Dongles (was IDL>will not run)

["Justin Ashmall" <Justin_Ashmall(at)hotmail.com>]

 My dongle (hardware key) does not work unless my printer, which feeds
through it, is turned on. If the hardware key is not working then you are
prompted to re-enter the registration numbers.
 Although my printer works perfectly regardless of whether the dongle is
present, when I called RSI to complain about the trouble they kindly
informed me that the dongle was fine - it was my printer that was broken,
conveniently absolving them from any responsibility.
 While I'm on the subject I think I'll have another whinge about dongles. Of
course I understand the reasoning behind the dongles, but it strikes me that
something is amiss when such an expensive (overpriced?) piece of software as
a single Windows IDL licence comes with the added inconvenience of a
hardware key. If the hardware key stops working (falls/knocked/pulled out,
printer turned off) you have seven minutes to save all your work (providing
you saw the pop-up message) after which IDL automatically closes down.
Restoring the hardware key does not restore the session. This plus the
inconvenience of restarting a session if you're in the middle of an analysis
can waste a significant amount of time and effort. Also, if I want to use
IDL in our lab as opposed to the office, it's a plain nuisance dragging out
desks, moving books, plants etc. And I can't have my PC flush to the wall
either!
 After the last moan regarding dongles someone pointed out to me that I
could connect to our Unix site licence server from NT, however when our
Systems Manager mentioned this to RSI they went completely spare,
threatening all sorts of harsh action if we tried it. So we didn't. Of
course. Given their reaction I can only presume this no longer works in the
more recent versions of IDL.
 The final annoyance was an email I received demonstrating the futility of
the dongles. It came after the last discussion on dongles, from one of the
less affluent nations this side of the Atlantic, telling me that they had
written and were using a dongle emulator. Given the amount of information on
the workings 'HASP' dongles available on the web I'm sure they're not the
only ones.

Justin



WinterDead <winterdead@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19990815195410.11854.00000276@ng-cp1.aol.com...
> I am on a windows machine. I installed IDL and put in the liscensing
> information and IDL worked fine. The next day i restarted my computer and
tried
> to run idl but it asked for my liscensing information and then when i
reentered
> exactly the same information it said it was not correct and would not run.
I
> tried to reinstall IDL several times but it would not work . Please e_mail
me
> any sugestions or respond here.
>
> thank you in advance