Sunday, December 31, 2017
This Week I Learned Week 189
This Week I Learned Week 189
This Week I Learned -
* You can think of microservices as �SOA done right,� with principles and patterns like autonomous services, Bounded-Context pattern and event-driven all having their roots in SOA and DDD. As the name implies, microservices architecture is an approach to build a server application as a set of small services, each service running in its own process and communicating with each other via protocols such as HTTP and WebSockets. Over the long term, microservices enable superior maintainability in large, complex and highly scalable systems by designing applications based on many independently deployable services that allow for granular release planning. Azure Service Fabric is a new platform built from the ground up and especially designed for hyperscale and microservices-based systems - MSDN Mag
* Two professors of National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, have used machine learning to create a system where bots watch a video, determine its highlights, create a relevant title for easy searching, and recommend who might want to be tagged to watch it. Their work was inspired by Microsoft Research�s COCO (Common Objects in Context). COCO is a new image recognition, segmentation, and captioning dataset that recognizes more than 300,000 images, in context, and because videos are essentially a succession of images, this dataset could help with video title generation - Microsoft Research Blog
* Cognizant recently announced that it has cloud-enabled the IT infrastructure at ACCO Brands Corporation (NYSE: ACCO), one of the world�s largest suppliers of branded school, office and consumer products and print finishing solutions, for improved business agility, performance and reduced costs. By migrating mission-critical workloads in enterprise SAP systems from an on-premise data center to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and implementing a pay-per-use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, ACCO Brands has improved the flexibility, availability and scalability of its IT environment, reducing risk and enabling it to quickly respond to changing business requirements - ET
* Videoconferencing equipment is often left vulnerable to hackers. Most of these new systems were designed with visual and audio clarity � not security � in mind. The most popular units, sold by Polycom and Cisco, can cost as much as $25,000 and feature encryption, high-definition video capture, and audio that can pick up the sound of a door opening 300 feet away. But administrators are setting them up outside the firewall and are configuring them with a false sense of security that hackers can use against them. After a security breach at the United States Chamber of Commerce last year, the Chamber discovered that its office printer, and even a thermostat in a Chamber-owned apartment, had been communicating with an Internet address in China - NY Times
* The messaging app Snapchat allows motorists to post photos that record the speed of the vehicle. The navigation app Waze rewards drivers with points when they report traffic jams and accidents. Even the game Pok�mon Go has drivers searching for virtual creatures on the nation�s highways. Most new vehicles sold today have software that connects to a smartphone and allows drivers to place phone calls, dictate texts and use apps hands-free. Ford Motor has its Sync system, for example. Others, including Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz, offer their own interfaces as well as Apple�s CarPlay and Google�s Android Auto. After steady declines over the last four decades, highway fatalities last year recorded the largest annual percentage increase in 50 years. Insurance companies, which closely track auto accidents, are convinced that the increasing use of electronic devices while driving is the biggest cause of the rise in road fatalities - NY Times
* The three-point safety belt (found in most cars today) was invented by Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin in 1959.
* In 2015, 5 million lives were lost to the diabetes, more than were claimed by AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
* When cranberries are ripe, they bounce like rubber balls
* Tirrupur is considered the knitwear capital of India accounting for 45 percent of total apparel exports in knitwear segment. 50% of the manufacturing employees are women
* 57 defaulters owe Indian banks Rs 85000 crore in bank loans.
* 40% of the worlds growth last year came from China - Economic Times
* Anil Agarwal, the London based Marwari billionaire & group chairman of the $13 billion global resource conglomerate Vedanta Plc, is a school dropout. Vedanta is the fourth largest natural resources company in the world after BHP, Rio & Glencore. His vision is to contribute to 50 percent of Indias oil production. India imports 85 percent of oil, all copper & gold by spending$400 billion on imports. India has better geology than China but produces only 6 percent of what China produces. India has the largest bauxite deposits in the world. The West has explored 73 percent while India has explored only 3.5%.
* George Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake & a pioneer of the electrical industry, was a school dropout
* The 1970 US legislation Clean Air Act, which passed the Senate unanimously, imposed national air-quality standards based on the �health of persons� rather than on the feasibility of technology or
affordability of pollution controls
* In Canada, a spate of earthquakes in Alberta within the last five years has been attributed to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, in which water, chemicals and sand are injected at high pressure into a well drilled in a shale formation to break up the rock and release oil and gas.
* The heart of Silicon Valley is a 75-mile strip of land anchored by San Francisco at one end and San Jose at the other.
* CMS leads in driving the cash cycle in India, from banks� currency chests to ATMs, to retail stores to wallets. It is the fifth largest ATM management company worldwide, and over 50 percent of all the ATM cash circulating in the country is handled by the CMS group
* 74% of income tax comes from just 0.8% of filers
* The Indian economy grew by 30 per cent between 2011 and 2016 and currency notes in circulation rose by 40 per cent. In contrast, the circulation of 500 currency notes grew by 76 per cent and 1,000 notes by 109 per cent. According to market estimates, 10-50 per cent of the value of the property being bought or sold takes place in cash in India. 35-40 per cent of the prices of SUVs and premium vehicles are paid through cash. Black economy gets heavily invested in SUVs and premium vehicles.
* On making big life changes -
- Embrace the uncertainty of life - �People make plans, and God laughs.�
- Be open to possibilities. As you reach different obstacles, make sure you spend time questioning your assumptions.
- As paths open, head down them.
* "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading" - William Styron
