This Week I Learned - Week #129

This Week I Learned -

* SAP HANA has been certified by SAP to run on both Amazon EC2 cr1 and r3.8xlarge instance types with support for production, a feature currently missing in Azure

* Eighty-seven percent of Fortune 500 customers are on the Microsoft cloud

* From a presentation by Bill Wilder:
- There is no “best” architecture – it is situational, a Technical Business Decision

- Performance is what an individual user experiences; scalability is how many users get to experience it

- Sticky Load Balancer (on Azure) has problems of its own when we get to auto-scaling

- Sharding - Horizontal scaling approach for data stores

- SLA penalties are limited to the service costs. Service costs != your business losses

* a9t9 offers free online OCR & OCR API services

* youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.

* When Microsoft releases a product, it often provides information about that product’s supported lifespan. The final stage of a product’s lifecycle is “end of extended support”. All Microsoft products eventually reach this stage of life. For example, Microsoft has posted end of extended support dates for even relatively new products like Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. In the case of Windows Server 2012 R2, end of extended support is 10th January 2023. When a product reaches end of extended support, Microsoft will no longer publicly release software updates, patches, hotfixes, technical advice, service packs, or documentation related to that product. 

* Highlights of the United Nations Broadband Commission’s most-recent findings -
- “half the world’s population—some 57 percent, or more than 4 billion people—still do not use the Internet regularly or actively
- Only five percent of the world’s 7,100 languages are represented on the Internet.
- 15 percent of Americans don’t use the Internet.

* India has the third largest Internet user base in the world and is also third largest smartphone market in the world.

* India boasts the world’s second largest developer population with 3 million software developers. 

* AT&T’s phone records database is thought to be the world’s largest unique database, at 312 terabytes

* Over 90% of all data in existence today was created in the last 2 years

* Between 2012 and 2014, the amount of data transferred over mobile networks increased by 81% per month

* The global volume of industry data nearly doubles each year. Full utilization of available data could increase retail profits alone by as much as 60% - Coursera

* Mutual funds in India can be purchased through a mobile text message & Interbank Mobile Payments Service (IMPS) facility. IMPS is a platform provided by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)

* The money you get from life insurance companies on maturity, claim or surrender is 100% tax-free provided, the premium paid did not exceed 20% of the sum assured. The insurer needs to deduct tax at source at 2% for proceeds of all taxable policies. However, to reduce the compliance burden on small taxpayers, no TDS is applicable for maturity value of less than Rs 1,00,000 - Financial Express

* Hyderabad’s IT workforce is 3.20 lakh.  Hyderabad contributes to 13 per cent of the country’s IT exports against 31 per cent from Bangalore.

* Times Group’s journalists’ tweets linked to salaries in new social media policy

* typically only one-ninth of the volume of an iceberg is above water

* ..the average American had only one real friend

* “The opposite of loneliness is not togetherness, it’s intimacy.” - Richard Bach

* "Life is to be enjoyed, not just endured.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

* “Nowadays, people are sitting 9.3 hours a day… Sitting has become the smoking of our generation.” - Nilofer Merchant

* The word "pocket dial" is officially recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary since August 2015. Pocket dialing (also known as pocket calling or butt dialing) refers to the accidental placement of a phone call while a person's mobile phone or cordless phone is in the owner's pocket or handbag.