Ads by Google

Friday, November 20, 2009

Churn baby, Churn

Rs 19.

That's the fee for number portability.  Less than a half pack of ciggies cost.  With a purported 400 million user base, it's going to be one massive headache for the operator.  Much of the problem is one of their own making.  Increasing the subscribers without attendant increase in cell phone towers.  Dropped calls and no connectivity, with people on prepaid watching their precious talk time go down without a word being spoken, they're going to get socked like crazy by the prepaid crowd.

Everyone of my friends and colleagues are just waiting for this to get rolled out and then, they'd hit the phones and switch. I believe the salesmen who work on commission to close out on subscribers for each operator will make a killing in the first few months.

Though, I'm pretty sure, the operators will find a way to make it a disincentive to switch.  One rumour I heard was that it might take as long as 4 or 6 weeks for the switch to be complete.   If the US experience is considered when portability was introduced, I'd wait a good 6-8 months before switching.

If it comes to that.  I'll take a lower bill and other extra minutes thrown in, anytime rather than switch.  Since I have my broadband and mobile from the same operator, hopefully I have some leverage.

Hopefully.


Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Another Day, Another Language: Go: From Google

From LWN, I learnt that Google has released a new systems language because....nothing had been done in that area for some time.

So, we have Go.

After you've gone through the FAQs, which I strongly suggest you do, as it contains interesting pointers on the whys and whats of this language,  one has this nagging feeling ....

Exactly what issue are they addressing and for whom?  It's there in the FAQ but are YOU convinced?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

MobileOrg 1.0 for iPhone/iPod Touch now available

I've been meaning to post this for sometime but I kept forgetting.  Well, the title says it all, from the org-mode mailing list on the announce.

Read the post for the features and links for downloading it.  There's even a screencast here.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

A quick way of looking up colours in LaTeX

While making beamer presentations, I generally use dvipsnames or svgnames as an option to beamer. This allows me to use named colours instead of giving some RGB numbers to get the colour I want.

Well, sort of.

I mean you still have to figure out what HoneyDew looks like. I used to google it up and check how the colours actually looked. Now, I've got a simpler way to do it. Just do, M-x list-colors-display in Emacs and it shows about the same list as that of svgnam.def with the visual colours. Saves you a few keystrokes and clickies.


You of course, are using Emacs and AucTeX aren't you? :-)