The care and feeding of dongles (was: Progress Toward z/OS Personal Use License)
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
Re: The care and feeding of dongles (was: Progress Toward z/OS Personal Use License)
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
Re: The care and feeding of dongles (was: Progress Toward z/OS Personal Use License)
http://www.meninos.us/products.php?product=FLASH.DRIVE Interesting anti-theft design for a USB memory stick. On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 3:02 PM, zMan zedgarhoo...@gmail.com wrote: 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...! -- Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all? -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: The care and feeding of dongles (was: Progress Toward z/OS Personal Use License)
Hmmm - might get some of us slapped too ... lol Personally I thought this sounded interesting. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9712128.stm As for dongles, they were a lame solution when they were introduced in some other millennium. Hell, I've even had USBs vaccuumed up by cleaners - you might never know what happened to it if it went walkabout. Get a vendor to believe that. Shane ... On Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:48:08 -0500, Mike Schwab wrote: Interesting anti-theft design for a USB memory stick. -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
