This Week I Learned - Week #278

This Week I Learned -

PerfInsights is a self-help diagnostics tool that collects & analyzes the diagnostic data, and provides a report to help troubleshoot Windows virtual machine performance problems in Azure. PerfInsights can be run on virtual machines as a standalone tool, or directly from the portal by installing Azure Performance Diagnostics VM Extension.

Ansible, an open-source, simple IT automation engine can be used for automating cloud provisioning, configuration management and application deployments on Azure.

The major cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) are locked in an aggressive race to maintain parity on core capabilities while their products are differentiated only marginally. This is causing a few organizations to adopt a Polycloud strategy — rather than going ‘all-in’ with one provider, they are passing different types of workloads to different providers in a best-of-breed approach. This may involve, for example, putting standard services on AWS, but using Google for machine learning, Azure for .NET applications that use SQLServer, or potentially using the Ethereum Consortium Blockchain solution. This is different than a cloud-agnostic strategy of aiming for portability across providers, which is costly and forces lowest-common-denominator thinking. Polycloud instead focuses on using the best that each cloud offers - ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

* The American Civil Liberties Union used Amazon’s facial software to compare the photos of all federal lawmakers against a database of 25,000 publicly available mug shots. In the test, the Amazon technology incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with people who had been arrested, amounting to a 5 percent error rate among legislators. The test disproportionally misidentified African-American and Latino members of Congress as the people in mug shots. An Amazon representative noted that the A.C.L.U had used the system’s default setting for matches, called a “confidence threshold,” of 80 percent. That means the group counted any face matches the system proposed that had a similarity score of 80 percent or more. Amazon itself uses the same percentage in one facial recognition example on its site describing matching an employee’s face with a work ID badge....but Amazon recommends that police departments use a much higher similarity score — 95 percent — to reduce the likelihood of erroneous matches - NYT

* Starting from August 12, 2018, the "AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate" exam will be based on a new & updated curriculum

* Patch Tuesday (also known as Update Tuesday) is an unofficial term used to refer to when Microsoft regularly releases security patches for its software products. Patch Tuesday occurs on the second, and sometimes fourth, Tuesday of each month in North America. Microsoft has a pattern of releasing a larger number of updates in even-numbered months, and fewer in odd-numbered months. The following day, informally known as "Exploit Wednesday", marks the time when exploits may appear in the wild which take advantage on unpatched machines of the newly announced vulnerabilities. Windows Update uses the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to download the updates, using idle network bandwidth. BITS has no visibility of the network traffic beyond the client - Wikipedia

* There are multiple ways to disable Windows 10 automatic updates

*  Windows 10 has a secret screen recording tool that can be used to capture on-screen activity as a video file. Hit the Windows key and G, and a popup will appear asking if you would like to open Game bar — there are no Yes and No buttons, but check the ‘Yes, this is a game’ box. Use the Record button to start capturing footage. Hit the button again to stop recording, or you can use the Windows key + Alt + R keyboard shortcut.

* Krait and sea snake bites maybe virtually painless.

* India has around 24 Life Insurance Companies to choose from though only four (HDFC, ICICI, MAX and SBI) of them are listed on the stock exchanges.

* Kapus constitute about 18% of total electorate in AP. Although Kapus are dominant community in East & West Godavari, BCs are strong opponents of the community. Kapus are sizable population in about 74 Assembly segments of 175 in AP. The AP Assembly adopted the BC Commission Report which recommended reservations for Kapus in the state outside existing BC reservations. A new category under BC-F has been created to provide reservations to Kapus in educational institutions & government jobs.

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