Update on Reliance Wimax

Of late I have seen a lot of third party providers of Reliance Wimax connections in Hyderabad posting their phone number on my blog entry Going WiMax. The wimax connection really did not work out for me for the following reasons

1. It just took a lot of time to get a connection each time I wanted one. It would sit for ages in trying to acquire network address.
2. The speed was decent but nothing like the 2 mbps link that Airtel currently gives me.
3. It was not really reliable. It would get cut of for no reason what-so-ever.

On the whole my experience has not been good at all with the wi-max connection and had it disconnected. I now use Airtel which is completely underground in my area and the service that they offer is quite exceptional. Speed is good and I have not experienced any downtime in the last 1 month that I have been using it.

Firefox 3 and ScribeFire

Its been a while since I blogged having not got the time and the inspiration for something different to write about. Yesterday wanting to be part of the world record for the largest number of downloads in a single day I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 and then I heard so much about ScribeFire and so I decided to download and install that add-in for Firefox.

From what I have experienced so far with ScribeFire it is quite wonderful. The biggest advantage of it is that it sits directly in your firefox browser and so when ever you feel like blogging you just press F8 and it displays a nice rich text area to write your thoughts in and click on the publish button and you are done. You do not need to log into your blogger account or you don't need to open another application just to say something. Since it makes it easy to blog you just feel like blogging when ever you get a thought. It has a ton of other features that I have not yet explored.

For all those that use Firefox go ahead and try the add-on I am sure it will help you blog more.

Why taxpayers are better off with a fuel price hike ?

There is a lot being said about the fuel price hike, so here are my views on it. If you are a tax paying citizen of India (a very few in this country which at the moment is less than 10% of the population) you are better off with the fuel increase. 

With the prices of crude going up around the world the cost of buying crude for the oil companies is going up. If the costs of the inputs go up the cost of the output too is bound to go up. With the government controlling the price of gasoline this increase in output is not being transferred to the consumer. This increase is being borne by the government that gets its money from the tax payers. Hence it is our tax money that is going into subsidizing the cost of gasoline in this country.

So if you are a tax paying person you are paying for the subsidy on the fuel that the citizens who are not paying tax are using (almost 90%). So if you are paying your taxes then you are better off with the prices going up. 

The government should stop all subsidies on fuel and use the huge amount of money that it will save from this in improving the public transport infrastructure in our cities and also the infrastructure such as roads and railways so that we do not have to depend on individual transport. It should spend all this money in making CNG available which we have in abundance in the Krishna-Godavari basin in abundance available to all public transport such as busses and autos. This will reduce our dependence on crude oil and will also make our cities cleaner. Its time we took up some of these measures on a war footing.

This is a personal view and I would love to hear your take on this hot topic.