The other thing that surprised me was that Renderosity had their own store in the marketplace.

I wonder if this means that Rendo will start having separate sales of their own line of products in a similar fashion to DAZ originals sales?

Since you've already got Excel, go to your purchase histories, highlight everything and copy and paste them into Excel. It's easy with DAZ (if you're not doing prices) because all items are listed on the Itemized Order History.  It's more work with the other sites because they only list the orders on the account page and not the details for what was purchased.  Those have to be looked at one order at a time.

Thanks.  That's what I figured and just wanted to ask to be sure.

Does that mean that all Renderosity purchasers of the Asylum are eligible for the upgrade?  I bought it here, but did not also purchase the VP version.

Attached Link: http://www.dailytech.com/US+Army+Says+No+to+Windows+7+Yes+to+Vista+Upgrade/article15217.htm

I tried googling "government upgrades to vista" and found the above article that the US Army is upgrading to Vista and not Win7. I suspect that has less to do with any particular technical preferences than that Win7's exact security features won't be fully known till it's been released and that it will take time for Army testing to confirm that it fully meets their needs.

This article, from a year ago, states that XP sales were going to be extended till 2010 due to Ultra Low Cost PCs.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/03/microsoft-extends-xp-through-2010-ultra-low-cost-laptops

A newer article extends XP sales through 2011 to allow time for migration to Win7, with a backtrack capability to XP for compatibility issues.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9134528/Microsoft_backtracks_extends_XP_availability_to_2011?taxonomyName=Windows&taxonomyId=125

Upgrading an OS on an existing system is more problematic than buying a new system with the OS already installed. New versions of an OS often have compatability problems with old drivers and manufacturers don't always release new drivers in a timely fashion, if at all for older hardware and software. 

Most people buy a new computer every three or four years, so it's usually best to wait for a complete system upgrade (which will include the cost of the new OS). Depending on what kind of computer a person wants to buy, anywhere from 10%-30% of the cost of the new system will be wasted on upgrading to W7 today. Based on Microsoft's past OS releases, early adopters will be advanced beta testers.

My advice would be to save the money and buy a new computer in a year or so, with W7 installed, after it's been patched up with a couple new service releases.

As far as XP going away, that won't happen till the bulk of new netbooks have migrated to W7.  Netbooks gave XP an extended stay of execution. Microsoft wasn't about to let Linux be the primary operating system on a new class of computers. Microsoft initially offered Linux netbook users a $25 upgrade path when the normal XP upgrade was over $100. Microsoft is competitive when they have to be and not competitive when they don't nee

I know PhilC's version was included in a Poser Expert book. That only included the mermaid parts. TY2 had to have been previously purchased to load the full mermaid character.

I've seen bip to bvh converters in the past.  They're probably still out there.

I wonder if the license allows giving away an older version if a person buys the full version instead of taking the upgrade path?

Even if the license doesn't, other laws may take precedence, such as the first sale doctrine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Ideally, there should be a discount on the upgrade price as well as the full version.

Part of the problem is whether or not files have unique names. If a texture is named wood.jpg, there's a fair chance that there are multiple textures  by that name and Poser might grab the wrong one.

There's no question that PNGs are better than RSRs. Unfortunately, the Poser programmers went with a graphics format that wasn't compatible with PC graphics programs and the bulk of Poser content created before 2007 relied on the RSRs and not PNGs for thumbnails.  I just looked at a few DAZ files and found content made as late as Aug 2006 that didn't have any PNGs (Clyde Puffer).

It's outright wrong to be abandoning RSR thumbnails when the bulk of Poser content made before a few years ago only provided that format. There are Poser users with thousands of files that won't have thumbnails in Poser 8. No software company ought to be arrogant enough to ignore the needs of their customers--except for maybe Microsoft. Apple has been selling a lot more computers lately because of the overall frustration Windows users have with Microsoft's lack of concern for their user base. I'd still love to slap somebody at Microsoft for all the hours I wasted relearning how to use Office products after they completely changed the interface in the 2007 version. Nobody can convince me that moving commands from the File menu to their new squiggly graphic was an improvement in usability. I'd like to not have to spend ten minutes turning off all of Word's "helpful" features any time I install the program on a replacement computer or when I get an upgrade to the program. Just because I hit a tab on one line doesn't mean I want every other line to have a tab. I used to have nightmares of Microsoft programming autonomous robots that would try to take over the world--but then I remembered that they'd crash in a few days.

Quote - I'm not using parchment to write on either... ;)

The nice thing about parchment is that you could still write on it if you had some.  I may use a computer, but if anybody tries to take my pencils away from me, they'll have to pry them out of my cold dead writer''s cramped hands. :)

There is an awful lot of good old content out there that didn't include png files.  DAZ, long after P5 came out, only distributed rsr files in their runtime. I don't know exactly where the cutoff will be when png and rsr files were routinely distributed with runtimes.  P4 came out in 1999 and P5 in 2003.  I'll guess that it was another 2-3 years before merchants routinely included png thumbnails with their products. That means the vast backlog of Poser products, free and commercial, aren't going to have thumbnails in Poser 8. That won't affect anybody that has large libraries of external runtimes installed in earlier versions of Poser, but it will be a royal pain for anybody installing content that they only have on disk. 

This isn't a minor problem of backward compatibility, but a fairly significant thing that will hopefully be addressed in updates.  Poser relies on external content and it's not a good thing to make it difficult to use content that was created more than a few years ago. Anybody suffering a catastrophic loss of their installed runtimes is not going to enjoy this lack of backwards compatibility when they find out that the majority of the content they reinstall has no thumbs. There are at least other solutions to fix that, but returning rsr support is a feature that is needed.

Another thing to keep in mind, if a copyright orphan bill ever gets passed, is that changing identities will make it more difficult to find the copyright owner of a work and will effectively orphan the works under the old identity. It's not a permanent loss because copyright ownership can be established again. 

A prolific artist, signing works with various user names and IDs, is creating a situation where it will be difficult or impossible to trace those works back to the original artist as the artist switches to new IDs and email addresses.

Minimizing changes to identities will make it easier to retain copyright control over one's works.

I wonder if the feature change, charging for name changes, explains why there were a rash of them all at one time.