The way I see it, an interview goes both ways. They try to assess your fit in the company, and you're also trying to assess if the company is something you want to spend your time on.
I call this the "game show style" interview. You know the answer, you get $10k. Next question. You didn't know the answer? You're out of the show. Next contestant.
To me this is very disrespectful of your time and your capabilities. Once I was pumped to go into an interview with a very well known company in Sydney, but was dismayed to learn that they do this game show interview (with IQ test, no less!). I wouldn't want to waste my most precious resources (i.e. time) for a company that doesn't respect me.
This is such a recurring issue that I just stop using new-ish Google products for fear of the rug getting pulled under me.
I used to use Google Home, now renamed Nest Home, and now I just stop using them altogether since I don't know how long it will survive.
Pretty much the only thing from Google I use today are Gmail and Google Docs.
This thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 describes what's going on internally at Google that led to that graveyard. Namely, how the promotion system encourages the creation of a new thing, and inadvertently de-emphasizes maintenance.
Secure communication is unfortunately still difficult for non-tech people. Most of the "easy" ones are tied to a smartphone, like Signal.
However if the goal is to prevent accidental leaking by using reply-all or adding an email address by mistake, then I think encryption features are nice-to-haves rather than a must-have. It's a very nice to have, but for non-techies and for your specific use case, usability is probably more important at this point.
* Slack (https://slack.com/) using a free account, but they limit the number of messages for free accounts. May not be a deal-breaker for you.
* Element (https://element.io/) which was formerly Riot.im, and is encrypted and have more security features vs. the other two. Probably the most secure here.
All of them have their pluses and minuses, but all of them can be opened in a browser
and require no smartphone. I suggest you pick one that you feel is easiest for your group to register and use, and provides the feature set that you require.
With regard to Discord, please make sure to read [0] before making any decisions :)
A lot of these are used in games for security. I've heard of Snap being used for security too, but I have no experience with that.
Discord roles are pretty messy for this though, to the point that secure conversations are often brought into a group chat or multiple separate servers.
I admit I'm a bit confused about Microsoft's strategy here. So they're releasing two Xboxes at the same time: series X and series S, with the S positioned as the less powerful version of the X, with the promise that it can play the same game as the X.
The X seems to be a direct competitor to the PS5 [0], hardware-wise.
Wouldn't the release of the S and the X together forces game developers to code for the lowest common denominator (i.e. the S) and makes development more complex for the Xbox? Or is it a strategy to undercut the PS5 (normal edition and digital edition) in price?
Many of those same developers will also be publishing those games on PC, and will likely already have to make certain effects toggleable or "slider-able".
If you simply downsample the textures as part of your pipeline, turn off some reflection maps, and a few other low hanging fruit effects you could easily bring the game down to the previous generation.
It's not flipping a switch, but it is not too hard and some of it the major 3d engines provide mechanisms for
I think it's actually really smart. Xbox and PlayStation sit awkwardly between the casual Nintendo gamers and the hardcore PC gamers. This is a way to steal market share from both sides because as the other comment mentions, these games are typically adjustable in terms of graphical quality so the user that "just wants to play" and doesn't have the fancy TV can participate more easily while the gamer that prefers consoles but envies the specs of a PC can get their cake and eat it too.
One hypothesis I saw months ago from a techtuber channel was that the cheaper model will support a game streaming subscription business down the line, making the hardware itself mostly a content delivery box. If true, cheap hardware with a cheap subscription will upend the existing console biz models.
That specific idea works to the extent that streaming games over the internet pans out(so far, countless overhyped failures). But a version of the plan where devs are given two SKU targets up-front would in fact be an evolution of how the last generation played out, where a mid-generation refresh happened and turned out not to be a complete waste of time.
Being able to launch with price discrimination reflects on how gaming tech isn't moving all that quickly now. The graphics fidelity is still going up but in a controlled fashion: higher screen resolutions, bigger textures, heavier shaders. The biggest underlying technical change of the coming generation is an emphasis on fast SSDs, and even a $299 SKU can have one of those.
Yes its an interesting gambit. This puts it at very competitive price point and could pick up a lot of buyers.
It has the same CPU but less RAM and GPU cores. I guess they're assuming they can lower the frame buffer size, shade less pixels, and save ram (and maybe even disk?) by never loading the highest resolution mip level.
This is a difficult question to quantify for me. "Few people" could be interpreted differently, and it depends on where you are. E.g. around the circle of people I know, I might be in the minority, but there is likely to be a niche where I'm part of the majority. It's just that I'm not aware or usually part of such a niche.
Second, what is the nature of the "truth" here? Is it mathematical/physical where there is no denying them? Is it opinion about something? Or historical facts? There are different level of truthiness there that I can see. However once you go into opinion-land, can it still be considered as truth?
I feel there are deeper reasons for this question.
I would also add that the replica set concept that is based on Raft [0] allows for built-in high availability, so the individual servers can be maintained while the whole set is running and servicing clients.
It also helps that the creator of the default storage engine (WiredTiger) are Keith Bostic of BerkeleyDB fame [0] and Michael Cahill, whose PhD thesis on serializable snapshot isolation [1] formed the basis of Postgres concurrency control [2]. Notably, both of them still work for MongoDB.
I played it using a basic Soundblaster card in the 90s and it’s already amazing. Lately I used DosBox with the MT32 emulation and was blown away by how good it sounds.
