Bent Dongle. Hurr hurr.

[nem0.livejournal.com]

I don't normally have many work related stories because people in my company are relatively computer literate. Sometimes, however...

I'm the IT manager at an engineering firm. One of the transportation guys is designing a bridge, so we got a trial version of some expensive bridge modeling software... that came with a USB dongle. I hate dongles. Firey hate. But hey, what can you do? This particular user likes feeling independent, so I handed him the dongle and the installer files and told him to call me if he had any trouble. Bad me. Not making that mistake again.

The trial period ends this week. I sent him an e-mail asking whether he wanted to purchase the full version of the software. He replied yes, and also typed this:

"When we purchase [the software] could we ask for another USB lock. The one I have is all bent up from me bumping it. thanks"

Dude has two USB ports in the front of his machine, which sits on the floor under his desk (small desk, dual monitors for CADD) and SIX in the back. Apparently it never occurred to him to plug the stupid thing in behind the box? I'd be less cranky if the dongle wasn't specifically keyed to our company and that copy of the software, and replacements weren't hella expensive. I guess I can't blame him for underestimating the importance of the dongle, but dang.

On the other hand, I am getting a lot of humor mileage out of bent dongle comments. Hee. Dongle.

Comments

[gholam.livejournal.com]

I guess you weren't around in the days when it wasn't standard practice to integrate ethernet and analog modems into notebooks, so everyone who needed one had to use a PCMCIA card - with a detachable, small, fragile dongle.

[revchris.livejournal.com]

Or, back in the even older days when a lot of programs used daisy-chainable parallel port dongles. I had one professor who came to me asking for help because he needed a support frame to hold up the 8 dongles on the back of his machine. They stuck out almost two feet!

[gholam.livejournal.com]

You're ever so lucky that's "older" days for you. Many accounting programs over here (Israel) still use that bullcrap.

[nem0.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, we have one of those parallel port dongles. Luckily, it's hooked up to the server, not one of the regular boxen.

When I worked for the student tech support center at a university, we saw a LOT of broken PCMCIA modem dongles. Hey, this is a great idea! Let's put extremely tiny, fragile, and loseable dingy-doos on our laptop modems, and then let's discontinue the whole line so people can't get replacements! GENIUS! Of course, they tended to have bigger problems (like owning a PII laptop with Windows NT or ME on it).

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Don't you understand, you aren't supposed to buy replacement dongles for a few bucks each, you're supposed to buy replacement modems for a few hundred bucks each...

[falconeio.livejournal.com]

They use dongles in Israel still? Last few times I was there most of the software seemed to be a lot more advanced than that. Is it just that the accounting industry doesn't wanna modernize?

[gholam.livejournal.com]

The dominant accounting program here is still the DOS version of Hashavshevet. DOS.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Oh ye gods. They haven't localized anything newer into Hebrew yet? Or do you guys just use English?

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Oh, they have. There's a Windows version of Hashavshevet, as well as numerous competing programs. None to my knowledge are localized foreign pieces, it's all local development. Still, despite all that, the market is mostly run by 50-something accountants, who know Hashavshevet for DOS, and have been working with it for 10+ years straight, and they don't want to put forth an effort to re-train themselves with new software while what they have works. The fun part is, it doesn't work with Windows 2000/XP DOS compatibility mode, so Windows 98 compatibility is a major factor when choosing new hardware for those folks. SiS 760GX is the current reigning champion of that market, now that 845/865 are next to impossible to acquire.

Mind you, it's professional accounting software. Personal accounting software, the way I understand it's used in US, to file your tax data, isn't used here at all - if you're employed, your employer's accountant does it all for you and you just receive a check or a bank transfer, and if you're an employer, you either hire an accountant, or (as most small businesses do), outsource it to a CPA. The place I work at, among other things, provides computer support to a bunch of those CPAs.

[falconeio.livejournal.com]

That is truly scary

[revchris.livejournal.com]

I work for a university. Anything you've ever seen is around here somewhere (however, I did get rid of the PDP/10 and the vaxstations a few years ago).

We have a few professors who still are running legacy equipment that needs dongles, but I've also got one that can't run on anything faster than a 386/25, because of hardware timing issues, and needs a motherboard with 4 ISA slots and a Vesa localbus slot, and has two parallel port dongles. Some day I'm not going to have any spare mobos left (I have two from old computers, just in case), and then they'll have to upgrade (or he'll have retired, and, with luck, the new prof will replace it).

I'm not one to talk, however, as the card access system I have in my building won't run under Windows and won't run on a Pentium or faster motherboard because of the old RS422 card it requires.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Have you tried running stuff like that on DOSBOX? It's made to run old games, and does it pretty well, and old games are the worst when it comes to issues you describe. As long as it doesn't have dongle-based copy protection, or other unorthodox hardware requirements, it should run.

Among other sad stories, it's only been a year or so since we've stopped deploying new systems running MS-DOS for POS and backoffice, and Novell Netware 4.11 on the server. The more sad part is, the Windows-based systems that replaced them don't work as well.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

Back in the days of LPT ports on headers, I used to take the port off the back of the computer, mount the dongle on the inside of the computer with the screw posts and then plug the normal port into the back of the dongle.. made for an internal dongle like the USB trick below.. though i suspect 8 of them wouldn't work for that.

[wibbble]

My experience of the 3com 10baseT card I had was that the dongle was quite tough - it just tended to run away when no one was looking.

I really liked my PCMCIA modem with a wee pop-out port for the modem cable. No dongles!

[erikarn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but their fracture point wasn't exactly high. The number of those X-Jack modem/ethernet cards I saw when starting in Tech-support just scared me. All it took was someone tripping on the cable and ping! Bye bye expensive card.

I even owned one for a while and had worn the glue /off/ the pccard assembly itself from pulling the thing apart to repair it over and over and over.

[wibbble]

I was always careful with mine. :o)

I should still have it somewhere - probably still inside my old ThinkPad, which I've lost somewhere in this flat...

[erikarn.livejournal.com]

_I_ was careful. I just wasn't careful about the people around me.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

some of the 5 port USB pci cards i've bought have a USB port on the inside.. and until now I never thought of why that'd ever be useful.. hard to break a dongle when it's inside the computer.

[nem0.livejournal.com]

Oh man, that's brilliant. I hadn't thought of that, either. I was using the internal port to power a hub I glued to the front of my case, but having a safe place for dongles is an even better idea.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

You can use a standard PCI slot bracket with 2-4 USB ports, just unscrew the cable from the metal bracket and tape it somewhere inside the case. Most cases have 2 front USB ports, and most motherboards have headers for 4 (although there are some exceptions - both my case and motherboard have 6 ports), so you have 2 free ports to attach dongle(s).

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

makes it hard for the dongle to wander off too.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Actually, some curvature is quite normal and nothing to be concerned about.

grin