curious why they don't combine the SRs into main installer?

especially for new customers? 
i can understand not wanting to re d/l the whole thing if you already have it. but then, wouldn't you d/l the original from your product history?
instead of messing around with Download managers.

If i buy the PP14 upgrade from RMP,
can i d/l it from here like normal?  or will it redirect me to somewhere else to d/l?

& why internet connect my poser rig?

don't know if it matters, but my Poser rig is not connected to the internet or a network.  it's all by it's autonomic lonesomes. which also makes the content tab a waste of memory.  can't they make it optional?

are there reasons for putting a computer with all my creative work on the internet?
or am i just being curmudgeonly and stubborn?

so basically, my poser pc has Poser, DS, Carrara, 3ds6, photoshop7, blender, luxrender, wings3d, sony vega suite, old microsoft office on it. 
I don't really need anything else, except Baldur's Gate. :lol:
2 cores and 4g ram, bloat is something to avoid.
no w7 updates, no virus scanners, no poser updates (for good or bad).
i put all my faith in daz store, rmp, and rdna to not give me a virus in my d/ls.
burned once by a boot sector virus >.<, learned my lesson.

sorry if this sounds bloggy, but i truely don't understand why s/w companies want access to my computer.  make clear concise install instructions, should be enough.

They do.  You can download the upgraded installer and content using the SM Download Manager...

combine SRs:
I'm sure they could.  Why they don't, I don't know.  There are certainly to reasons on both sides of it, to patch or not to patch.

dowload manager:
It seems to me that this was done to have one download system, regardless of retailer that doesn't rely on website access where a connection could be broken or to remove funny behavior of this web browser versus that web browser.  I'm not defending or detracting from the download manager.  I do think it should remember your serial number, but that's also the least "safe" option.

upgrade from rmp:
Can be hard to keep up with depending on how many retailers/partners.

your isolationist situation:
You've put yourself in an uncommon scenario and therefore the extra hoops come with that territory.  So you'll have to deal with transferring downloaded updates/content/whatever from your net-capable machine to the one that isn't.

If you were instead to defend your main machine from threats, I don't think you'd have that much to worry about, in general.  That doesn't mean something unlucky could happen but in mosts cases, it's doing things like opening attachments from sources you aren't sure of, traveling to questionable sites and/or not having up to date or decent protection.

Your stuff isn't going onto the internet unless you put it there, use a synch/cloud service, and/or aren't adequately protecting your machine.  I personally also avoid to put any of my important stuff into any kind of Windows common folders like "My Documents", "My Games", etc.  To me those are high target areas.

I don't think at all that those places/stores would intentionally drop a trojan or other malware but places do get hacked/infected, so you're still taking a risk.

But all-in-all, it comes down to choice and you have a specific way that you've elected to do things and you seem comfortable with it, so it's not wrong, just uncommon and a scenario that is going to require extra steps.

too many threads of the 'it was working yesterday, but now it's not working' variety, i guess

grumble grumble content tab grumble.  i would never ever ever install directly to my runtime.  always to a temp folder first.

Not sure if this helps but stay with me, trying to rationalise (didn't help Yossarian much)

Think we all have our pet hates, eg I don't touch mobiles and don't watch TV (too controlled).  The Internet made much more sense once I got a connection that did more that 3Mb/s.

Re: installer - When installed 2014 it downloaded the based and SR all automatically, no fuss.

Connection to the Internet means it can automatically detect and advice on updates, something to our benefit not SM

True some of the internet connectivity is to push their sites like Content Paradise but if you put wireshark on it can be seen other sites are also linked to Poser startup, possibly somekind of product browser/portal for Poser content was planned that never took off. True its to make money from us but we're all grown-ups right?

Other components (eg flash) have their own Internet connectivity functions that have nothing to do with SM. They can cause problems to Poser.

If big brother is your concern, I don't know but suspect big business does far more tracking via people's use of their phones, credit cards,loyality cards etc than from Internet.  If that's a concern using cash only and no cell phones is the best bet.

Biggest concern I have is from the criminals, they have no vested interested in a stable internet and will use it to steal and extort. To my mind its the unseen/unheard that is more of the threat.

Do what you feel comfortable with but I suspect not being connected to the Internet will become more of a pain over time (like me not having a mobile). From the comments read over time it seems the main problem is access speed rather than the direction.

Back to insanity.

I have a smart phone (very recent for me) but I certainly won't purchase with it or check my bank account/whatever account with it.  I don't have a problem getting RSS or news feeds with it and that kind of thing... oh and making phone calls :D  I'm still not much for texting.  If I get texted, expect something like "kk" and not much else.

I'm not much for TV either, mainly the commercials.  About 15 minutes of that nonsense and I'm done.  I wait until everything gets streamed or I can otherwise purchase it.  This usually means I'm couple years behind but I have so much entertainment at my disposal already that I don't care about that.

then this may inconvenience some users if they take it to cloud, for $50 american per mo.

not that they would do that any time soon AFAIK.  but it might obviate some issues in re: installation, libraries, crashes et al.

Quote - my Poser rig is not connected to the internet

I run the same setup.  It's clean and fast and I use my older box (dual booting with Ubuntu) for internet stuff.  I've had few problems installing or upgrading programs.  Our graphics computers at work run the same way.  We have a small network that shares a couple of printers and our storage NAS but noooo internet.  We had to keep all our Adobe stuff at CS5 but it does what we want and got off the constant upgrade ride.

I use a KVM switch to let me use the same (dual) monitors,  keyboard and mouse with both boxes.   

I have computers that never get connected to the internet as well. To make it far easier, most of my systems have Esata ports (extrenal hard dives, 3 to 6 gig a sec) on them which makes transferring large files from one to the other rather painless.

NAS storage is dreadfully slow, even on a fiber network. And USB 3 can't hold a candle to Esata's transfer speeds....

I like the Download Manager, it makes it easy to just click download all and walk away. It is also a metered connection, so you should still be able to actually do something else on the internet, unlike capping out your max number of connections with Save As.

Unfortunetly, some software companies do want access to your systems. Poser does not require any internet connection to run, and SM does not force us to be on the net to use a program like some other companies do.

As far as internet security, most of the time any issue that occurs on a system was installed by the user. Yes there are malicious scripts, viruses, trojans, that can install themselves. But there are more than a few free programs that will stop this from happening 99.9 percent of the time, even if you accidently try to install it.

I asked another company I tested for about combining Service Packs, and they said that doing so is a bad idea.

The way they explained it to me was like this:

Customer A can use the latest service pack with no iwsues, works fine.

Customer B installed it and now the program wont run, and just crashes.

Where does that leave Customer B if everything he now downloads is the SR that wont run on his system because they combined them....

Having the option of seperate service packs stops this from happening to Customer B.

Yes, I agree with Scott.  Poser does check the local stucture to make sure multiple copies are not running at the same time using the same serial.  I think that's fair.  It doesn't phone home to snoop on your or to sell advertising.

Content Paradise is just a convenience portal for those who might have purchased Poser, are brand new and have no idea about CP, Renderosity and Runtime DNA.  Back in Poser 5 (and maybe 6), they was a way to remove the tab.  It is not really necessary now as it doesn't use any resources (that I know of) while idle, so you just don't click on it if not interested.

I don't really care for cloud computing or automatic syncing across the internet to mulitple devices.  That's probably because I really don't have a need for it the way I have things set up here.  I do make backups on a portable device daily and make hard backups though.  However, others might see the cloud and online application services to be convenient and find them valuable for various reasons.  To me, they are too externally dependent and wind up being subscription based, which I often avoid - well I'm not subscribing for software, period.  I'd rather buy as I go and if I fall behind a few versions, I'd rather evaluate on whether I need or want an upgrade and I'll gravitate towards companies that offer a non-sub alternative.  Sorry, bit OT unless we are talking about how it all feeds into company practices. ;)

Well my view is influenced by my experience.  Having worked in a PC repair shop for a number of years I can only say the the vast majority of infected PCs was because the owner visited dubious sites or opened attachments from unknown sources.  These infections only played havok when the owner had not backup of the data that was held.  If they did, the impact was minimal with the solution being a reload of Windows and the restoration of the data.  If the main drive is cloned on a regular basis the procedure if simple and can be performed overnight in most cases.

Not connecting to the Internet does not remove the need to have a decent back up procedure in place as you still need to cover off hardware failure.

So yes I connect my main Poser machine to the Internet and that from a luddite who does not use a smart phone (saw too many people become dependant while working at one of the main carriers, and I mean drug type dependancy).  I have a mobile that is around 10 years old and I turn it on to make a call, if I really have to, and turn it off again. 

Very rarely do I watch TV and when I do it is recorded on a DVD recorder so I can fast forward the adverts.  I don't like the idea of cloud computing and the only susbscription I would consider would be along the lines of Vue where you pay monthly for furture releases.  Difference it that I still have the program on my PC, if it only exists in the cloud it can stay there.