This Week I Learned - Week #37 2020

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure Sentinel is a consumer of logs and alerts generated by Azure Security Center

* Azure Container Instances enables a layered approach to orchestration, providing all of the scheduling and management capabilities required to run a single container, while allowing orchestrator platforms to manage multi-container tasks on top of it.

* Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM and ARM templates, which means anything that can be done in an ARM Template can be done in bicep (outside of temporary known limitations). 

* Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) and geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS/RA-GZRS) (preview) are available only for standard general-purpose V2, BlockBlobStorage, and FileStorage accounts in certain regions. General-purpose v2 accounts deliver the lowest per-gigabyte capacity prices for Azure Storage. Microsoft recommends using a general-purpose v2 storage account for most scenarios. You can easily upgrade a general-purpose v1 or Blob storage account to a general-purpose v2 account with no downtime and without the need to copy data.

* If your applications are transaction-intensive or use significant geo-replication bandwidth, but don't require large capacity, Azure Storage general-purpose v1 may be the most economical choice.

* The Azure Storage data movement library for .NET is based on the core data movement framework that powers AzCopy. The library is designed for high-performance, reliable, and easy data transfer operations similar to AzCopy. 

* Progress (the makers of Telerik tools and OpenEdge database) acquires Chef

* Interesting graphic on the timeline of Oracle's converged database offerings -

* Elon Musk forgot his son X Æ A-12's name when a reporter enquired about him but remembered it  sounds 'like a password'.

* 193m people worldwide subscribe to Netflix - The Economist

* Blue whales are the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth. These magnificent marine mammals rule the oceans at up to 100 feet long and upwards of 200 tons. Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant. Their hearts, as much as an automobile - NatGeo

* India is home to a third of the world's blind population

* Gopalpur served as an important port for the seafarers of ancient Kalinga. Even during the World War –I, it was an important military port where soldiers used to embark on a journey to Burma. Post the second World War when trade with Burma stopped, Gopalpur's importance was lost for the British. As the beach is east facing, the sunrise and sunsets are spectacular. The Palm Beach Resort, the first ever beach resort in India was built here in 1914 by Signor Maglioni to cater to the merchants and businessmen. The hotel was bought by the Oberoi group of hotels in 1948 in what was the group’s first venture into the hospitality business. Currently the hotel is owned by the Mayfair Group of Hotels. 

* In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness....The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

* There are all these services on the Internet that we think of as free, but they are not free. They are paid for by advertisers. Why do advertisers pay those companies? They pay in exchange for showing their ads to us. We're the product. our attention is the product being sold to advertisers. They sell certainty. In order to be successful in that business, you have to have Great predictions. Great predictions begin with one imperative: you need a lot of data. Some people call it surveillance capitalism, capitalism profiting off the infinite tracking of everywhere everyone goes by large technological companies whose business model is to make sure that advertisers are as successful as possible. This is a new kind of marketplace now. It's a marketplace that trades exclusively in human futures. We now have markets that trade in human futures at scale - The Social Dilemma