Mindstorm from Lego (retails for $400NZ - I need to start a Paypal donation fund ;-)

Certainly come a long way since I played with my first set back in the 70's - I think it might have been either Set 460 Rescue Unit or Set 360 Lunar Lander.