This Week I Learned - Week #202

This Week I Learned -

* The Dv2-series CPU is about 35% faster than the D-series CPU. The Dv2-series has the same memory and disk configurations as the D-series.

* Your Azure subscription might also limit the number of cores you can deploy in certain size families.

* Azure is divided physically and logically into units called regions. A region consists of one or more datacenters that are close. A region resides within the same geography as its pair (with the exception of Brazil South) in order to meet data residency requirements for tax and law enforcement jurisdiction purposes.

It is possible to try Service Fabric on Azure for free, without any subscription

Microsoft services support deployment and management through Resource Manager

The minimum supported size for a Service Fabric cluster running production workloads is five nodes.

* Microsoft provides Lab instructions for 2 Service Fabric scenarios -  stateless Service Fabric application & stateful service.

* Dropbox historically used AWS

Google announced the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability.

If you plan to perform Penetration testing on your application hosted in Azure, there is a process that needs to be followed

The main difference with SSL is that IPsec runs at the machine level: it protects data from one machine to another, whereas SSL is between applications (e.g. a Web browser and a Web server).

SSL happens at layer 7 in the OSI model - every application has to have its own implementation. (most) VPNs operate at the network layer (3) which means that everything that happens at higher layers is at least not nakedly exposed to the Big Bad Internet.

List of Azure Services you get for free with any subscription

Siri is a good example of "Weak AI" or "narrow" or "soft" AI. Siri operates within a limited pre-defined range, there is no genuine intelligence, no self-awareness

AI & Machine Learning are different

Emails can be compromised while in transit

* Sleep Cycle (free on iOS) app tracks sleep history & wakes up a user at a more comfortable moment in their sleep cycle and helps avoid the horrid lurch one sometimes gets with a timed alarm - NY Times

Pramod Varma is the architect of the world’s largest identity project, Aadhaar - almost 10 times bigger than the largest existing identity system. After completing his MTech in Computer Science & PhD in Graph Theory from JNU in Delhi, he joined Infosys in 1993 when it was around a couple of 100-people strong, operating out of Koramangala, Bengaluru. When Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys & later chairman of India’s Unique Identification Authority, assembled an elite group of software engineers, tech-savvy bureaucrats and biometric experts to build a system that could issue unique 12-digit numbers to all the country’s 1.2 billion people, based on fingerprints and iris scans, he chose Pramod Varma. Pramod Varma is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar and the architect of India Stack, the name collectively given to a bunch of layers the government has built. The first layer was Aadhaar and the second was eSign.

* Bharat Bill Pay Systems: Out of one billion utility bills paid per month, only 3-5 percent are paid electronically. There’s huge scope of easing the payments here.

* Accenture’s clients include Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb which together accounted for at least $1 billion of the IT firm’s $32.9 billion in revenue for the year ended August 2016 (Accenture follows a September-August fiscal) - Mint

* In 2017, Cognizant expects growth of between 8% and 10%, which is more or less in line with the 8.6% growth reported in 2016.

* Six languages - English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish (29 countries), French (29 countries) & Arabic (22 markets), cover 80 per cent of the world GDP and 160 countries. US market contributes about 60 per cent to the Indian IT industry’s revenues. But there is a huge appetite for Indian IT services and products in Japan, Korea, Australia, Hong Kong and several emerging countries. Japan is the second biggest market for the IT industry after the US - Hindu BusinessLine

* A person's skin is considered the body's largest organ, weighing in at about 8 pounds and stretching out about 22 square feet on average.

Of the close to eighty thousand cartoons published by The New Yorker in the past nine decades, ...fewer than one per cent fall into the wordless-wonder category....the captionless genre

A cat can’t chew big pieces of food because their jaw can’t move sideways

* Dogs have three eyelids to help protect and keep their eyes from drying out.

* The venom of the black widow spider is apparently 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake's.

* Hippos are excellent swimmers & can hold their breath for about 5 minutes

* Strawberries actually aren’t berries at all

* The inner temperature of a cucumber can be up to 20 degrees cooler than the outside air

The poorer the society, the less power women have.

* In the European Union, more than half the new jobs since 2010 have been through temporary contracts.

* The below graphic packs a lot of details into a single visualization -

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