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
Showing posts with label Browsers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Browsers. Show all posts
Friday, 8 July 2016
Thursday, 16 June 2016
Browsers give away device name through user agent - Et tu Browser!
My mobile browser has been letting the websites I visit know what handset I use and I wouldn't have known this until I saw this targeted ad - an ad for case for Lumia 530
I knew about browser user-agent strings, but today I learnt that browsers give away device model name as well, through the user agent they expose -
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530 Dual SIM) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530 Dual SIM) like Gecko
Cookies, prying sites like Google, Facebook, apps like TrueCaller know more about me than my friends and family. Good-bye privacy!
Saturday, 11 June 2016
Google Chrome Notification Alerts
The Push Notifications API feature in Google Chrome allows websites that you give permission to the ability to send you notifications and alerts – even when the website isn’t open in a tab.
Web Push works hand-in-hand with other cool features like Service Workers and Web Manifests to help ‘app-ify’ websites on mobile and desktops.
Notify.js is a simple wrapper for the Web Notification API.
You can block the notification feature completely in the Google Chrome browser if you have no use for it.
If you’re browsing in incognito mode, you won’t get notifications.
Saturday, 12 March 2016
This Week I Learned - Week #153
This Week I Learned -
* You can integrate your web, mobile, or API apps with your V1 or V2 virtual networks.
* HockeyApp provides mobile app distribution, crash reporting, and in-app user feedback so you can build the world’s best mobile apps.
* Azure DNS is an Azure Resource Manager–only service, it is not supported in the Azure classic portal.
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux images are now generally available and offered through Azure Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go model with per-hour billing.
* Developers who used Facebook's Parse hosting (which is now closed) as the backend to support their mobile apps, can now utilize Azure App Service.
* Google's Chrome Music Lab makes use of Web Audio API, an open web standard that lets you create and manipulate sound right in the browser.
* ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library. The ZXing Decoder Online web application is powered by the barcode scanning implementation in the open source ZXing project.
* ZXing (zebra crossing) provides the capability to initiate the bar code scanner via a webpage through a button click event, anchor tag, or other action that could call a URL on a mobile device.
When the barcode scanner application is installed on an android device, a URL call to:
zxing://scan/?ret=http://foo.com/products/{CODE}/description&SCAN_FORMATS=UPC_A,EAN_13
...will bring up the device bar code reader, the user scans the code, and the code is returned via the callback URL parameter supplied in the zxing URL.
* EAN, or EAN13, stands for European Article Number. The EAN includes the country of origin, the manufacturer, a product number & a checksum digit. When you only look at the barcode, you can't easily see which product it belongs to. EAN-Search.org website provides a reverse EAN lookup, that tells you the product the EAN code belongs to.
* 13-digit EAN-13 barcode format is the most common format used in India. UPC barcodes are 12 digits long, and are used mainly in the USA. EAN barcodes are usually 13 digits long, and they are used all over the world. Any number system which starts with the digit 0 is a UPC-A bar code. Most barcode scanners can read both types of barcode.
* As an affiliate of GS1 Global - a not-for-profit, industry-led global standards body, GS1 India (set up by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Governmentof India along with leading Chambers of Commerce and Industry, BIS etc in 1996 as a not-for-profit, independent standards body) administers and allocates GS1 product identifiers used in barcoding for unique and universal identification of supply chain objects, i.e. - products, logistic items, trading partners, locations, documents, assets etc. and other GS1 Standards.
* Google Shopping feeds targeting Australia, Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom or the United States require merchants to submit valid Global Trade Item Number or ‘gtin’.
* Open Food Facts is a free, open and collaborative database of food products from the entire world.
* Facebook's Bug Bounty Program fetches 22-year-old Flipkart security engineer, Anand Prakash $15,000
* Cortana, Microsoft's voice-based virtual assistant, is also popular AI character in Microsoft's blockbuster video game franchise, Halo.
* The Hindu BusinessLine series covering the plans, proposals, strengths and weaknesses of the top 20 cities that the Government has identified for the 'Smart Cities' program is timely & insightful
* In 2002, Australian scientist Karl Kruszelnicki won an Ig Nobel Prize (link is external), a parody of the Nobel Prize award that “honors achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”, for his year-long belly button lint study of some 5,000 individuals. His main finding was that belly button lint is more prevalent in people with stomach hair, affects more men than women, and is made up of clothing fibers. The main engine of this process is belly hairs that act similar to a conveyer belt directing the fibers into the navel. Deep navels, poor hygiene, and obesity may result in more lint. Top-loading machines tend to be rougher on clothing than front-loading machines resulting in larger quantities of dislodged fibers that remain on the clothing, which then can result in more lint - Go Ask Alice
* You can integrate your web, mobile, or API apps with your V1 or V2 virtual networks.
* HockeyApp provides mobile app distribution, crash reporting, and in-app user feedback so you can build the world’s best mobile apps.
* Azure DNS is an Azure Resource Manager–only service, it is not supported in the Azure classic portal.
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux images are now generally available and offered through Azure Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go model with per-hour billing.
* Developers who used Facebook's Parse hosting (which is now closed) as the backend to support their mobile apps, can now utilize Azure App Service.
* Google's Chrome Music Lab makes use of Web Audio API, an open web standard that lets you create and manipulate sound right in the browser.
* ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library. The ZXing Decoder Online web application is powered by the barcode scanning implementation in the open source ZXing project.
* ZXing (zebra crossing) provides the capability to initiate the bar code scanner via a webpage through a button click event, anchor tag, or other action that could call a URL on a mobile device.
When the barcode scanner application is installed on an android device, a URL call to:
zxing://scan/?ret=http://foo.com/products/{CODE}/description&SCAN_FORMATS=UPC_A,EAN_13
...will bring up the device bar code reader, the user scans the code, and the code is returned via the callback URL parameter supplied in the zxing URL.
* EAN, or EAN13, stands for European Article Number. The EAN includes the country of origin, the manufacturer, a product number & a checksum digit. When you only look at the barcode, you can't easily see which product it belongs to. EAN-Search.org website provides a reverse EAN lookup, that tells you the product the EAN code belongs to.
* 13-digit EAN-13 barcode format is the most common format used in India. UPC barcodes are 12 digits long, and are used mainly in the USA. EAN barcodes are usually 13 digits long, and they are used all over the world. Any number system which starts with the digit 0 is a UPC-A bar code. Most barcode scanners can read both types of barcode.
* As an affiliate of GS1 Global - a not-for-profit, industry-led global standards body, GS1 India (set up by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Governmentof India along with leading Chambers of Commerce and Industry, BIS etc in 1996 as a not-for-profit, independent standards body) administers and allocates GS1 product identifiers used in barcoding for unique and universal identification of supply chain objects, i.e. - products, logistic items, trading partners, locations, documents, assets etc. and other GS1 Standards.
* Google Shopping feeds targeting Australia, Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom or the United States require merchants to submit valid Global Trade Item Number or ‘gtin’.
* Open Food Facts is a free, open and collaborative database of food products from the entire world.
* Facebook's Bug Bounty Program fetches 22-year-old Flipkart security engineer, Anand Prakash $15,000
* Cortana, Microsoft's voice-based virtual assistant, is also popular AI character in Microsoft's blockbuster video game franchise, Halo.
* The Hindu BusinessLine series covering the plans, proposals, strengths and weaknesses of the top 20 cities that the Government has identified for the 'Smart Cities' program is timely & insightful
* In 2002, Australian scientist Karl Kruszelnicki won an Ig Nobel Prize (link is external), a parody of the Nobel Prize award that “honors achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”, for his year-long belly button lint study of some 5,000 individuals. His main finding was that belly button lint is more prevalent in people with stomach hair, affects more men than women, and is made up of clothing fibers. The main engine of this process is belly hairs that act similar to a conveyer belt directing the fibers into the navel. Deep navels, poor hygiene, and obesity may result in more lint. Top-loading machines tend to be rougher on clothing than front-loading machines resulting in larger quantities of dislodged fibers that remain on the clothing, which then can result in more lint - Go Ask Alice
Sunday, 14 February 2016
This Week I Learned - Week #149
This Week I Learned -
* Azure's new CDN experience is built on the Azure Resource Manager. It allows you to preload individual assets to your CDN endpoint and purge individual cached assets or entire directories from your CDN endpoints.
* Netflix started migrating their systems to AWS in August of 2008 and "..in early January, 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service!". Notes from Netflix Tech Blog articles:
- "By incorporating the principles of redundancy and graceful degradation in our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills using Simian Army, it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure and within our own systems without impacting the member experience."
- To deal with fault-tolerance & be proactive, Netflix has built a Simian Army suite of tools to induce various kinds of failures, or detect abnormal conditions, and test Netflix's ability to survive them.
- Cost reduction was not the main reason Netflix decided to move to the cloud though it ended up being a fraction of those in the data center -- a welcome side benefit.
- "..the easiest way to move to the cloud is to forklift all of the systems, unchanged, out of the data center and drop them in AWS. But in doing so, you end up moving all the problems and limitations of the data center along with it. Instead, we chose the cloud-native approach, rebuilding virtually all of our technology and fundamentally changing the way we operate the company."
- "Architecturally, we migrated from a monolithic app to hundreds of micro-services, and denormalized and our data model, using NoSQL databases. Budget approvals, centralized release coordination and multi-week hardware provisioning cycles made way to continuous delivery, engineering teams making independent decisions using self service tools in a loosely coupled DevOps environment, helping accelerate innovation."
* JSON.NET is the recommended library to serialize and deserialize JSON in .NET
* HTML, CSS & JavaScript consist of more than 300 W3C specifications from over 400 member organizations. No browser implements every standard, and in fact more than a third of web standards aren’t implemented by any of the most popular browsers - Windows Blog
* Personal assistant programs like Cortana and Apple’s Siri need access to your location, your contacts, voice input, information from email and text messages, browser history, search history, calendar details “and other information.”. Companies often claim this is to provide more relevant results, but the data may also be used to help send more targeted advertisements your way - NY Times
* Steve Kangas coined the term bookmarklet as a portmanteau (a word created from two other words) of bookmark and applet.
* Befunky is an online app that can turns your photographs into interesting cartoons without requiring any software.
* Tableizer is an online web app that can convert Spreadsheets into HTML Table format
* Six out of the eight startups valued at over $1 billion have domiciled outside India, either in Singapore or US. In 2014, 54% of all new-age startups raising money chose to domicile outside India.
* Uber claims it has a little over 250,000 driver partners on its platform in India. Ola says it has over 350,000.
* The online grocery market in India valued at $200 million annually. Amazon has set the cat among the pigeons by deciding to get into the already crowded hyperlocal grocery delivery market. Currently cornered by BigBasket, Grofers and Peppertap - Business Standard
* Amit Singhal, the senior vice president for search, and one of the earliest builders of Google’s global system, announced that he would retire on Feb. 26. Singhal, 48, joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. One of his earliest jobs at Google was rewriting the initial breakthrough algorithms. "When a regular person hits a wall and gets discouraged, that’s when Amit is just getting started." - Matt Cutts
* StatCrunch is a statistical data analysis package that takes data from a web page through a user-initiated bookmarklet click.
* The United States Air Force facility commonly known as Area 51 is a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, within the Nevada Test and Training Range. The base's current primary purpose is publicly unknown. Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a focus of modern UFO and conspiracy theories - Wikipedia
* If you consume fewer calories than your body requires for daily operations, it turns to internal sources of fuel. Those sources consist of body fat and lean tissue, meaning muscle. The problem with losing muscle is that, unlike fat tissue, muscle burns calories. Having less muscle means a lower resting metabolic rate, so you burn fewer calories throughout the day. Losing muscle may also discourage physical activity, which is important for maintaining weight loss. Extra protein is advisable during weight loss to avoid stripping yourself of muscle. Exercise is also key, particularly weight training, since it is known to build muscle. - NY Times
* Blame it on Lead: Exposure to lead has been linked to reduced reading scores, oppositional behavior and increased rates of teen pregnancy.
* Cockroaches choose from one of several preferred trajectories when running from a predator, and that variability is enough to confound their attackers most of the time. Although there was some variability, the researchers discovered that over repeated tests this angle of escape ranged from about 90 degrees (at a right angle to the direction of the threat) to 180 degrees (the opposite direction), with peaks, or preferred trajectories, of about 90, 120, 150 and 180 degrees - NY Times
* Kaushik Jayaram and Robert J. Full, who work on technology inspired by biology, were drawn to roaches as a model for soft robots. Cockroaches can tolerate pressure equivalent to 900 times their body weight. When pressed flat enough that their legs splayed, they could still move about 20 body lengths a second. They can tolerate flattening not because the roach exoskeleton is soft, but because it is composed of rigid plates connected by more flexible tissue.
* Some consolation - A court in Saudi Arabia revised the punishment given to a stateless Palestinian poet convicted of apostasy, reducing it from death to eight years in prison, 800 lashes and public repentance
* Artur Fischer, a German inventor who registered more than 1,100 patents is ahead of Thomas Edison, who had 1,093 patents to his name. He was nearsighted, short and lacked a high school diploma. What Bill Gates was to the personal computer, Artur Fischer is to do-it-yourself home repair. At 27 years of age, he founded his own company, the Fischer Group, which today has 42 international subsidiaries, employs 4,000 people worldwide and sells its 14,000 products in more than 100 countries. One of Mr. Fischer’s most recent inventions is a gadget that makes it possible to hold and cut the top off an egg of any size. He got started on the problem when a hotel owner complained to him that his guests, on opening their boiled eggs for breakfast, always made a mess — the year was 1946.
* Iraq depends on oil for 90% of its revenue
* India is the world’s largest meat exporter.
* Azure's new CDN experience is built on the Azure Resource Manager. It allows you to preload individual assets to your CDN endpoint and purge individual cached assets or entire directories from your CDN endpoints.
* Netflix started migrating their systems to AWS in August of 2008 and "..in early January, 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service!". Notes from Netflix Tech Blog articles:
- "By incorporating the principles of redundancy and graceful degradation in our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills using Simian Army, it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure and within our own systems without impacting the member experience."
- To deal with fault-tolerance & be proactive, Netflix has built a Simian Army suite of tools to induce various kinds of failures, or detect abnormal conditions, and test Netflix's ability to survive them.
- Cost reduction was not the main reason Netflix decided to move to the cloud though it ended up being a fraction of those in the data center -- a welcome side benefit.
- "..the easiest way to move to the cloud is to forklift all of the systems, unchanged, out of the data center and drop them in AWS. But in doing so, you end up moving all the problems and limitations of the data center along with it. Instead, we chose the cloud-native approach, rebuilding virtually all of our technology and fundamentally changing the way we operate the company."
- "Architecturally, we migrated from a monolithic app to hundreds of micro-services, and denormalized and our data model, using NoSQL databases. Budget approvals, centralized release coordination and multi-week hardware provisioning cycles made way to continuous delivery, engineering teams making independent decisions using self service tools in a loosely coupled DevOps environment, helping accelerate innovation."
* JSON.NET is the recommended library to serialize and deserialize JSON in .NET
* HTML, CSS & JavaScript consist of more than 300 W3C specifications from over 400 member organizations. No browser implements every standard, and in fact more than a third of web standards aren’t implemented by any of the most popular browsers - Windows Blog
* Personal assistant programs like Cortana and Apple’s Siri need access to your location, your contacts, voice input, information from email and text messages, browser history, search history, calendar details “and other information.”. Companies often claim this is to provide more relevant results, but the data may also be used to help send more targeted advertisements your way - NY Times
* Steve Kangas coined the term bookmarklet as a portmanteau (a word created from two other words) of bookmark and applet.
* Befunky is an online app that can turns your photographs into interesting cartoons without requiring any software.
* Tableizer is an online web app that can convert Spreadsheets into HTML Table format
* Six out of the eight startups valued at over $1 billion have domiciled outside India, either in Singapore or US. In 2014, 54% of all new-age startups raising money chose to domicile outside India.
* Uber claims it has a little over 250,000 driver partners on its platform in India. Ola says it has over 350,000.
* The online grocery market in India valued at $200 million annually. Amazon has set the cat among the pigeons by deciding to get into the already crowded hyperlocal grocery delivery market. Currently cornered by BigBasket, Grofers and Peppertap - Business Standard
* Amit Singhal, the senior vice president for search, and one of the earliest builders of Google’s global system, announced that he would retire on Feb. 26. Singhal, 48, joined Google in 2000 as employee No. 176. One of his earliest jobs at Google was rewriting the initial breakthrough algorithms. "When a regular person hits a wall and gets discouraged, that’s when Amit is just getting started." - Matt Cutts
* StatCrunch is a statistical data analysis package that takes data from a web page through a user-initiated bookmarklet click.
* The United States Air Force facility commonly known as Area 51 is a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base, within the Nevada Test and Training Range. The base's current primary purpose is publicly unknown. Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a focus of modern UFO and conspiracy theories - Wikipedia
* If you consume fewer calories than your body requires for daily operations, it turns to internal sources of fuel. Those sources consist of body fat and lean tissue, meaning muscle. The problem with losing muscle is that, unlike fat tissue, muscle burns calories. Having less muscle means a lower resting metabolic rate, so you burn fewer calories throughout the day. Losing muscle may also discourage physical activity, which is important for maintaining weight loss. Extra protein is advisable during weight loss to avoid stripping yourself of muscle. Exercise is also key, particularly weight training, since it is known to build muscle. - NY Times
* Blame it on Lead: Exposure to lead has been linked to reduced reading scores, oppositional behavior and increased rates of teen pregnancy.
* Cockroaches choose from one of several preferred trajectories when running from a predator, and that variability is enough to confound their attackers most of the time. Although there was some variability, the researchers discovered that over repeated tests this angle of escape ranged from about 90 degrees (at a right angle to the direction of the threat) to 180 degrees (the opposite direction), with peaks, or preferred trajectories, of about 90, 120, 150 and 180 degrees - NY Times
* Kaushik Jayaram and Robert J. Full, who work on technology inspired by biology, were drawn to roaches as a model for soft robots. Cockroaches can tolerate pressure equivalent to 900 times their body weight. When pressed flat enough that their legs splayed, they could still move about 20 body lengths a second. They can tolerate flattening not because the roach exoskeleton is soft, but because it is composed of rigid plates connected by more flexible tissue.
* Some consolation - A court in Saudi Arabia revised the punishment given to a stateless Palestinian poet convicted of apostasy, reducing it from death to eight years in prison, 800 lashes and public repentance
* Artur Fischer, a German inventor who registered more than 1,100 patents is ahead of Thomas Edison, who had 1,093 patents to his name. He was nearsighted, short and lacked a high school diploma. What Bill Gates was to the personal computer, Artur Fischer is to do-it-yourself home repair. At 27 years of age, he founded his own company, the Fischer Group, which today has 42 international subsidiaries, employs 4,000 people worldwide and sells its 14,000 products in more than 100 countries. One of Mr. Fischer’s most recent inventions is a gadget that makes it possible to hold and cut the top off an egg of any size. He got started on the problem when a hotel owner complained to him that his guests, on opening their boiled eggs for breakfast, always made a mess — the year was 1946.
* Iraq depends on oil for 90% of its revenue
* India is the world’s largest meat exporter.
Sunday, 31 January 2016
This Week I Learned - Week #147
This Week I Learned -
* With REST APIs for spell checking, computer vision (including detecting if image is racy or pornographic in nature), face detection & recognition, emotion recognition, motion detection & tracking faces in video, speech recognition & synthesis, voice recognition, Microsoft's Project Oxford is amazing!
* json2csharp site takes JSON as an input and provides you the C# object model.
* The Firefox 1.0 installable was around 4.5 Mb when it came out in 2004
* Google CEO Larry Page tends to focus on how to make a sizable business out of whatever problem this or that technology might solve....he knows the right questions to ask....a question he likes to ask: “Why can’t this be bigger?”
* ..the most valuable asset on the WhatsApp platform is the free user-generated data, mostly generated real-time, by close to a billion users that it has worldwide, without paying for it. “There is a lot of consumer intent and interest which is captured on WhatsApp.”
* The Indian IT industry created 3 million jobs for achieve the first $100 billion
* With over 100 development and delivery centers worldwide and approximately 219,300 employees as of September 30, 2015, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500
* According to LinkedIn, the top three hottest in-demand-skills in the Indian job market are:
Cloud and Distributed Computing
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
Storage Systems and Management
* One out of three Swedish companies based in India feel that 'not paying tax was a competitive disadvantage'. Scam-tainted & now defunct Enron paid $20 million as "educational gifts" in 2001. Critics consider these payments to be bribes to clear the project
* Life Insurance Corporation of India's (LIC) claim settlement at 98.19 per cent is better than the entire private sector’s 89.40 per cent.
* India is a sub-4 metre paradise as compact cars form 70% of market. From 34 models in FY12 to 47 models in FY16, in five years, the industry has added thirteen new models. 9 years ago, this segment opened up in India after the government lowered the excise duty to 12 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for bigger cars.
* The Sensex has slid 18.5 per cent from its January 2015 peak, nearing the 20 per cent level that some investors consider bear-market territory. The worst start to a year for global stocks extended into a third week as oil sank to a fresh 12-year low. Brent crude oil briefly fell below $28 a barrel as Iran pledged to boost exports and Nomura Holdings Inc predicted a potential drop to $25. A 14.7 per cent fall in exports in December last year, coupled with a widening of the trade deficit by 27.1 per cent during the same period, hit sentiment ... - The Business Standard
* When the Sensex crashed to 8,160 in March 2009 due to global economic crisis, it was back to 14,300-level two months later in May — a recovery of 75 per cent. Within seven months, it touched 17,300-level, or 112 per cent.
* The Shah Bano case - Shah Bano, a Muslim mother of five children, was divorced by her husband in 1978. She filed a criminal suit in which the Supreme Court ruled in her favour and she won the right to alimony from her husband. However, the then Congress government, enacted the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. The most controversial provision of the Act was that it gave a Muslim woman the right to maintenance for the period of iddat (about three months) after the divorce, and shifted the onus of maintaining her to her relatives or the Wakf Board. The Act was seen as discriminatory as it denied divorced Muslim women the right to basic maintenance which women of other faiths had recourse to under secular law.
* India’s Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the country’s large cities must provide shelter for 0.1 percent of the population....This winter, Delhi expanded its shelter system to accommodate more than 18,000, but the number of homeless is vast — likely more than 100,000... a sprawling gray market has taken shape around the city’s vast unmet need for shelter. In some places, it breeds ...a “sleep mafia, who controls who sleeps where, for how long, and what quality of sleep... What the homeless in Delhi need: 2 rupees to use public toilets, 5 rupees to bathe, 5 rupees for a half-cup of tea, 10 rupees for half a quilt - NY Times
* Dharwad Pedha,Tirupati Ladoo and the Hyderabad Haleem are among the few ‘foodstuffs’ with region-specific GI (Geographical Indicator) Tag.
* Once thought to be deaf and ear-less, praying mantises actually hear ultrasonic or high-frequency sounds through just one ear located deep in their chest.
* “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” - Chuck Close
* With REST APIs for spell checking, computer vision (including detecting if image is racy or pornographic in nature), face detection & recognition, emotion recognition, motion detection & tracking faces in video, speech recognition & synthesis, voice recognition, Microsoft's Project Oxford is amazing!
* json2csharp site takes JSON as an input and provides you the C# object model.
* The Firefox 1.0 installable was around 4.5 Mb when it came out in 2004
* ..the most valuable asset on the WhatsApp platform is the free user-generated data, mostly generated real-time, by close to a billion users that it has worldwide, without paying for it. “There is a lot of consumer intent and interest which is captured on WhatsApp.”
* With over 100 development and delivery centers worldwide and approximately 219,300 employees as of September 30, 2015, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500
Cloud and Distributed Computing
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
Storage Systems and Management
* One out of three Swedish companies based in India feel that 'not paying tax was a competitive disadvantage'. Scam-tainted & now defunct Enron paid $20 million as "educational gifts" in 2001. Critics consider these payments to be bribes to clear the project
* Life Insurance Corporation of India's (LIC) claim settlement at 98.19 per cent is better than the entire private sector’s 89.40 per cent.
* India is a sub-4 metre paradise as compact cars form 70% of market. From 34 models in FY12 to 47 models in FY16, in five years, the industry has added thirteen new models. 9 years ago, this segment opened up in India after the government lowered the excise duty to 12 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for bigger cars.
* The Sensex has slid 18.5 per cent from its January 2015 peak, nearing the 20 per cent level that some investors consider bear-market territory. The worst start to a year for global stocks extended into a third week as oil sank to a fresh 12-year low. Brent crude oil briefly fell below $28 a barrel as Iran pledged to boost exports and Nomura Holdings Inc predicted a potential drop to $25. A 14.7 per cent fall in exports in December last year, coupled with a widening of the trade deficit by 27.1 per cent during the same period, hit sentiment ... - The Business Standard
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| How the different Mutual Fund categories have fared over the years - Value Research Online |
* When the Sensex crashed to 8,160 in March 2009 due to global economic crisis, it was back to 14,300-level two months later in May — a recovery of 75 per cent. Within seven months, it touched 17,300-level, or 112 per cent.
* The Shah Bano case - Shah Bano, a Muslim mother of five children, was divorced by her husband in 1978. She filed a criminal suit in which the Supreme Court ruled in her favour and she won the right to alimony from her husband. However, the then Congress government, enacted the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. The most controversial provision of the Act was that it gave a Muslim woman the right to maintenance for the period of iddat (about three months) after the divorce, and shifted the onus of maintaining her to her relatives or the Wakf Board. The Act was seen as discriminatory as it denied divorced Muslim women the right to basic maintenance which women of other faiths had recourse to under secular law.
* India’s Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the country’s large cities must provide shelter for 0.1 percent of the population....This winter, Delhi expanded its shelter system to accommodate more than 18,000, but the number of homeless is vast — likely more than 100,000... a sprawling gray market has taken shape around the city’s vast unmet need for shelter. In some places, it breeds ...a “sleep mafia, who controls who sleeps where, for how long, and what quality of sleep... What the homeless in Delhi need: 2 rupees to use public toilets, 5 rupees to bathe, 5 rupees for a half-cup of tea, 10 rupees for half a quilt - NY Times
* Dharwad Pedha,Tirupati Ladoo and the Hyderabad Haleem are among the few ‘foodstuffs’ with region-specific GI (Geographical Indicator) Tag.
* Once thought to be deaf and ear-less, praying mantises actually hear ultrasonic or high-frequency sounds through just one ear located deep in their chest.
* “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” - Chuck Close
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