This Week I Learned - Week #20 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure Migrate can help with the following:

  • Server Assessment and Migration
  • Database Assessment and Migration
  • Web App Assessment and Migration

Azure Migrate and Azure Migrate tools are available at no additional charge. However, you may incur charges for 3rd party ISV tools. Dependency visualization is free for the first 180 days from the day of associating a Log Analytics workspace with Server Assessment. After 180 days, standard Log Analytics charges will apply. The use of any solution other than Service Map within this workspace is not free and will incur standard Log Analytics charges. Azure Migrate: Server migration is free for first 180 days for each machine. After 180 days, $25/month per instance replicated will be applied. Note that for the first 180 days, you will not incur any Server Migration licensing charges, but you might incur charges for Azure Storage, storage transactions and data transfer during replication.

* 2 Database Migration Service (DMS) is free for first 180 days, learn more about DMS pricing.

Device42 is now integrated with Azure Migrate as a discovery and assessment software tool.

* Google's StratoZone provides you with a data-driven framework to migrate your IT infrastructure to Google Cloud. The discovery of your resources uses an agentless process: there are no appliances, hardware, or agents to deploy. The discovery is agnostic about hypervisors, and physical or virtual resources.

* Addfix, Delhivery’s proprietary address disambiguation system, takes unstructured and incomplete or error-ridden addresses provided by customers and breaks them down into different geographical elements like country, state, city/town, locality, street, landmark, building, postal code, to give an accurate location for an address, the filing said. The system is claimed to have been built using intelligence collected from over a billion successful deliveries since inception.

Tutorial series covering PyScript - Python for the Web

* The future is here - As I look at suggested replies/canned responses in Microsoft Teams, I'm reminded of The Terminator (1984) movie where the cyborg-assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger gets canned responses to choose from.  

DALL·E 2 has learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them. It uses a process called “diffusion,” which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image. In January 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL·E. One year later, the newest system, DALL·E 2, generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution. 

* The placement of whorls on horses is a heritable trait.

* Despite its name, the coconut is a fruit. Coconuts thrive in the tropics between 23°N and 23°S. Thailand is one of the world's top exporters of coconut milk, with its largest markets being Australia, Britain and America.

* Only male elephants have tusks.

* Monkeys have been used to harvest coconuts for centuries in southern Thailand. Those who use monkeys liken it to using cattle in fields. Native to Southeast Asia, crab eating or long-tailed macaques are fast learners who develop their harvesting skills by observing their trainers. A monkey there can collect 200 to 400 coconuts per day. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) raised concerns about the treatment of monkeys that have been used to harvest coconuts.

* Cockroaches have survived three mass extinctions and appeared on Earth 300 million years before mankind. Each species of cockroaches lays a different number of eggs. In its lifetime a female periplaneta americana can produce about 150 young cockroaches

From a infographic by Adolfo Arranz in the South China Morning Post 

* Neem is called Indian lilac in English, and “neemba” in Sanskrit, the plant – scientific name Azadirachta indica – teems with 130 biologically active compounds, some of which have antiviral and antibacterial qualities.  Ayurvedic experts have for centuries promoted neem as the most versatile medicinal plant in the world, with each of its parts – leaves, bark, flowers – brimming with health benefits.

* “Cancer of unknown primary origin” is called “Cup” cancer.

* Henry David Thoreau's “Walden”...like many canonized works...is more revered than read. Thoreau spent two years at Walden but nearly ten years writing “Walden,” which was published, in 1854, to middling critical and popular acclaim; it took five more years for the initial print run, of two thousand copies, to sell out. Only after Thoreau’s death, in 1862, and thanks to vigorous championing by his family members, Emerson, and later readers, did “Walden” become a cornerstone work of American nonfiction and its author an American hero. He despised his admirers, toward whom, Emerson wrote, he “was never affectionate, but superior, didactic,—scorning their petty ways.”  Thoreau’s comprehensive arrogance is captured in one of his most famous lines: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Unsurprisingly, this thoroughgoing misanthrope did not care to help other people. “I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises,” Thoreau wrote in “Walden.” He had “tried it fairly” and was “satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.” Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization...for Thoreau, civilization was a contaminant. He refused to pay the poll tax in Massachusetts, partly on the ground that it sustained the institution of slavery. “Walden” is a staple of the high-school curriculum, and you could scarcely write a book more appealing to teen-agers: Thoreau endorses rebellion against societal norms, champions idleness over work, and gives his readers permission to ignore their elders. (“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures.”)...the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. - The New Yorker

* Indian retail banking software dominates the world. The country’s primary strength has been in IT services. But in banking, three core banking products developed here over the past 25 years are at the heart of retail accounts globally. In research firm Gartner’s latest magic quadrant for global retail core banking, released in February, three out of the four companies in the leaders quadrant are Indian – EdgeVerve Systems, a subsidiary of Infosys that has the banking software Finacle, Oracle Financial Services Software, which originated in India as iflex and which continues to be based out of India and which sells the software Flexcube, and Tata Consultancy Services, which has the software BaNCS. - ToI

* BaNCS services more than 30% of the global population. Two of the world’s  largest core banking implementations run on BaNCS, processing 1 billion accounts. The largest is the implementation by State Bank of India (SBI). 

* Infosys launched Finacle in 2000. Back then, 50% of customer engagements used to happen in branches, while today over 95% of engagements occur in non-branch channels. Finacle’s solutions address the core banking, lending, digital engagement, payments, cash management, wealth management, treasury, analytics, AI, and blockchain requirements of financial institutions. The platform’s  architecture also offers an extensive suite of open APIs along with API management tools to enable ecosystem innovations. Today, banks in over 100 countries rely on Finacle to help more than a billion people and millions of businesses to save, pay, borrow, and invest better 

* Oracle acquired iflex solutions, one of India’s first product companies, in 2006. Today, its banking products include everything from anti-money laundering and financial crime compliance, risk and finance, retail banking (under which falls their CBS) and many more. Flexcube has helped banks around the globe jumpstart their digital transformation. Airtel has used Flexcube to launch its digital payment bank in India and Nigeria. Oracle Financial Services serves over 700 customers in 140 countries. Its solutions cover 15% of the world’s population. 

* Solar water pumps that can replace diesel pumps used by Indian farmers, costs between INR2.4 lakh and INR4.5 lakh, depending on the machine’s capacity. The replacement of existing diesel pumps with solar pumps not only reduces irrigation costs by around INR50,000 per year for a 5HP pump, but also leads to reduction in pollution. a diesel pump costs about INR35,000, but farmers would have to shell out INR1,000 per day for diesel. With rising diesel prices, this has now increased to INR1,400 per day. The total expense to operate a diesel pump for 200 days in a crop season turns out to be around INR3 lakh. Electric pumps, too, cost about INR35,000, but farmers in most states face erratic power supply. Other costs and service charges make electric pumps as expensive as the diesel ones.

* The population of the world in 1943 was 2.3 billion. The population of undivided India increased from 353 million in 1931 to 403 million in 1945. After partition, the population of the Indian Union was 337 million.

* India now has more women than men. According to the fifth National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) carried out by the government between 2019 and 2021, India has 1,020 women for every 1,000 men. In 2011, that figure was 943 females per 1,000 men

* India has surpassed every nation, including China and the US, in digital financial transactions. India had the highest real-time payments among businesses around the world.

* Agoraphobia (ag-uh-ruh-FOE-be-uh) is a type of anxiety disorder in which you fear and avoid places or situations that might cause you to panic and make you feel trapped, helpless or embarrassed. 

* “The castes are anti-national. In the first place because they bring about separation in social life. They are anti-national also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste.” - Dr BR Ambedkar, in his concluding speech in the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949

* "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." - Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism

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