This Week I Learned - Week #170

This Week I Learned -

* You can use Always Encrypted to help ensure that your sensitive data remains private and confidential while it's stored and queried in Azure SQL Database

* Azure Automation schedules now support time zones and adjust for daylight saving based on the schedule’s time zone.

* Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows on the inside. They allow you to run applications insulated from the rest of the system, within portable containers that include everything an application needs to be fully functional. As they did with Linux, containers will change the nature of the software supply chain for Windows users.

* Bing API v5 service differentiates between a DOS attack and QPS (queries per second) violation. If the service suspects a denial of service attack, the request will succeed (HTTP status code is 200 OK); however, the body of the response will be empty. If you exceed your QPM (queries per month), the request fails with HTTP status code 403, and if you exceed your QPS, the request fails with HTTP status code 429. The response will also include the Retry-After header, which contains the number of seconds that you should wait before sending another request - MSDN

* It's been almost two years (August 2014) since Google announced that HTTPS was a ranking signal. As of late June, SEOMoz's tracking data shows that 32.5% (almost one-third) of page-1 Google results now use the "https:" protocol.

* Any major change from HTTP to HTTPS for sitewide URLs is risky, especially for large sites.

* There are more than 3 billion internet users who access it using 8.1 billion connected devices, including more than 24,000 distinct mobile device types.

* There are 12,106 W3C specified APIs and no browser implements them all

* Over the last year (June 2015-May 2016) 2.07% were running IE8, a browser that Microsoft no longer patches; the same goes for more than three-quarters of the 1.59% on IE9 and for virtually all of the 10.95% who ran IE10 

* Webcompat.com is a place to report bugs from any website across the web

* Tesla the inventor:
- He was a polyglot, speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin
- Tesla felt that thought could be photographed ultimately. He believed we would develop ways to see thought and that people would communicate with their thoughts. He had so many phobias that he couldn't have had close relationships with women. He didn't like most of the jewelry that they wore or the perfume, and he couldn't bear to touch hair. In fact, he didn't like to shake hands.
- Tesla underwent a debilitating trauma a few years after recovering from cholera. This time, the nature of the illness and its causes were a complete mystery. Tesla's physical senses, which had always been remarkably acute, seemed to go inexplicably into overdrive, paralyzing him with an overabundance of sensation. Tesla shunned physical contact with other people, with a special aversion to touching hair. To avoid shaking hands with people he met, Tesla lied that he had injured his hands in a laboratory accident.
- Tesla claimed to never sleep more than two hours
- In middle age, Tesla became a close friend of Mark Twain; they spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere
- Tesla could be harsh at times and openly expressed disgust for overweight people, such as when he fired a secretary because of her weight. He was quick to criticize clothing; on several occasions, Tesla directed a subordinate to go home and change her dress
- Tesla had serious differences with Edison & Marconi & a lot of animosity
- In 1917..Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal
- Tesla obtained around 300 patents worldwide for his inventions

* Mexico which has one of the highest prevalence rates for obesity in the world,  introduced a 8% "sin tax" on energy dense food (275 kcal/100 g).

* India is the largest importer of defense related equipment in the world. Of its annual spend of over $50 Billion on arms, over 50% of that is spent on imports.

* The son of a government bureaucrat, Subramanian Swamy was raised in New Delhi but left in 1962 to pursue a doctorate in economics at Harvard, the beginning of a nearly 50-year affiliation with the university, as an associate professor and summer lecturer. Over the years, Mr. Swamy has served five terms in Parliament for two different parties that have since become part of Mr. Modi’s governing party. He settled into a routine of spending winters in India and summers teaching at Harvard. Mr. Swamy’s wife, Roxna, is a member of the Parsi community, which emigrated centuries ago from Iran. One of his sons-in-law is Muslim. He has nearly three million Twitter followers - NY Times

* The journalist, Suhasini Haider is Subramanian Swamy's daughter

* Steve Wozniak stayed at Hewlett-Packard before he finally jumped to Apple. Bill Gates stayed at Harvard until he wrote the first code for what became Microsoft Basic. Larry Page and Sergey Brin stayed in graduate school until Google started to become viable as a business. They even tried to sell their business to Yahoo for one million but Yahoo said no.

* America is a little different from Japan, but ultimately it’s all the same. We’re all the same in that we’re enticed into the false illusion of happiness through material purchase.

* Aedes albopictus, known as the Asian tiger mosquito, is found on Long Island and is capable of transmitting Zika in a laboratory setting. As bats eat flying insects, including mosquitoes, a Long Island town is using bat houses in several parks to attract more bats to the area. Bats can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes per hour. New York State is home to nine bat species — none of them vampire bats. New York State is home to nine bat species — none of them vampire bats. Less than one-half of 1 percent of all bats in North America carry rabies, according to the Humane Society of the United States - NY Times

* Sir John Chilcot’s 12 volume report covering 2.6 million words (the complete works of Shakespeare contain 8,85,000 words) found that not all peaceful options had been exhausted in the lead up to the war and the invasion was by no means a final resort. His inquiry took 7 years, a year longer than the 6 year Iraq war.

* Like Machine Learning - "A passion is a theory. Now you have to test your theory. The world is your laboratory. Construct the experiment that will test your theory. Then test and test and test and tweak and test more" - James Altucher