For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
I know I shouldn't be upset as I did get a ton of use out of mIRC in the 90s/2000's and they probably didn't expect it to still be around and updated to this day, but expiring something sold as lifetime just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They should have honored all previous lifetime licenses and just made new ones follow the new rules.
You can see the changes on various pages here [1] pre 2016 and post 2016
> For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.
That does not seem to hold true..
I do recall that the older licenses expired, but my current active mIRC license was issued September 2018.
I have been using the license I bought in 2010 for the last 15 years now. I have, since then, ended up purchasing several licenses for friends and none have had issues updating. I recently just reinstalled using that 2010 license.
He will retain the information for a license for up to a year to retrieve it again
Looks like this no longer is included in the FAQ, but here is an archived copy directly on mirc's website about the lifetime license going away. It looks like the lifetime ones were downgraded into 10 year ones. It looks like at least when this FAQ was live you could email him and ask for a new one for free once it did expire so that was nice, but unsure if that is still being honored as the FAQ has now been removed [2]. He did try to make you feel bad about emailing though asking.
Full text copied from [1] for ease of reading
>> Question: I have an old registration that is not working, can you help?
Answer: When I originally offered a lifetime license in 1995, it seemed like a kind and fair thing to do. However, I did not expect that I would still be working on mIRC twenty-five years later. The lifetime license means that I am still supporting and providing updates to every user that has ever registered. This has become gradually more difficult and has reached the point where, sadly, it is just no longer possible. If your registration is over ten years old, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated. If you register again, you will receive an updated registration automatically. If you cannot afford to register again, or would rather not, that's okay, just email me. However, please be aware that it will take time for me to reply.
That's enough to make me glad I never bought a license before and excited to never buy a license again. After all, why should I enter into an agreement that can be unilaterally voided by the other party?
It's not clear from the article. Are they reducing the staff count so that it naturally averages at at least 15 minutes to get to an agent or are they literally adding a loop in to make people wait even if an agent is available? While longer waits are not great, I guess I could excuse the first way. If they are just sticking people on hold to make they hang up even when the wait time would have been shorter without an artificial hold, that is just bad.
It's the latter, but is there any effective difference, really? Say that lowering their their staff level from X to Y would result in a 15 minute wait for a smaller, undeterred group of callers. Putting an artificial floor for wait time of 15 minutes would mean that (X-Y) agents are sitting idle while callers are artificially waiting. I assume HP would not continue to employee them, since cost reduction was the point, after all. So it seems like the only difference is order of operations.
> To reaffirm the changes, HP says in the staff memo: "The wait time for each customer is set to 15 minutes - notice the expected wait time is mentioned only in the beginning of the call."
More then just the testimonials, pretty much everything on the page looks to be fake. It says 10,000+ happy artists and 100k+ designs created while the domain was registered today.
The actual function looks solid. I created a picture and printed it out for my son to color. Let the product sell itself, don't make up fake reviews and numbers. Big turnoff.
For what its worth, I have a Quest Pro and am quite happy with it. I don't use VR a ton, but compared to the Quest 2 I preferred the Quest Pro hands down. I have not tried the Quest 3 to compare though. That said, I thought it was already discontinued already a year ago.
> It cost more than $400, and it lasted less than half a year.
I have four of IQAir's indoor ones and one of their outdoor ones. I got the first one probably 8 or 9 years ago but the others maybe 3 or 4 years ago. The original one was made before iqair bought airvisual. They all are working fine currently.
Also, for the indoor ones, you can set DND mode (I forget the exact name they use) and it'll turn off the display during the night. Does have one downside I'll cover in a sec though.
That said, until this year I always just used their website to view the data or the app. It worked.. ok. But their graphs were tiny and not very easy to use. So this year I started digging in deeper and set tried to connect things to grafana. The indoor units have a samba share where you can pull down data, but the issue is they only update that data every 5-15 minutes (15 when its in DND mode).
The outdoor unit does NOT have a samba share. You need to use their API for that. Now this is where I'm really unhappy and eventually looking at AirGradient or some other option. In order to get api access to my data on the outdoor unit I either need to pay (a lot, I forget how much) for api access, or I can get free api access if I allow iqair to sell my data to everyone else.
.. not interested in that
So I'm currently only getting data from my indoor units and only getting every ~5-15 min data points.. but they are working. I did invest a lot in these devices so not ready to upgrade to anything different just yet, but every time I see one of these air quality topics pop up here on HN it really makes me want to change.
I am sure the sensor is fine and the weird USB port can be fixed (though it looked like they do not make it easy to disassemble the body). However, the device is just so janky and unpleasant to use I am not sure I want to go through the trouble. I started looking at Airthings, though I was recommended AirGradient as well.
> until this year I always just used their website to view the data or the app
Never used their app to check my own unit. My apartment is small. I am here in this room, the device is right here in this room, would I want to go fetch my phone to know the readings?
> Also, for the indoor ones, you can set DND mode (I forget the exact name they use) and it'll turn off the display during the night
Of course, but it means it should be within reach to turn on and it will blast blue light in my face should I want to check it at night. An e-ink screen would work best, considering low refresh rate is not an issue in this scenario.
> Of course, but it means it should be within reach to turn on and it will blast blue light in my face should I want to check it at night. An e-ink screen would work best, considering low refresh rate is not an issue in this scenario.
You can set a schedule. Mine automatically go into DND mode a little before bedtime and turn off after the sun is up.
Would you have a clock that requires being turned off at night, because it has an unbearably bright screen?
I personally don’t want to fumble through DnD mode whenever I thought to take a glance at carbon dioxide or PM2.5 while it’s dark outside.
There is only one thing I need from it, and that is to show air quality measurements in a non-painful way. Sadly, AirVisual Pro does not do that well for me.
Really interesting read! I was one of those first 5000 units (preordered Sept 29 2009 and shipped Dec 29 2009) and I wore my fitbit religiously (upgrading to newer versions now and then) until last year.
>> "That something had to be comfortable to wear all day, be easy to use, upload its data seamlessly so the data could be tracked and shared with friends, and rarely need charging. Not an easy combination of requirements."
I ended up finally retiring my fitbit last year after seeing little by little Google dismantling all that made fitbit fitbit. Google's first version of Fitbit was the Pixel watch which didn't even last a day. It also may have been comfortable to wear, but was not comfortable to use and the social aspects of it, namely challenges, were axed. So all you were left was a device with the tracking aspects and upload aspects. Not great.
I ended up moving over to a Garmin fenix 7X Sapphire Solar which has a very impressive battery life, fits way more comfortably, has way more features, and while still not the same challenges I loved on fitbit, still has better social features then google left the fitbit with.
All in all, while I do love my Garmin device now, it was a very sad day leaving Fitbit behind. I still hold that, while unproven, I think I probably logged more days of data on the fitbit at the time I switched over then anyone else. I now know I have a 1 in 5000 chance at least of this being true!
>> "In April of this year, Park and Friedman left Google. Early retirement? Hardly. The two, now age 47, have started a new company that’s currently in stealth mode."
Looks like The Guardian may have had a typo (-sleepp) in their url, fixed it, and didn't redirect traffic from the typo to the new url. Either way here is the working url:
> Can anyone who uses or has tried to use recent "watch" style products from Google/Fitbit provide anecdotes on this claim?
I was a Fitbit user from the day the initial fitbit went on sale for preorder. I used pretty much every 'flagship' fitbit since then until Google bought them. Ever since Google took over the Fitbit product got worse and worse. I decided a year ago I needed out when they got rid of the communities favorite feature, challenges. I'm pretty sure when I finally packed my fitbit away I had logged more days of usage then anyone else.
I started exploring what the other options were but was not able to even consider the apple watch because I do prefer android to ios. If it had supported android I'd have potentially gotten one though. Anyway as apple placed themselves out of the running I explored other options and decided Garmin had the best offerings. The biggest issue there though was they had way too many models and way too many versions of each model and little help to figure out which one is the best for you beyond super high level titles like "runner". That said I ended up settling on the Fenix series and after a year of use I can say I'm quite happy with it!
When I upgraded my phone this past fall to the latest Pixel Google actually was giving away free Pixel watch 2's with every purchase so I did wear a pixel watch for a couple of weeks to test it out. It was.. not great... especially the battery which was supposedly improved from the pixel watch 1.
Anyway, yes, I do agree with the statement that Google hasn't created something good enough, but I don't think they've actually tried. Like other hardware they've bought (nest) they just let it die. Garmin needs some major marketing help, but I do feel like they got a great thing going over there.
It is important that you might have considered Apple Watch if it were available for Android. This gatekeeping seems the crux of the lawsuit.
However, given your deep experience with Fitbit / Google's offerings and careful consideration of Garmin's as well, I'm curious: What do you think of the merit of suing Apple for antitrust for Apple Watch not supporting at least some set of Android devices?
