Tanks, Dell

Tanks are inherently cool. They're big, noisy, roaring, send 'four wheel drive' whimpering home to Mom, and, oh yeah, they have this gun....which even I, not a pro-gun guy, can admire.

I heard a story years ago of a tank instructor saying that a tank had three main systems - propulsion, communications, and weapon. With all three, it could go just about anywhere and scare the hell out of the enemy. But the main one was the weapon. If you lost propulsion, you could still communicate and fire at the enemy; if you lost communications, you could still go look for the enemy, and then fire at them. If you lost the weapon, though -- well, he sighed, all you had left was a forty-five ton portable radio.

The gun is the power jack on my daughter's laptop. Really, any laptop. If you can't get power to the device, it doesn't really matter how wonderful it is. All of the laptops we've owned were of the same basic power model -- plug it in, and it'll run even without the battery, and will charge the battery if its there; unplug it, and it'll run off the battery. None of them had an external charger -- you had to use the laptop to charge them, which meant you had to be able to get power into the laptop. It is therefore delightful that in two of the three, the DC power jack failed. From what I read, in the older one, it's a small solder connection that over time gives way. On my daughter's, I don't know -- though I suspect its become cracked. It's actually charging at the moment, because I jammed the plug in there -- but I'm sure that wasn't a healthy thing to do.

I am sure that Dell makes these things as cheaply as they can, but, you know? There's such a thing as too cheap. Ever heard of a Single Point of Failure, Mike Dell?

If Macs have a dual access power scheme, or an external charger, I don't want to hear about it. To make up for that reluctance, Apple fanbois might enjoy this.