This Week I Learned - Week #133

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft’s cloud business has grown by 8 percent, to $5.9 billion.

* PowerShell one-liner to list the VM names, cloud service names and availability set names (if any) for all your VMs -
(Get-AzureService).servicename | foreach {Get-AzureVM -ServiceName $_ } | select name,AvailabilitySetName

* SQLIO (SQLIO Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool) is a tool provided by Microsoft which can also be used to determine the I/O capacity of a given configuration.

* This PowerShell script sample from Technet Gallery demonstrates how to utilize Azure PowerShell to deploy a Windows based virtual machine from the Azure image gallery and configure Storage Spaces to get the highest storage performance currently available.

* Solid-state drives (SSDs) are in a class of their own that deliver extremely high random I/O performance, often a factor of 20+ over that of 15,000 RPM hard disks. 

* IBM has set up its first public cloud data centre in Chennai

* "It took Google – which just last year settled a 7-yearlong $1-billion lawsuit with cable company Viacom Inc. for YouTube’s “immoral” business model of broadcasting copyrighted content – 8 years to break even with its $1.6-billion purchase of YouTube."

* People (not Twitter) invented new ways to communicate over Twitter. The ideas of hashtags, tweetstorms, and retweets came from folks outside of Twitter like Chris Messina, Marc Andreesen, and Tim O'Reilly.

* Internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth was at one time one of the developers of the Debian operating system & later funded the development of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian

* Google gets 95 per cent of its $66-billion revenue from selling advertising.

* To change the Microsoft account you use on your phone, you first have to reset your phone to factory settings. This will delete any content and settings you've added to your phone, including music, videos, pictures, apps, games, documents, and accounts. Huh!

* The Front-End Handbook by Cody Lindley is available for free download in a variety of formats

* Eligible Kindle books can be lent to another reader for 14 days

* The memory footprint of the Flipkart app is 10 MB, while the size of Snapdeal Android app is 8.42MB and Amazon(varying on different devices) is 9.25MB

* Under 10% of India’s population is insured

* Richest 1% own 53% of India’s wealth

* The Indian travel and tourism market is a 42 billion USD industry, and will be growing at a CAGR of 10.2 percent over the next 10 years. Online travel agents (OTA) account for 17.5 percent of total gross bookings.

* The Tamil contribution to Agra's famed petha is that the humble pooshnikai or ash gourd used in the sweetmeat is grown on fields in Madurai & sent North - The Hindu

* The simple looking USB drive has complex parts & can be dangerous