Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive has reportedly laid off 45 people, Kotakuhas learned. The publication says those with knowledge of the situation at the studio said the layoffs only affected people at Behaviour’s Montreal, Canada studio, with those 45 affected let go last week, between January 9 and 11.
However, Kotaku notes it was also told layoffs at the company began in December. The layoffs reportedly included cuts in various departments at the studio. Last month, Behaviour Interactive announced it was working with Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games on The Casting of Frank Stone, a new single player game set in the Dead by Daylight universe.
[embedded content]
Game Informer has reached out to Behaviour Interactive PR to ask for confirmation of these layoffs and if affected employees will receive severance, and will update this story if it learns more.
The games industry will surely feel the effects of such horrific layoffs for years to come. The hearts of the Game Informer staff are with everyone who’s been affected by layoffs or closures.
CI Games, the publisher behind last year’s Lords of the Fallen and the Sniper Ghost Warrior franchise, has laid off 10 percent of its staff, as first reported by GamesIndustry.biz. The publication says its sources pointed to laid-off staff posting about the job cuts on LinkedIn, but has since received confirmation from CI Games.
It’s currently unclear how many people 10 percent of the company translates, too, considering CI Games is a publisher that also owns studios like Lords of the Fallen developer Hexworks and Sniper Ghost Warrior developer Underdog Studio.
[embedded content]
CI Games CEO Marek Tymiński told GamesIndustry.biz the following:
“To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10 percent of employees across the company,” Tymiński told GamesIndustry.biz. “We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us.”
Unsettlingly, Tymiński seems to indicate more layoffs are on the horizon, possibly referring to job cuts as “optimization.” Tymiński told GamesIndustry.biz, “Further business optimizations are being made to the organization’s pipelines and processes.”
The games industry will surely feel the effects of such horrific layoffs for years to come. The hearts of the Game Informer staff are with everyone who’s been affected by layoffs or closures.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is now available, and if you’re a fan of games like Metroid, Castlevania, or Hollow Knight, and you don’t have it on your radar, that’s probably a mistake. The game is a thrilling adventure, with plenty of excellent combat, puzzle, and traversal challenges. Once you get far enough in the game, you’ll likely encounter one of the most challenging of them all; The Impossible Climb is a late-game platforming/traversal sidequest that demands careful timing, patience, and the use of nearly all the powers you’ve earned up to that point in the story. If you want to prove your mastery of The Lost Crown, it’s the sequence you’ll want to tackle.
How To Beat The Impossible Climb In Prince of Persia:
[embedded content]
The video above is the result of dozens of earlier failed attempts, but it should give you an idea of at least one path through which you can beat the sequence.
The WordPress directory has 50k+ free plugins that were developed so you can extend a WordPress website with functions and features far beyond your imagination.
Additional thousands of WordPress plugins are available from various marketplaces.
No matter how much you might have a need for a specialized plugin or two, would you really want to spend a full workday on reseraching? Probably not.
So, what, if anything, can you do? We have an answer to that.
We tested tens of WordPress plugins and selected the 8 best WordPress free and premium plugins for a range of both popular and lesser used functions.
These plugins focus on important functionalities that you won’t typically find in a WordPress theme. They address web designer/developer needs for:
problem-free building of landing pages that catch the eye.
management and displaying of financial, commercial, scientific, statistical, and other data, as well as of substantial amounts of data.
visual storytelling that enhance UX.
automating and streamlining appointments bookings.
These 8 best WordPress plugins for 2024 are available in trial, free, or premium.
What key qualities do these top WordPress plugins have?
Support – We reviewed product development teams’ responses to problems and questions and recommended only those products whose teams have a history of answering support issues within 24 hours.
Reviews by users. We extensively read product reviews and testimonials that specified both ‘Have’ and ‘Have nots’ of these plugins.
Features – We scrutinized each plugin to ensure its advertised features would meet the goal the plugin was designed and built to satisfy.
Free version – All 8 have free versions with a large number of features.
Compatibility – We made certain each plugin was fully compatible with the latest WordPress and PHP versions, and has been updated within the past two months.
8 Best WordPress Plugins for 2024
These 8 WordPress plugins are excellent in their areas. And we have made your job easier by doing time-consuming work for you.
Below, you will read about each plugin’s key features, how their customer evaluated them, and we will give you links to test them out or find out more info for yourself.
Amelia is the best WordPress plugin for a service-oriented business looking for an automated booking system.
More than 70% of Amelia’s users agree that Amelia’s standout feature is its powerful multilingual Notifications system that enables users to seamlessly manage their appointment and event bookings via SMS, email, and/or WhatsApp messages.
Product qualities users realize once they begin using Amelia:
effortless navigation and ultramodern backend and frontend interface attributes.
the ability to tailor Amelia to meet their specific needs.
a user-friendly design that is free from unwelcome surprises together with the value inherent in transparent functionality and pricing.
A service-oriented business like the one shown in the barbershop template can take advantage of Amelia’s new and improved booking form, organize an appointment flow that best suits their business model, and receive appointment requests online 24/7.
Product rating: 4.8/5 on Captera.
Customer Insight: Pros: “Amelia is one of my favorite plugins because: 1. Easy to install and use. 2. Reliable and professional quality. 3. Full of great features – better than any others I have used. 4. Great layout, versatile and works seamlessly with clients 5. It is always updated and improved. 6. Support help and communication is fast, friendly, and excellent. 7. Not just a flash in the pan. It has been around for a long time.”
Cons: “Nothing I can think of or have had to be concerned with.”
Instant Support: Documentation, Videos on YouTube and a Discord Group.
wpDataTables is the best WordPress plugin for organizations or individuals tasked with creating tables and charts from complex and/or massive amounts of data.
wpDataTables’ key feature is its Multiple Database Connections capability. This groundbreaking feature is a data management breakthrough that allows a table to set up independent connections to MySQL, MS SQL, or PostgreSQL databases and become a versatile data hub in the process.
Product qualities users quickly become aware of:
a user interface that does not require technical ability to effortlessly create tables or charts.
wpDataTable’s blend of powerful features that handle complex data structures with finesse.
effortlessly show informative tables by seamlessly incorporating data and information sourced from diverse origins.
Brizy is the ideal WordPress website builder for those looking for a White Label solution to market their own brand.
Brizy’s standout feature is its White Label option. You can brand the Brizy builder as your own and encourage clients to create websites using “your” builder.
Product qualities users discover as they use Brizy Builder:
You will never have a problem editing in place whether you are clicking on a text, an image, or any other kind of content.
Content is never created in a disjointed sidebar, as is the case in some competing builders.
Tailored features for agencies and resellers in addition to the White Label option, include Billing, Reseller Client Management, Multi-language capabilities, and Marketing integrations.
Brizy Builder is ideal for building creative websites and landing pages in the Brizy Cloud or when used with the Brizy WordPress theme. “Petits” Brizy’s pet website template is ideal for a pet shop in addition to having a wide range of other uses.
Product rating: 4.6/5 on Trust Pilot
Customer Insight: “In many way a very satisfying pagebuilder, with a generous and fantastic free version. Especially the way of working with pictures is really nice. However, sometimes experience that Brizy is a little unstable, some things that in between do not flow as they should. But can warmly recommend it, not least for beginners.”
Support capabilities include the Brizy support manual and YouTube videos.
Slider Revolution is the best WordPress plugin for those looking to incorporate a WOW factor into their sliders without any need for coding.
Some say it’s the knockout effects for WordPress that turn them on. With others, Slider Revolution’s top feature is the one that enables them to create sliders visually. Both are right.
Revolution Slider has a host of design options for every category of user:
Web shop builders will tell you that the WooCommerce sliders are especially useful.
Businesses and small agencies find the one-page portfolio templates particularly helpful.
The images and cool scrolling effects in Slider Revolution’s mesmerizing Brewery Website slider template will tempt you to take time out for a cool one. It’s great for a wide variety of uses.
Users quickly take note of the features that allow them to easily upgrade a WordPress website visual in mere minutes.
Product rating: 4.6/5
Customer Insight:“This is a stunning tool. There are great templates that are easily modified to suit you. There’s a learning curve which should come as no surprise once you recognize its potential (and therefore yours.)I don’t know one line of code.”
Support: Slider Revolution’s support manual and YouTube videos provide instant support.
Click for a preview of the Slider Revolution plugin.
LayerSlider is the best WordPress plugin for web designers looking for an uncompromising approach to making amazing web content with gorgeous visual effects.
LayerSlider is not only for building responsive sliders and popups but is also excellent for creating more complex websites. LayerSlider’s top feature is, in fact, a scroll effect in which a hero image magically animates as visitors scroll through the page, as is the case in the Fairy Magical Company example with its scroll scene, scroll transition, and pinned layers.
With respect to templates, the Wood Sculptor website template shows a great example of LayerSlider’s capabilities.
Qualities that only its users will notice include:
A Project Editor that matches professional desktop applications in terms of performance and usability.
A complete suite of visual content creation online services without leaving the UI.
Built-in transitions and effects that can be applied instantly.
Although LayerSlider’s popup and banner-creating capabilities and popular animation features are excellent for marketing purposes, LayerSlider is “tailored” for use on any website niche.
Customer Insight: “Powerful features and a flexible slider for many effects. Makes a very professional looking slider.”
Support: A support manual comes with the package, plus built-in help for almost everything inside the LayerSlider Project Editor.
Essential Grid is the #1 WordPress gallery plugin for creating galleries guaranteed to capture visitors’ attention.
The grid skin options and 50+ unique grid skins are clearly Essential Grid’s top feature.
Users can easily plug and play these customizable templates to complete projects in no time at all, plus Essential Grid’s visual skin editor enables users to create as many skin variations as they want.
Essential grid created galleries load with a rocket-fast speed and are responsive to display the content on all devices in the most perfect way.
It’s also possible to do search engine optimization of an Essential Grid gallery using deep linking and pagination to achieve a higher ranking on Google.
Team, blog, portfolio, and You/Tube Vimeo channel stream grids are popular among target client categories. The Portfolio Grid example features a image-based portfolio grid layout with pinned text layer and hover effects.
The developers of the wildly popular Slider Revolution plugin, which also appears on this list of best plugins, created Essential Grid as well.
Product rating: 4.7/5 on Trust Pilot
Customer Insight: “It’s rare in today’s world to find support that is competent and responsive, but Theme Punch’s Essential Grid support is AMAZING!!! My issue was resolved on the first contact, and within an hour of submitting a ticket.”
Support: Look to the support manual and YouTube videos for instant support.
Web Stories helps users create powerful narratives and fast-loading full-screen experiences.
The top feature of this WordPress storytelling editor is how smoothly it blends a selection of story creation capabilities into a WYSIWYG creation tool. WebStories also provides an impressive selection of templates. Bike Shop is simple, straightforward, and also one of the most popular eCommerce themed templates.
Other popular features include even more beautiful page templates to help get story creation activities underway together with:
a visually rich and intuitive dashboard that makes it easy to navigate through the entire story creation process.
drag-and-drop capabilities designed to make composing beautiful stories as easy as possible.
access to the WordPress media library through the plugin’s dashboard.
Product qualities that Web Stories’ users discover when they begin using the plugin include:
fast loading times that keep visitors engaged and entertained.
sharing and linking stories on the open web.
tracking and measuring stories for monetization.
Product rating: 4.1/5
Customer Insight: “On our website, we personally love the web story platform! It’s SO beautiful and customizable, we can create different posts that fit our media outlet, and our public likes it a lot. It isn’t that easy to make in the beginning, but once you get it, you can produce a lot!
Tablesome is the best WordPress form automation plugin for those who need to efficiently transfer information from submitted forms into tables.
Tablesome’s top feature is easily its WordPress Automation feature which enables users to automate certain data management processes when people have submitted forms such as:
storing the form entries in a table.
saving the form entries to Google Sheet.
sending the form entries in an email.
Tablesome’s users appreciate what Workflow Automation does to make their work easier. As they become familiar with Tablesome they gain a better understanding of the tasks it can do, and also become aware of the significant reduction in the number plugins needed to carry out those tasks.
Tablesome can also be used to support building of or improving data-centric websites thanks to its integrations with MailChimp, Google Sheets, Slack, HubSpot CRM, OpenAI/ChatGPT, and WordPress.
Product rating: 4.7/5
Customer Insight:“I was searching for a simple responsive table plugin that allowed Excel file imports in the free version, and after testing all the so-called popular table plugins, I realized that none of them offered excel imports in the free version or if they did, they were not responsive. Then I found Tablesome, and it worked perfectly! Within minutes I had the table setup from the existing excel sheet. Thank you to the authors of Tablesome, and I highly recommend it to everyone!”
Support: YouTube videos and Tablesome’s user manual are best for instant support.
It’s understandable you would not need every one of them, but having one or two could add significant value to your projects. With so many free and premium WordPress plugins to select from in the 4 areas that we covere, we saved you a great amount of time.
Each of these best WordPress plugins is:
super-fast, solid, and has excellent UX.
free of restrictions or limitations within its area.
a huge time saver thanks to its prebuilt demos that make creating web projects efficient and enjoyable.
designed for looking excellent on both desktop and mobile.
And customer support for each of these plugins is on point, responsive and pro.
Check out these free and premium wordpress plugins, take them for a spin and go premium if you need the extra features.
Many electric vehicles are powered by batteries that contain cobalt — a metal that carries high financial, environmental, and social costs.
MIT researchers have now designed a battery material that could offer a more sustainable way to power electric cars. The new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials, instead of cobalt or nickel (another metal often used in lithium-ion batteries).
In a new study, the researchers showed that this material, which could be produced at much lower cost than cobalt-containing batteries, can conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. The new battery also has comparable storage capacity and can be charged up faster than cobalt batteries, the researchers report.
“I think this material could have a big impact because it works really well,” says Mircea Dincă, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT. “It is already competitive with incumbent technologies, and it can save a lot of the cost and pain and environmental issues related to mining the metals that currently go into batteries.”
Dincă is the senior author of the study, which appears today in the journal ACS Central Science. Tianyang Chen PhD ’23 and Harish Banda, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper. Other authors include Jiande Wang, an MIT postdoc; Julius Oppenheim, an MIT graduate student; and Alessandro Franceschi, a research fellow at the University of Bologna.
Alternatives to cobalt
Most electric cars are powered by lithium-ion batteries, a type of battery that is recharged when lithium ions flow from a positively charged electrode, called a cathode, to a negatively electrode, called an anode. In most lithium-ion batteries, the cathode contains cobalt, a metal that offers high stability and energy density.
However, cobalt has significant downsides. A scarce metal, its price can fluctuate dramatically, and much of the world’s cobalt deposits are located in politically unstable countries. Cobalt extraction creates hazardous working conditions and generates toxic waste that contaminates land, air, and water surrounding the mines.
“Cobalt batteries can store a lot of energy, and they have all of features that people care about in terms of performance, but they have the issue of not being widely available, and the cost fluctuates broadly with commodity prices. And, as you transition to a much higher proportion of electrified vehicles in the consumer market, it’s certainly going to get more expensive,” Dincă says.
Because of the many drawbacks to cobalt, a great deal of research has gone into trying to develop alternative battery materials. One such material is lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP), which some car manufacturers are beginning to use in electric vehicles. Although still practically useful, LFP has only about half the energy density of cobalt and nickel batteries.
Another appealing option are organic materials, but so far most of these materials have not been able to match the conductivity, storage capacity, and lifetime of cobalt-containing batteries. Because of their low conductivity, such materials typically need to be mixed with binders such as polymers, which help them maintain a conductive network. These binders, which make up at least 50 percent of the overall material, bring down the battery’s storage capacity.
About six years ago, Dincă’s lab began working on a project, funded by Lamborghini, to develop an organic battery that could be used to power electric cars. While working on porous materials that were partly organic and partly inorganic, Dincă and his students realized that a fully organic material they had made appeared that it might be a strong conductor.
This material consists of many layers of TAQ (bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone), an organic small molecule that contains three fused hexagonal rings. These layers can extend outward in every direction, forming a structure similar to graphite. Within the molecules are chemical groups called quinones, which are the electron reservoirs, and amines, which help the material to form strong hydrogen bonds.
Those hydrogen bonds make the material highly stable and also very insoluble. That insolubility is important because it prevents the material from dissolving into the battery electrolyte, as some organic battery materials do, thereby extending its lifetime.
“One of the main methods of degradation for organic materials is that they simply dissolve into the battery electrolyte and cross over to the other side of the battery, essentially creating a short circuit. If you make the material completely insoluble, that process doesn’t happen, so we can go to over 2,000 charge cycles with minimal degradation,” Dincă says.
Strong performance
Tests of this material showed that its conductivity and storage capacity were comparable to that of traditional cobalt-containing batteries. Also, batteries with a TAQ cathode can be charged and discharged faster than existing batteries, which could speed up the charging rate for electric vehicles.
To stabilize the organic material and increase its ability to adhere to the battery’s current collector, which is made of copper or aluminum, the researchers added filler materials such as cellulose and rubber. These fillers make up less than one-tenth of the overall cathode composite, so they don’t significantly reduce the battery’s storage capacity.
These fillers also extend the lifetime of the battery cathode by preventing it from cracking when lithium ions flow into the cathode as the battery charges.
The primary materials needed to manufacture this type of cathode are a quinone precursor and an amine precursor, which are already commercially available and produced in large quantities as commodity chemicals. The researchers estimate that the material cost of assembling these organic batteries could be about one-third to one-half the cost of cobalt batteries.
Lamborghini has licensed the patent on the technology. Dincă’s lab plans to continue developing alternative battery materials and is exploring possible replacement of lithium with sodium or magnesium, which are cheaper and more abundant than lithium.
David is the Senior Vice President for the Oracle SaaS Cloud Security engineering and operations organization. Previously, David was the public Cloud Security Engineering Director in the Google Security and Privacy organization and his preceding 18 years were spent with Microsoft in numerous security cloud, product and engineering leadership roles. David holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems as well as an MBA with a Management Information Systems concentration and is a longtime advocate of security application and technology, stemming from his U.S. military service background. In this edited interview excerpt from the CISO’s Secrets podcast, SVP & CISO for Oracle SaaS Cloud Security, David Cross, shares insights into his unique career journey, the cloud security evolution, and artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this!
We are very fortunate to host this interview with David Cross!
It’s pretty exciting to be here.
I like to say that I’m just a ‘worker bee’, but one who likes to make things happen. I’m a multi-tasker; a quality that’s inherently relevant to security.
Cyber security is not a single task. It’s multi-tasking. You’ve got to jump into many things, all at the same time.
You’ve got to keep things moving. And that’s why it’s a great fit for some people, like myself.
You know one of the things I’ve said for a long long time is and that’s really so awesome about this industry is that no matter when you get in, you’re getting in at the beginning of something.
Would you like to share a bit about your background, which is quite storied and impressive? Sure thing. At the very beginning of my career, I was in an electronic Navy attack squadron, the EA-6B Prowler. I am very thankful to the United States Service. It really helped me in my career…
This kicked off my passion for security. Electronic warfare. The threats. The offensive attacks, those type of things that are both virtual and electronic.
And that was early too…For you to have been thinking about the intersection of the virtual world and security, at such a point in time, is pretty interesting. Well, going back to my earliest days with the squadron, we didn’t really have network computers. We had embedded weapons systems that were based on DOS.
And as we evolved, in just in a couple of years…we went to Banyan Vines for their computer systems. But then in our plane, we had our prototype — and I can’t go into much more detail than this — but we had the Toshiba laptop, with NT 3.5 on it…And at this point, the world was changing…And the threats and risks changed with it.
You talk about the attack squadron…Here we are 20-30 years later…How do you feel that your experience in the military influences your role today?
At that point in time, not a lot of people were thinking about security.
Long story short, we were coming back from our last deployment, I was in an aircraft carrier. I was standing watch in the ready room. My commander wants me to sign-up and do another tour. And my thinking was ‘no, my time is done’.
I then stopped at the naval exchange bookstore, in Naples, Italy, and I picked up Bruce Schneier’s first book, Applied Cryptography. And as I was reading that, I realized ‘this is what I need to do’.
And it wasn’t my domain at that point. I was not a cryptographer and I wasn’t into cyber security. But after my experience and after I saw the transformation in terms of what was going on in the military…I felt that it was the time to jump in.
What are your views on cloud and how the cloud is evolving within the security space?
Absolutely. I spent a lot of my time on the operating system layer and on things like Windows. But then it became clear that the cloud was emerging…And you really just had to jump in.
Otherwise, it would be like saying ‘no, I’ll never use online bill pay, it’s too dangerous!’ Not for me. But, once the gate opened…
Right, otherwise it would be like saying, ‘I’d rather keep buying stamps!’
…It’s not ‘if’ everybody’s moving to the cloud, it’s ‘when’ you’re moving to the cloud. There’s no getting around it. For how long do you think that your favorite mail server on bare hardware is going to be produced and supported at this point? It’s going away. There could be some things that remain on-premise, but let’s look at reality. We have to accept emerging technologies. Just like AI.
Is AI going to go away? We already know the answer to that, don’t we?
Right,not a chance. With your background, I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about your views on AI. With AI, we’ve had ML for a long time, but now we’re witnessing a transformation. Pretty exciting, right? I think that now is the opportune time for us to develop applications, as we did when computer infrastructure came out.
My real question to you is, when are we going to adopt the laws of robotics that Issac Asimov came up with so long ago? Isn’t that the same as AI?
That’s a great question, David…
I was born and raised in Detroit, an area home to the auto industry. At one point, it was thought that automation within the auto industry would kill jobs.
But it hasn’t. The auto industry has survived. The manufacturing and the roles have not changed.
AI is likely to have a similar effect. People fear that it’s coming for jobs, but the reality is that it probably won’t make a dent in that regard.
Another element that’s been hinted at a few times is that — whether you’re an engineering leader, a security leader or any other type of leader — things are going to change, and you have to keep learning.
The moment you stop learning is the moment that you’ve plateaued, and then you’re declining into the ocean.
AI is the next big thing — Am I going to reject it? No. Am I going to embrace it and learn it? Yes. It’s just like the cloud. We had to embrace it and learn it…
Another thing that I like to say is that it’s not about how hard you work, it’s about how much you invest in yourself. And that is what really makes a difference in people and the world.
You can choose to ignore the latest technology…But I think your point is spot-on. The fascinating stuff is the unknown; it’s not the stuff we know. And I think that’s what’s exciting about this industry, right? The cloud, IoT, SASE…The list goes on in terms of things that are coming to the fore. Totally, and…
![5+ Best WordPress Plugins to Try Out [2024 edition] – Web Design Ledger](https://storage.googleapis.com/webdesignledger.pub.network/WDL/e7c2cbd0-wdl_featured.png "5+ Best WordPress Plugins to Try Out [2024 edition] – Web Design Ledger")
