You could even have the dongle inside a secure cabinet that way...drill a hole at the edge of the door for the cable, and lock that sucker in there...!
On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:38 PM, David Cole <dbc...@colesoft.com> wrote: > Dongles certainly can be fragile, and longer ones, such as the z/PDT's > (around 2 inches or so) can easily be accidentally torqued and broken (or > break the socket, whatever). > > For that reason, I keep a supply of 6" long M/F USB cables which I use to > separate the dongle from the PC chassis. That solves both the > bump-it-and-break-it problem as well as damage from constant > removal-and-reinsert. > > Dongles are valuable. 6" USB cables are cheap. > > Just saying... > Dave Cole > > > At 4/25/2012 11:43 AM, Joel C. Ewing wrote: > >> A dongle definitely could be an issue for some. Might be less of an >> issue on Linux, but my experiences on Windoze has been less than ideal and >> makes me regard any application that requires a dongle as more of a gamble. >> While the dongle may be regarded as "nice license insurance" from the >> software vendors standpoint, it is essentially just another point of >> failure for the user and lowers the value of the product. >> >> My wife has some very expensive Embroidery software that requires a >> dongle. The license does entitle her to run the software on multiple >> platforms, both her laptop and desktop, since the dongle prevents >> concurrent use. After a year or so the dongle case became too loose to >> remove the dongle from the USB port - the only way now is grasp and pull >> the dongle base with a pair of needle-nose pliers, which works, but is >> certainly not the advertised convenience. The only "support" provided by >> the application vendor to remedy this situation is to re-purchase the >> software at full price to get a new dongle. >> >> Other than using standard Windows GUI interfaces, this software does >> nothing that special at the Operating System level, except for the dongle >> support that requires a hardware driver written by yet a different vendor. >> Logic would suggest that this application should be able to migrate from >> Win XP to Win 7 without a problem, provided one can find support for the >> dongle on Win 7. My initial attempts to migrate have so far failed because >> the dongle vendor's current drivers for Win 7 are not compatible with the >> older version dongle that came with the application. I haven't given up, >> but unless I can locate a compatible driver that is also compatible with >> Win 7 this expensive application is toast on Win 7. A nice result for the >> application vendor if I'm forced to do an otherwise unnecessary upgrade at >> great cost, but from the user's standpoint this is a very poor outcome, >> apparently forced by the decision to require a dongle. >> >> -- >> Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org >> > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**---------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
