|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Hi Janette -
I'm taking advantage of your request for our opinions on this subject.
My security block has, on occasion, caused me some headaches, but from
what I'm reading, other security schemes make the dongle seem like a
piece of cake!
I insist upon the ability to add memory to my system, add/replace hard
disks, even replace the entire system, with no more inconvenience to my
ability to run TradeStation than a single quick telephone call. And I
should be able to get whatever I need in the way of a new password
BEFORE I actually make the changes in order that I not suffer any
weekday downtime.
If this is not feasible, then I vote to retain the dongle. And if
dongle technology has progressed in the years since I obtained mine and
is now capable of operating with greater transparency, then I would be
willing to pay a nominal sum to exchange mine.
One suggestion (which I have made several times in the past) is to
slightly increase the sophistication of the security-checking code in
TS: rather than immediately halting collection of data whenever a check
appears to indicate a missing block, issue a warning message, increase a
failure count, and repeat the check in five or ten seconds. If the 3rd
or 4th such check still fails, then and only then should the server
freeze. (My experience has always been that if I immediately respond to
such a failure message with "OK", the subsequent test succeeds.)
Also, the window for the failure message MUST be forced to the
foreground! I have had at least one occurrence where the failure
occurred in the evening during unattended printing and the message was
not noticed until well after the start of trading next morning - I was
puzzled that I was seeing no data updates and when I switched to the
server, lo, there was the error box!
Thanks for soliciting these comments, and thanks for giving them serious
consideration.
Carroll Slemaker
|