Open plan works well enough if you do it right. I'm very much the introvert, and I used to prefer working in my own office, but I've come around and I now prefer open plan as long as a few condifitons are met.
- Get the right people together: don't mix programmers or analysts who need to focus with people who are likely to be on the phone all day.
- Don't do hot-desking; give everyone their own desk
- Provide plenty of quiet booths for a single occupant, rooms to have meetings in, and a coffee corner away from the desks
- Promote sensible guidelines for using the office: don't hog the quiet booths as your own personal office, take heated arguments into a meeting room and long social chats to the coffee corner, be mindful of others when having a phone call, and take the longer ones into a quiet booth. Don't leave your cell phone unattended on your desk: if it rings, the penalty is to have it dunked in a cup of coffee.

By the way, there's a good reason to give senior managers their own office. These are people who will very frequently have phone calls, and have short meetings with staff, vendors or clients all the time. Giving them a place to conduct those is not only good for them but for the staff around them as well. The downside is the same one cited as a reason not to give everyone an office: you'll have far fewer spontaneous interactions with others if you're sitting in one.

Indian programming shops suffer from the same issue that our own ones do: lack of quality control. The difference between a good and a bad programmer is a factor that runs into double digits, but that doesn't do you any good if you're unable to recognize, attract, nurture and reward talented people. Most firms in the western world fail miserably at this. Why should India be any different?

Another complication is introduced with outsourcing. Before, the manager was responsible for hiring and staffing teams, and appraising their employees. That was too troublesome, so development got outsourced. Now they complain that the Indian programmers don't understand their business. Well, sitting half a world away working for a different firm tends to do that. They also express disappointment in the fact that the Indian team is about as dysfunctional als their own old team, despite assurances from Indian management that they are a highly professional shop, CMM level 5 hundred, ITIL-trained, ISO over 9000, with all the right certificates. Must be that the Indians suck at programming, right? Or maybe it's due to the fact that you thought you hired 3 FTE worth of average programmers, but you didn't get 3 FTE, you got Gupta, Lakhsmi and Pradeep. Gupta was struggling a bit, but Lakshmi did well, however she quit and joined a firm that paid better money. Pradeep is brilliant but he got moved to a different team doing a difficult project for a high level client.

There are good Indian programmers out there, and I've worked with them plenty, but through the layers between myself and the remote teams I found it hard to find the good ones and even harder to retain them. That is another hard lesson about outsourcing: if you do it, you may think you're outsourcing responsiblity and buy with it the right to scream obscenities at lying vendors who underperform, but you have also largely lost the ability to control your team, who is in it, and who gets rewarded for good work. You now rely on the vendor to do that for you, but guess what: he may have different interests at heart.

Those are all sites that I'd like to see preserved because of their historical value, not because they are sacred. Well, if the site of the Washington Monument turns out to be an exceptionally good spot for a telescope, they can have it. However if they propose to bulldoze a site with ancient cave drawings, I'd say no... but I would not object if those drawings would/could be moved and preserved.

You know what's sacriligious? Demolishing the beautiful old home down the road of here, in which 5 generations of one family have lived, just so a new highway can be built. The difference? One family isn't as politically noisy as a whole group of protesters, especially if the protesters are all from an easily identifiable minority group. In both cases we can't stop all progress just for sentimental value, but personally I feel more sorry for that family.

One could argue that demolishing the family home is just what's being done on Hawaii, but be honest: at best they are ruining the view, or tearing down a beloved site. And as much as I would like to see such views and sites preserved everywhere, it isn't always possible, and in that case the Hawaiians can suck it up just like the rest of us. Don't use religion to claim an exemption.

You're not supposed to understand their objections, just nod your head in pious assent. That's how most religions work. And in this case the protesters have a little "white guilt" to mix in, which generally goes a long way.

Have you seen the footage where it falls over? Then it hits hard, the remaining fuel sparks and it goes boom way past recovering anything but scrap metal. If they want something that's worth salvaging, it has to land smooth. Also the net wouldn't really help with the first 99%.

Looking at the cover of that Popular Science magazine, I see that they too were far ahead of their time, inventing clickbait before there even was such a thing as a "click" (on the web, at least).

Even if it happens, can they keep them there? If they have an extradition treaty with the USA, a judge could still order that a request to have them extradited would have to be honoured, asylum status notwithstanding.

Well maybe, but it sounds like the right kind of candidates aren't showing up for the interview which makes it kinda hard to give them offers. Unless they're being overly up-front and present a low and narrow salary range, I'd look into other reasons why they're not attractive enough. If they are scaring them away, be less specific and say you're ready to offer competitive terms for the right candidate. Then you might at least get the right kind of people in the door and maybe sell them on the other benefits, or if not you'll at least know what kind of pay range is necessary.

How does that work if there's multiple candidates? Do you simply hire the first one who passes the "thumbs-up" test or are you flexible enough you'll hire as many good people who shows up at the door? Most places I've worked for you get permission to hire a new person from up high, you get a round of candidates and pick one. If you give the first guy an offer, well you don't really have anything to offer the rest.

Well it was 1995, while he was still studying at the university of Helsinki working on Linux 1.x, long before the dotcom money and any serious corporate interest in Linux, while Microsoft at the time was a $50 billion dollar company. So almost the same ;)

From a user's perspective there's the applications and there's the rest, whether it's done in the kernel or in user mode is not really apparent or important, things like drivers, system daemons, windowing systems, graphics/multimedia and so on. Sometimes it's a division of labor, like pulseaudio with ALSA in the kernel or mesa with KMS in the kernel. While I know you're a practically oriented person, is there any parts where you feel that:

a) Really shouldn't be done in the kernel, but in practice we do
b) Really should be done in the kernel, but in practice we don't
c) Doesn't belong in the kernel, but if you had the time you'd like to change/improve.

The cabbies themselves already did a great job in making me want to avoid taxis (in the Netherlands). Refusing short rides, overcharging, and if you argue with them they'll put you out of their vehicle on the highway (if you're lucky) or just stab you (if you're unlucky). Sure, Uber should stick to the law, but I am hoping that we'll see a legal "2nd class" tier of cabs, like the Private Hire scheme they have over in the UK. Uberpop should fit nicely into that. I've had a few very good experiences with the service until they clamped down on it.

You'll want to avoid Paris in general when travelling by air; pick a different airport to change flights if you can. Good advice from my travel agent. If it isn't the cabbies on strike, it'll be the air traffic controllers, baggage handlers, caterers, customs officers, cleaning staff, or the guys with the lollipos guiding the planes to the terminal.

That's fine if they at least provide the goat.

Well no, not really. They're hoping to replace the base infrastructure on Linux with the open source "amdgpu" driver, but with separate open and closed source user mode drivers for OpenGL, multimedia and so on. It would get you up to release parity if all you need is a framebuffer and software fallback, but they are still planning to develop Mesa and Catalyst separately. They don't have any plans to give Intel a free high performance OpenGL engine or to let nVidia look at their game-specific optimizations.