Robert Pogson

Yesterday Bill C-19 to end the long firearm registry was read a second time and referred to the committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. At this rate, the bill could become law within a few weeks or months. 2012 will be a good year for hunters, shooters, and collectors of long firearms.

My favourite part of the bill?
“29. (1) The Commissioner of Firearms shall ensure the destruction as soon as feasible of all records in the Canadian Firearms Registry related to the registration of firearms that are neither prohibited firearms nor restricted firearms and all copies of those records under the Commissioner’s control.

(2) Each chief firearms officer shall ensure the destruction as soon as feasible of all records under their control related to the registration of firearms that are neither prohibited firearms nor restricted firearms and all copies of those records under their control.“

That’s the part that the gun-grabbers really hate because killing the registry makes it difficult to redo the damage they have caused over the last 17 years.

see Debate

Google and ASUS are getting together to release a new co-branded tablet soon. There isn’t any real practical reason to do so except that both brands are well known so putting both brands on one product should make a consumer very comfortable buying the product… Bingo! Proper promotion is the last piece of the puzzle in getting */Linux on retail shelves. Everyone in the supply chain is comfortable with such products.

No more innuendo that the product is “no-name” or that consumers care nothing about the OS or that the product is “low-end”. This promotional effort will be applied to a mainstream tablet in competition with a very hot product in the market.

With a fight like this going on in the tablet market, M$ and “8″ will be “bringing a knife to a gun-fight”. Consumers who have multiple good choices aggressively advertised will give only passing notice to the new arrivals running “8″. Of course, M$ can pay retailers to give shelf-space to “8″ and/or put it on prominent display, but the consumers will already be “asking for” */Linux and route around the mine-field.

see Digitimes – “Google, Asustek co-brand 7-inch tablet PC to debut earliest in May“

Those who continue to hold that ARM has no real value in IT should answer this question. Will use of ARM result in more or fewer fiery incidents in personal computing?

To get more battery life in mobile computing OEMs have been using larger and higher-density batteries over the years. That’s like carrying a bomb in one’s pocket. It can be no problem at all or a disaster. The same holds true for stationary computing. A PSU that’s running hot feeding a 100W x86 chip can be replaced by something that delivers a few watts fanlessly (and not picking up dust) to an ARMed System on a Chip (SoC) increasing reliability and decreasing smoke-filled incidents on the desktop.

I will never forget a lecture I was giving students about computing at Rankin Inlet, NU, Canada. I was leaning on an ATX case that was in use by a student. Without warning, there was a loud “POP”, a cloud of smoke and the acrid fumes of an exploded aluminium electrolytic capacitor all around me. I told the students to remember that smell for future diagnostic purposes and the lesson evolved quickly into how to change a PSU. That would not likely have happened if a 10W brick or power-plug had been involved instead of a 400W switching regulator with discrete components on the power-main.

see “Lenovo recalls 160,000 all-in-one PCs after blaze warning“