This Week I Learned -
* The first chapter of the book "Azure SQL Revealed" [PDF] covers the history of Azure. Fun fact: Windows Azure was officially launched on February 1, 2010 and, along with it, the first truly PaaS relational database service in the industry, SQL Azure
* React interacts with HTML documents through a 'virtual DOM,' which is a copy of the actual DOM, but all of the elements are represented as JavaScript objects. These elements, along with React’s declarative programming style and one-way data binding, simplify and speed up development. The biggest similarity it shares with Vue is the use of the virtual DOM.
* BigQuery is Google’s serverless cloud data warehouse.
* Accessibility Insights for Web is a browser extension that helps developers find and fix accessibility issues
* Many enterprises consider hybrid cloud environment their ideal operating model. For these enterprises, running a mixed model of private cloud, public cloud, and traditional datacenter more often than any other is a stepping stone toward a fully integrated hybrid cloud environment.
* Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor.
* Cloud adoption anti-patterns to avoid - Using a single subscription can lead to poorly governed and designed landscapes. There is also a possibility of running into subscription limits.
* IT Outsourcing (ITO) is the practice of using external resources, or subcontracting, some or all of the information technology (IT) functions required by a business. A company using IT outsourcing can choose to use one provider for all their IT functions or split the work among multiple providers.
* IT transformation is the strategic and comprehensive upgrade of an organization's hardware, software, and practices to prepare for future challenges.
* Any console application can be converted to an HTTP web service in Azure Functions.
* In Assess phase of migration projects, we need to perform rapid discovery of customer environment and prepare TCO analysis based on the inventory we find to help the customer in understanding the business case for moving into cloud. All of these can be delivered by leveraging AWS Migration Evaluator service.
* Non-volatile memory is an innovative hardware improvement that delivers a unique combination of affordable large memory capacity and data persistence (non-volatility). It can help boost the performance of data-intensive applications, such as in-memory analytics, databases, content delivery networks, and high-performance computing (HPC). It’s generally regarded to be the most significant innovation in memory hardware in decades. A prominent example of non-volatile memory is Intel Optane Persistent Memory
* An inventory of tools and resources about CyberSecurity
* By compromising just one vendor, attackers may get access to all the vendor’s customers in a supply chain attack. SolarWinds may be a seismic event in government cybersecurity, but it's not the first major supply chain attack we've seen. In the SolarWinds case, one of the higher-profile companies breached was FireEye, one of the most well-known cybersecurity vendors.
* Supply chain attacks targeting open source software projects are a major issue for enterprises. In the 2017 Equifax breach, which the company said cost it nearly $2 billion, attackers took advantage of an unpatched Apache Struts vulnerability.
* Open-source software tools and Vault maker, HashiCorp has disclosed that the recent Codecov supply-chain attack had impacted a subset of their Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines. Codecov provides tools that help developers measure how much of the source code executes during testing, a process known as code coverage, which indicates the potential for undetected bugs being present in the code.
* The ImageNet project officially started in 2007. It is an ongoing research effort to provide researchers around the world with image data for training large-scale object recognition models. The dataset contains more than 15 million of labeled high-resolution images covering almost 22,000 categories. The project has been instrumental in advancing computer vision and deep learning research. The data is available for free to researchers for non-commercial use.
* Building upon this idea of training image classification models on ImageNet Dataset, in 2010 annual image classification competition was launched known as ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge or ILSVRC. ILSVRC uses the smaller portion of the ImageNet consisting of only 1000 categories. The total count of training images is 1.3 million, accompanied by 50,000 validation images, and 1,00,000 testing images. The models participating in this competition have to perform object detection and image classification tasks at large scale and models that achieve the minimal top-1 and top-5 error rates (top-5 error rate would be the percent of images where the correct label is not one of the model’s five most likely labels) are announced as the winner.
* In the first year of the ILSVRC competition, every team had an error rate of at least 25%. In the 2012 competition, a team from the University of Toronto submitted AlexNet – a deep convolutional neural network architecture. AlexNet shockingly surpassed that error rate with 15.3. AlexNet is often regarded as the pioneer of the convolutional neural network and starting point of the Deep Learning boom. Training on ImageNet gave models a big boost, requiring only fine-tuning for other recognition tasks. Convolutional neural networks trained in this manner find patterns at the pixel level, making thousands of computations through ascending fields of abstraction – a concept called transfer learning. These convolutional neural networks are finding their way into everyday life, like Facebook automatically recommending photo tags, iPhone’s voice recognition, and autonomous vehicles detecting surrounding objects. Deep learning is also becoming an important component of medical imaging.
* AlexNet was outperformed by Microsoft Research Asia's very deep CNN with over 100 layers, ResNet (Residual Network), which won the ImageNet 2015 contest. The error rate was 3.57%.
* In 2017, research was conducted that compared the state-of-the-art neural networks and a human’s performance on ImageNet Dataset. In the research, it was found that the neural network was able to achieve a top-5 error rate of 3.57% whereas humans performance was restricted to a top-5 error rate of 5.1%. This result clearly suggests that deep neural networks are able to perform better in recognizing objects and classifying objects than humans.
* Image recognition deep neural networks (DNN), are making inroads in areas of medical diagnostics such as:
- Diabetic retinopathy screening
- Classification of skin lesions
- Detection of lymph node metastasis
* Remoras or suckerfish are large, gray, parasitic fish usually found stuck to the sides of sharks, manta rays, and other large species. Remoras are not dangerous to their hosts. They simply attach to the larger animal and hitch a ride. Remoras adhere by means of a flat, oval sucking disk on top of the head. Sharks do not eat pilot fish because pilot fish eat their parasites. Small pilot fish are often seen swimming into the mouth of a shark to eat small pieces of food from the shark's teeth. Depending on the species, remora can travel attached to the body of sharks, rays, swordfishes, marlins, sea turtles or large marine mammals such as dugongs and whales. Some species of remora live inside the mouth of large sharks and rays. They eat bacteria and scraps of food.
* Daniel Dines struggled with life in the U.S. after leaving his native Romania in 2001 to work for Microsoft Corp., but the experience created the foundation for one of the world’s biggest fortunes. The software programmer returned to his homeland in 2005 to start the business known today as UiPath Inc. The company’s software performs many low-skilled tasks that businesses once outsourced to humans in cheaper-wage countries such as India or the Philippines. Known as robotic process automation technology, the technique takes over repetitive, routine data-entry and processing tasks. - Bloomberg
* A bibliomane is a person with a passionate enthusiasm for collecting and possessing books
* The Dividend option for Mutual Funds is renamed as Income Distribution cum Capital Withdrawal (IDCW) option for all Schemes effective from April 1, 2021
* Index Funds vs ETFs -The units of ETFs can be bought and sold on the stock exchanges, as the name suggests. Therefore, if you are to invest in ETFs, then you mandatorily need to have a Demat account. Demat accounts are not compulsory to invest in index funds.
* Tax Loss Harvesting doesn’t help to nullify the losses, but it can reduce your suffering by helping you save taxes. Long-term capital losses can be set-off against only long-term capital gains. You cannot set-off long-term capital losses against short-term capital gains. Short-term capital losses can be set-off against either short-term capital gains or long-term capital gains.
* The returns for Scheme E of Tier I & Tier II of National Pension Scheme (NPS) plans may be different even though the same Fund Manager is managing both.
* Domiciliary hospitalization, if included in the health insurance policy, will cover the expenses only if the treatment lasts at least three days, or 72 hours, based on how critical the situation is, availability of beds, among other factors.
* Cave no. 16 of Ellora caves in India , features the largest single monolithic rock excavation in the world. It is one of the 34 cave temples and monasteries known collectively as the Ellora Caves.
* General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man well known for his planning ability, once observed that “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” This quote captures the idea that events can render the concrete details of plans obsolete yet also maintains the utility of the planning process and the important information it provides. Any adopted methodology must handle change gracefully, as there will be significant changes throughout the project—very likely many of them. Plan well and thoroughly, but be prepared to adapt your plans as events unfold.
* "Upgades, people, upgrades. That's how we make the dough" (from "outmodes") - Ratchet, Robots (2005)
* “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
0 Comments