This Week I Learned - Week #22 2023
This Week I Learned -
* Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) which was launched in 2016 had a 2.6% market share in the USD500 billion cloud market in 2022, according to global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
* Oracle was founded in 1977 and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was among its first DBMS customers.
* Oracle is the preferred vendor in banking, financial services, public sector, telecom, and manufacturing domains despite competition from its arch-rival, the German software major SAP which was founded five years before Oracle.
* In 2022, Oracle and Microsoft entered into a pact for deeper integration of their clouds, helping customers use multi-cloud environments. Oracle's database users can connect directly to Microsoft's Azure cloud and have access to Microsoft tools including the tech giant's analytics service, Azure Synapse. There are no egress charges in either direction, it guarantees less than 2 milliseconds latency, single sign-on, and the ability to manage Oracle database on OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) from an Azure UI and vice-versa. Customers can use databases on OCI with apps like PowerBI, Microsoft's data visualisation software on Azure.
* Having entered the country almost three decades back, India is a key market for Oracle. About 45,000 of its 170,000 global workforce is in India. Out of its 41 public cloud regions, two are in India — Mumbai and Hyderabad. The company has nine product development centers in India. Oracle has multiple business divisions in the country which support local and global businesses. These include the Indian product development centre, a consulting division servicing India and global accounts, and a global financial information centre and Oracle Financial Services Software (OFSS). OFSS is listed on Indian bourses and has around 900 customers in 145 countries. The USD650-million OFSS competes with Infosys Finacle and TCS BaNCS. - Economic Times
* ChatGPT is powered by NVidia GPU chips.
* Kubernetes addresses four key networking problems: container-to-container communication, pod-to-pod communication, pod-to-service communication, and ingress and egress communication.
* Why LLMs "hallucinate" - Modern LLMs don't have the same capacity that humans have to do things like say "I don't know". They generate probabilistic responses and pick the best one - if you didn't ask the question such that one of the possible answers is "I don't know", you'll get something made up.
* AI Prompt templates and requirements will soon be a section in brand guidelines, content style guides, and design systems of companies and brands. - Pablo Stanley
* An ornithopter is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings. Regular airplanes have fixed wings and rotary wings (propellers).
- Our eyes are not meant to focus on objects close to our face for long periods of time. When we do, especially as children, it encourages the eyeball to lengthen, which over time can cause nearsightedness, or myopia. To help reduce the strain on your eyes, follow the 20-20-20 rule: After every 20 minutes of close reading, look at something at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.
- Screens can be bad for eyesight. They cause dry eyes. When we stare at a screen, we just don’t blink as often as we should and that can cause eyestrain and temporary blurred vision. There’s no evidence that wearing blue-light-blocking glasses will improve eye health.
- Carrots are good for your eyes. Supplements containing nutrients found in carrots, including antioxidants like beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, could slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration.
- Wearing sunglasses, glasses or contacts that block UV rays can offer protection.
- If you need glasses, you should wear them. Taking a break from wearing glasses CANNOT prevent your eyesight from getting worse.
- Worsening eyesight is NOT an inevitable part of aging. Most causes of declining eyesight in adulthood — including age-related macular degeneration, cataracts and glaucoma — are preventable or treatable if you catch them early.
* Manatees are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. Manatees have a kind and fearless demeanor because of the lack of natural predators. They have also not developed an elaborate escape response or aggression mechanism, so they tend to handle most situations with an incredible degree of gentleness and respond warmly to people.
* Manatee adults have no incisor or canine teeth, just a set of cheek teeth, which are not clearly differentiated into molars and premolars. These teeth are repeatedly replaced throughout life, with new teeth growing at the rear as older teeth fall out from farther forward in the mouth, somewhat as elephants' teeth do.
* Manatees, elephants and kangaroos are unusual among mammals because they are polyphyodonts, in contrast to most other mammals which replace their teeth only once in their lives (diphyodont). A polyphyodont is any animal whose teeth are continually replaced. In contrast, diphyodonts are characterized by having only two successive sets of teeth. Polyphyodonts include most toothed fishes, many reptiles such as crocodiles and geckos, and most other vertebrates, mammals being the main exception. Alligators grow a successional tooth (a small replacement tooth) under each mature functional tooth for replacement once a year, each tooth being replaced up to 50 times in the alligator's life. Crocodilia (order of mostly large, predatory, semiaquatic reptiles) are researched for tooth regeneration in humans. Crocodilia are the only non-mammalian vertebrates with tooth sockets.
* What is the meaning of life? Answer from a Twitter bot: The meaning of life is to find your purpose, discover your passions, and share your gift with the world. Enjoy your journey!
* FUBAR is an acronym that originated in the military, which stands for a situation that is so damaged or out of control that it is Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition (clean version).
* Some betting apps such as Betway, BetNetix and Bet Analytix that formed part of the list of 138 apps banned by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) continue to be available on the Apple App Store. These apps have been removed from the Google Play Store. Apple has told Indian officials that it needs a "concrete reason or a legal requirement" to fully comply with the Centre's directive to take down betting apps from its App Store. - ET
* India's Railway minster Ashwini Vaishnaw terms the Vande Bharat trains "computer on wheels", as a single unit is powered by 30,000 to 32,000 chips.
* Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) coach is a passenger coach of Indian Railways that is developed by Linke-Hofmann-Busch of Germany. Indian Railways first used these coaches in 2000 and since then, they are produced by the Rail Coach Factory in the city of Kapurthala, Punjab. The codal life of conventional type of Integral Coach Factory( ICF) design coaches is 25 years and Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) design Stainless Steel coaches are 35 years.
* Super Vasuki is India's longest (3.5km) loaded train run with 6 Locos & 295 wagons and of 25,962 tonnes gross weight.
* The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Platform for India (SHRUG) facilitates data sharing between researchers working on India. It is an open access repository currently comprising dozens of datasets covering India’s over 500,000 villages and 8000 towns over a span of 25 years, all linked together with a set of common geographic identifiers.
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