This Week I Learned - Week #143

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft claims that Service Fabric is the foundational technology on which it runs Azure core infrastructure. It powers some of the Microsoft cloud services such as Skype, InTune, Azure Event Hubs, and Cortana.

* A new version of Firefox is shipped every six weeks. Mozilla calls this pattern "release trains".

* WPOStats compiles case studies and experiments demonstrating the impact of web performance optimization (WPO) on user experience and business metrics.

* Google Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at Google are the software engineers responsible for ensuring that all of Google’s services are super reliable and super fast, all of the time.

* Google Translate is translating one million words every second.

* India is the third-largest market for mapping services

* The Asus Chromebit taps into the demand for a simple cheap computer of the type that the failed Aakash project was supposed to service. Its central processing unit is the size of a chocolate bar, it costs about Rs 8,000 and it can be hooked to almost any external monitor and keyboard. It works off cloud storage. If Chromebit is hooked on to an old personal computer, it is a cheap and instant upgrade.

* Both Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL feature Continuum for phones, enhanced by the optional Microsoft Display Dock accessory. This Windows 10 feature allows people to use their phone like a PC by connecting it to a monitor and transforming it for larger-screen entertainment, or adding a keyboard and mouse to work like a PC with Windows 10 apps like Microsoft Office, while simultaneously taking calls or performing other tasks

* PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel defines start-ups as creators of vertical innovation and not horizontal innovation. Vertical innovation refers to new technology that has not been created before. A start-up aims to create a monopoly in a niche market, and then expand to new markets. Meanwhile, horizontal innovation (also called globalisation) is about bringing existing technology to places that don’t have it. Once a start-up finds a repeatable and scalable business model, it ceases to be a start-up. Examples of once-start-ups include YouTube, Facebook, and Alibaba. Start-ups make products that cater to a niche in ways that haven’t been done before. This makes start-ups unpredictable, because a new product may not resonate among its apparent users and may require constant adjustments before it gets there.

* Jeff Atwood writes that at Discourse.org they have a default avatar renderer which produces nice looking PNG avatars for users based on the first letter of their username, plus a color scheme selected via the hash of their username. 

* 2015 is closing with a string of weather anomalies all over the world. Scientists say the most obvious suspect in the turmoil is the climate pattern called El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean for the last few months has been dumping immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. Because atmospheric waves can travel thousands of miles, the added heat and accompanying moisture have been playing havoc with the weather in many parts of the world. Although El Niños occur every three to seven years, most of them are of moderate intensity. The current El Niño is only the third powerful El Niño to have occurred in the era of satellites and other sophisticated weather observations. It is a small data set from which to try to draw broad conclusions.

* It is  is flawed logic to base investment decisions on past performance. For instance, the Sensex which was at 3,000 levels in 1999, is 26,000 now. In the interim, it fell from 21,000 to 8,900 in 2009. Performance of asset classes will change every year.

* Between 1989 and 2001, 3,245 hectares of water bodies were lost in Hyderabad. Bengaluru had 262 lakes in 1960, but today only 10 of them hold water

* Gramener has 6 founders who all worked in IBM on the same project

* Fourth generation technology standards allow to take advantage of more bandwidth and better output. So what has been done traditionally through wired applications can be now done on wireless devices at an equal speed. So consumers with 4G devices can access high-speed data, high-definition voice and do real-time video conferencing. The network also offers superior latency for gaming. Since the high-speed data service runs on multiple frequencies, it would need a phone that can seamlessly function on multiple frequencies that are compatible with 4G network.

* Online video in India
- Rajshri Entertainment, one of the oldest players in India’s film industry, produces 200 minutes of web-only video a day which it offers free to consumers on YouTube and similar services, paid for by advertising.
- 21st Century Fox, which owns many of India’s most popular television channels through its Star India unit, began offering free online access to delayed sports broadcasts and hundreds of movies and TV shows through a website and mobile app called Hotstar. Right now, however, Hotstar is entirely free. Although about 100 advertisers help pay the bills, most of the company’s Indian revenue comes from its Star television channels
- Some Indian YouTube channels now have millions of followers, and the company says the total number of hours watched has been growing 80 percent annually. YouTube recently began allowing Indians to download and store clips for later viewing. YouTube shares the revenue from advertising around the clips, giving content creators like The Viral Fever and All India Bakchod a way to earn a bit of money, although ad rates are low — from about $1 to $4 per 1,000 viewers reached, or roughly one-tenth the rate in the United States.

* “I did things like reading the encyclopedia for fun and I was lucky in that my parents would buy me any book I wanted.” - Bill Gates (reads about 50 books in a year)