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Showing posts from June, 2019

Notes from the LinkedIn "Disrupting Yourself" course

Notes from the LinkedIn " Disrupting Yourself " course presented by Whitney Johnson: Disruptive innovation is a term coined by Clayton Christensen to describe a low-end or new market innovation that eventually upends an industry. The disruptors, think Amazon in the 1990s, secure a foothold at the low end of the market, and then in the pursuit of profit, gradually produce higher performance, higher margin products. Established competitors - Barnes and Noble, Borders - could aggressively counter an attack by a low-end disruptor, but they don't because it doesn't make financial sense to defend their least profitable products when they themselves could move up-market. Seven basic rules of Disruptive Innovation - * Take the right risks - Disruptors look at what their competitors are not doing. *  Play to your distinctive strengths - get the skills that you need to do your job, and then focus on your distinctive strengths. 2 questions to ask to know your strengt...
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This Week I Learned - Week #26 2019

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This Week I Learned - * The browser must download and parse CSS files before it can show the page, which makes CSS a render-blocking resource. Inlining extracted styles in the <head> of the HTML document eliminates the need to make an additional request to fetch these styles. The remainder of the CSS can be loaded asynchronously - web.dev * Azure Bastion is a new managed PaaS service that provides seamless RDP and SSH connectivity to your virtual machines over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This is completed without any exposure of the public IPs on your virtual machines. Azure Bastion provisions directly in your Azure Virtual Network, providing bastion host or jump server as-a-service and integrated connectivity to all virtual machines in your virtual networking using RDP/SSH directly from and through your browser and the Azure portal experience. This can be executed with just two clicks and without the need to worry about managing network security policies. * Azure Sha...
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What caused the catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear accident?

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Paraphrased from Wikipedia articles  The Chernobyl accident is considered the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history , both in terms of cost and casualties. It has been approximated that about four hundred times more radioactive material was released from Chernobyl than by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How does a nuclear reactor work? As explained in the HBO mini-series Chernobyl by the character playing Valery Legasov, Chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster who later exposed the design flaws - A nuclear reactor makes electricity with steam. The steam turns a turbine which generates electricity. Where a typical power plant makes steam by burning coal, in a nuclear plant, we use something called fission. We take an unstable element like Uranium 235, which has too many neutrons. A neutron is, (like a) bullet. So, bullets are flying off of the uranium. Now...if we put enough uranium atoms close together, the bullets f...
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This Week I Learned - Week #25 2019

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This Week I Learned - *  Active geo-replication feature in Azure SQL Database leverages the Always On technology of SQL Server to asynchronously replicate committed transactions on the primary database to a secondary database using snapshot isolation. In addition to disaster recovery, active geo-replication can be used for database migration which requires minimum downtime and application upgrades *  Azure Application Gateway is not an L3-L7 stateful firewall. NSGs are not a firewall. Traffic Manager is not a proxy and does not see the traffic passing between the client and the service . * Besides the official Azure Pricing & TCO Calculators, there are other unofficial Azure Pricing Calculators - -  VMchooser.com -  AzPrice.info  -  AzurePrice.net * You know that face your dog makes, the one that’s a little bit quizzical, maybe a bit sad, a bit anticipatory, with the eyebrows slanted? Sometimes you think it says, “Don’t be sad. I c...
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My Favorite Mnemonics

After the first mnemonic I learnt at school to remember the 9 planets in my day - My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets, there have been others I've been relying on OSI layer - All People Seem To Need Data Processing All = Application Layer People= Presentation Layer Seem = Session Layer To = Transport Layer Need = Network Layer Data = Data Link Layer Processing = Physical Layer “ I Saw Two Crows Quietly Having Coffee and Reading Poetic Songs ” for the 10 PMI Knowledge Areas: Integration Scope Time Cost Quality HR Communications Risk Procurement Stakeholders CROPS - Five Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework : Cost Optimization Reliability Operational Excellence Performance Efficiency Security First steps to do a differential diagnosis - VINDICATE : V ascular, I nfection, N eoplasm, D rugs, I diopathic, C ongenital, A utoimmune, T raumatic, E ndocrine. Four techniques for better encoding your memories -  FOUR : F ocus - d...
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This Week I Learned - Week #24 2019

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This Week I Learned - *  Azure Backup doesn't use differential backup * With simplified licensing models following the Oracle and Microsoft Cloud partnership , customers can deploy enterprise Oracle applications on Azure with the same processor mapping as their existing on-premises deployments. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) customers can also tap into the power of AI, IoT, Blockchain and edge services provided by Azure. Microsoft customers can take advantage of Oracle RAC, Exadata, and Autonomous Database deployed in OCI. * Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, consent from users of a website on storing their information must be informed and specific. For this, the data subject must be notified about the controller’s identity, what kind of data will be processed, how it will be used and the purpose of the processing operations as a safeguard against “function creep”. The law also states that consent must be “unambiguous”, that is, it requires either a st...
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Book Review: Mind Without Fear - Rajat Gupta

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Mind Without Fear is the fascinating memoir of the first Indian-born CEO of a multinational corporation, Rajat Gupta . It takes us through the highs & absolute lows of an enterprising Indian immigrant to the US who successfully breaks through the glass ceiling but stumbles towards the fag end of his career after getting embroiled in white-collar crime His achievements - * Orphaned at 18, he managed to get into IIT. * After graduating, secured a plum job at ITC but chooses to attend Harvard Business School in 1971 * After graduating from Harvard, joins McKinsey, where he would spend his entire thirty-seven-year consulting career, including his nine-year term as the firm's leader. * During his 9 year tenure as MD, McKinsey more than doubled the size of the staff and tripled revenue * During his final years with McKinsey and after his retirement, Gupta transitioned from business leader to business statesman, bringing his wealth of experience to bear on some of the most p...
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What is the difference between Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning?

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Paraphrased from a Oracle Blog article  & other online sources - Artificial Intelligence means getting a computer to mimic human behavior  Machine Learning is  mimicking how humans learn . If machine learning is about mimicking how humans learn, why not go all the way and try to mimic the human brain ? That’s the idea behind neural networks.  Deep learning is all about using neural networks with more neurons, layers, and interconnectivity These networks imitate the human brain’s connectivity, classifying data sets and finding correlations between them . With its newfound knowledge (acquired without human intervention), the machine can then apply its insights to other data sets. The more data the machine has at its disposal, the more accurate its predictions will be. Machine Learning vs Deep Learning - All machine learning Only deep learning Number of data points Can use small amounts of data to make predictions. Needs to...
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This Week I Learned - Week #23 2019

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This Week I Learned - * A nice compilation of Azure certification exam training material on EdX *  Lucidchart’s AWS Import tool lets you plot out your AWS environment quickly * The Quick Draw Dataset is a collection of 50 million drawings across 345 categories, contributed by players of the game Quick, Draw!   from Google *  Form Recognizer (Azure Cognitive Service currently in Preview)  learns the structure of your forms to intelligently extract text and data. It ingests text from forms, applies machine learning technology to identify keys and tables, and then outputs structured data that includes the relationships within the original file. That way, you can extract information quickly, accurately, and tailored to your specific content, without heavy manual intervention or extensive data science expertise. Form Recognizer supports printed forms, PDFs, and images. The process involves uploading five sample forms and letting Form Recognizer discov...
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