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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss the growth of Roku streaming, Fry’s going out of business, the Perseverance rover parachute, Netflix’s new subscriber milestone, a Comcast outage, LG abandoning their smartphone division, and more.
Earl in Guam listens Online and on K57 KGUM and asked: “It’s about Adobe Illustrator. The subscription is good for a year. If I purchase the Illustrator, what happens at the end of the subscription? Does the software become unusable or does it just block me from getting updates?”
Earl, the software will stay installed and allow you to pick up where you left off if you subscribe again, but it wont work unless you do.
Adobe switched to a monthly/yearly license model a few years ago the way most other companies did. For example, Microsofts Office works this way now too.
The timed license model allowed them to skirt a lot of the piracy issues they used to have and was favored by heavy professional users who found themselves having to spend the better part of $1000 every year or two to upgrade to the current version at the time. Now they can remain on the latest version or run parallel versions for the monthly fee. It doesnt work well for individual users, but it works for Adobes target audience.
Any files you created will remain on your computer and, if theyre compatible with other software, will be functional but the Adobe programs themselves wont work unless you renew your license.
If youre a casual user, there are alternatives out there like Vectr or Inkscape that may work for you, but nothing will be exactly like Illustrator.
Kipper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin listens to our free podcasts, now hosted by Blubrry and asked: “Since installing Norton 360 and VPN, my Grace Mondo can no longer find my Wi-Fi. Their support team is off during the pandemic so I thought you might know. Is this Grace/Norton situation casual or just a coincidence?”
Kipper, It should be a coincidence. The VPN and antivirus would both work at the device level.
Some routers do have VPN settings, but even if it’s set up on the router (which would make it the gateway for all devices) it’s still external-only, the local network shouldn’t be affected in any way.
Neither the antivirus nor the VPN should be affecting discoverability. We’d power cycle everything since network devices are a little temperamental, but it’s probably not the VPN or antivirus software.
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