This Week I Learned - Week #17 2022

This Week I Learned - 

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is a fully managed service that adapts to changing requirements by rapidly scaling storage up to 100 TB. 

Gartner suggests considering OCI for critical Oracle Business Applications and potential use for non-Oracle workloads based on its evaluation of public cloud providers against its definition of 270 capabilities desired by organizations with enterprise-class production workloads in its annual Solution Scorecards. OCI has a good track record of service availability in 29 commercial cloud regions and seven government regions in 14 countries. 

Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer (DRCC) is a single-tenant service that is owned and operated by Oracle in a customer-provided data center. All data remains within that data center. A DRCC region contains identical services to OCI’s public cloud regions, at the same price point and with the same consumption-based billing model for between 320 and 1,000 servers. It supports customers that need a cloud region in a specific location, but that still want to use many of the services within a provider’s IaaS+PaaS portfolio rather than a small subset of services. 

In 2015, Oracle Compute Cloud, now branded as OCI Classic, was launched. In 2016, a new “Gen 2” architecture called Oracle Bare Metal Cloud was launched and later rebranded as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in 2018. In the six years since Oracle Cloud was introduced, there has been slow traction in OCI cloud infrastructure platform services (IaaS+PaaS), representing 2% total market share.

A slow CSS prevents the JavaScript following it from executing. In today’s JS-rich apps a delay like this is a life/death situation. 

* Eid takes place at the end of Ramadan - a month of prayer and fasting. The name "Eid al-Fitr" translates as "the festival of the breaking of the fast". Like the beginning of Ramadan, Eid begins with the first sighting of the new moon. The word 'Ramzan' is the Urdu spelling to refer to the Islamic holy month, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and 'Ramadan' is the Arabic spelling. In its literal sense, Ramadan means excessive heat. Ramadan Mubarak is the one that is mostly commonly used and means to have a 'blessed Ramadan'. Ramadan Kareem is to wish someone a 'generous Ramadan', roughly translating to 'may Ramadan be generous to you'. 

* The words flammable and inflammable are often misinterpreted as opposites. As a matter of fact, flammable and inflammable mean exactly the same — capable of burning.  The prefix in- is used as an intensifier meaning in or into. 

* JP Morgan owned 51% share of Tesla's patents 

* "The father of radio" Marconi sent signals through the air using 17 of Tesla's patents...no patent is truly safe, as Tesla's career demonstrates. In 1900, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd. began thriving in the stock markets—due primarily to Marconi's family connections with English aristocracy. British Marconi stock soared from $3 to $22 per share and the glamorous young Italian nobleman was internationally acclaimed. Both Edison and Andrew Carnegie invested in Marconi and Edison became a consulting engineer of American Marconi...the U.S. Patent Office suddenly and surprisingly reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a patent for the invention of radio. The reasons for this have never been fully explained, but the powerful financial backing for Marconi in the United States suggests one possible explanation...when Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1911, Tesla was furious. He sued the Marconi Company for infringement in 1915, but was in no financial condition to litigate a case against a major corporation. It wasn't until 1943—a few months after Tesla's death— that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's radio patent number 645,576. The Court had a selfish reason for doing so. The Marconi Company was suing the United States Government for use of its patents in World War I. The Court simply avoided the action by restoring the priority of Tesla's patent over Marconi.

90% of all lawsuits in the US are settled out of court

* U.S. corporations pay more than $20 billion a year to litigation attorneys. 

* A NASA study reveals that a 26-minute catnap can enhance performance by 33 per cent

* Guacamole is an avocado-based dip. In traditional Spanish, guacamole is pronounced with a hard "G", therefore as gwah-kah-MOH-leh. However, in Mexican Spanish, guacamole is pronounced as wah-kah-MOH-leh, with a silent "g".

* Dragon fruit is a tropical fruit native to Mexico and Central America. Its taste is like a combination of a kiwi and a pear.

* Tamarind is sometimes referred to as the “date of India.” The polyphenols in tamarind have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. 

* Science acknowledges reason and empirical evidence; and religions include revelation, faith and sacredness whilst also acknowledging philosophical and metaphysical explanations with regard to the study of the universe. Both science and religion are not monolithic, timeless, or static because both are complex social and cultural endeavors that have changed through time across languages and cultures. In general the scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by experiments. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement, or even rejection, in the face of additional evidence. Religion is an attempt to find meaning in the world, and to explain humanity's place in it and relationship to it and to any posited entities. 

Average income correlates negatively with (self-defined) religiosity. The richer a nation is, the less likely its inhabitants to call themselves religious. According to a study from 2015, Christians hold the largest amount of wealth (55% of the total world wealth), followed by Muslims (5.8%), Hindus (3.3%) and Jews (1.1%). According to the same study it was found that adherents under the classification Irreligion or other religions hold about 34.8% of the total global wealth (while making up only about 20% of the world population.

* The brand name 3M is derived the from the company's original name, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.

* Bruce Lee (1940 – 1973) was the founder of Jeet Kune Do, a hybrid martial arts philosophy drawing from different combat disciplines that is often credited with paving the way for modern mixed martial arts. In 1961, he enrolled at the University of Washington. He opened his first martial arts school operated out of home in Seattle and Los Angeles to teach, where his students included Chuck Norris, Sharon Tate etc. In the 1970s, his Hong Kong and Hollywood and produced films elevated the Hong Kong martial arts films to much popularity and acclaim.

* An Aadhaar holder's age band, gender, state, and last three digits of mobile can be confirmed by going to https://myaadhaar.uidai.gov.in/verifyAadhaar and entering their Aadhaar number. The "Aadhaar QR scanner" app can also be used to read the QR code on the Aadhaar card. The information in the QR code is secure and tamper-proof since it is digitally signed by UIDAI, even if the Aadhaar card is tampered with by photo another person's photograph.

* Only 12% of India’s 1.4 billion citizens have access to air conditioning.  

* Coca-Cola bought the Parle Company for $60 million in 1993. When Parle was sold to Coca-Cola, Thums Up had about 85 percent of the market in India. The famously misspelt name is because back in 1978, FMCG products were not allowed to have dictionary words as product names, hence they dropped the ‘b’.

70 Policies that Shaped India [PDF] is a compilation by  Observer Research Foundation's (ORF) Gautam Chikermane of 70 policies and enactments made over the 70 years since Independence, which can be described as forming the changing bedrock of Indian economic strategy over time

* There are more than 8000 pilots in India according to the Federation of Pilots.

* Nearly 90% of locations in Hyderabad have recorded daily temperatures of over 40°C, two degree Celsius above the prevailing temperatures of the corresponding period (April 20-May 1) last year, in the last ten days.

* Filing a civil suit seeking Rs10 crore damages requires Rs 9.75 lakh to be deposited as court fee. 

* "If you don't know where you're going, any road can take you there". -  Cheshire Cat to Alice in Alice in Wonderland

Illustration by John Tenniel. Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - "Whooo ... are ... you?"

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