1. Yes definately. I'm currently on a 1-year sub myself. 2. No problems. 3. Can not really say, but consider that PW content fills 5 CDs currently... all the new stuff coming out is very expertly modeled. 4. not to my knowledge. PW has a good number of "regular life" clothing etc. which is pretty much devoid of many other places. A fair share of historical, sci-fi and fantasy garments as well. Some have complained that the content revolves too much around Mic and Vic (and now S3), but to me that is not a problem - on teh contrary. PW now has a catalog of their sub content available: http://www.poserworld.com/PoserworldpdfIndex.zip for curious eyes to browse what they get when they join.

Deep Paint 3D by Right Hemisphere is one of the softwares that can be used to paint directly on an OBJ model and to create texture maps for it afterwards.

At least my Wacom pen and mouse have no batteries - it is specifically mentioned. They generate their signals through induction most probably. Both are cordless. The tablet itself has a cord to a USB port. USB provides the needed current for the tablet to operate. I have Wacom Graphire Studio XL. For sceptics ... it is easy enough to verify that most Wacom models no longer use batteries - www.wacom.com or a visit to a local store carrying these. Btw: it would be kinda odd to assume battery failure only after Poser use anyway...

Message edited on: 07/02/2004 01:56

PP

... wow... thank you !

Good good. "Welcome" sounds a bit ... hmm ... out-of-place since she's been here quite a while. Congratulations are in place!

Hmmm... just crossed the 10gig barrier, but then again I've now in a habit of storing props outside Poser runtime. Filecount in runtime 40700+ ... uuh... I think I'm gonna go insane when the time comes to do a defragmenting of the partition ...

I got some really old hard-drives at home. Last year I tested a 42MB drive (dated to leave the manufacturer in 1990) ... worked just fine. At work we had a bit of fun with a 10MB hard-drive from 1986. It still works (powers up and spins, at least), but we don't have any controller's to plug it in... The real issue in this thread is not how long some people have had their data readable in cd's ... it's about the chances took when relying on cds as back-up media. It proves nothing if I have 30 working cds unless I test their performance one by one with a different drive than where they were burnt. Also putting a cd in drive and reading the contents is NOT enough to test the integrity - one needs to read all written bits and not just the TOC (Table of Contents). TOCs are stored in a different manner than the actual data and also in a different physical location in the cd. So if you see your zips and exes in the TOC, you still can't be sure they work unless you test their operability.

Nah... I got no quarrels with big file sizes... I can use my dial-up connection free-of-charge on weekends so I can just leave a big download downloading and go to sleep :D I prefer zip files myself. Savings of some few hundred kilobytes by using alternative or more aggressive packing methods does not make a huge difference when the download total size is measured in megabytes or tens of megabytes.

With the items just updated ... 60 dollars a year is a BARGAIN - not a rip-off !! Lyrra: my modem had some complaints about the nobleman textures, but I told it to shut it and do what I tell it to do... keep up the good work!

RReynolds: you may want to update your information about MODERN tape archiving technology. Basing your opinion on magnetic media to technology used by NASA in the 70's is not very valid. Modern DLT tapes eat up 500gigs of data in one tape with GUARANTEES of recovery by the manufacturer. My old Travan tapes have guarantees for 100000 writings - and the technology to warn me should I use a tape that migth not be able to hold my data. And again: why do you guys think big serious businesses use magnetic media (from single DLT drives to tape-archiver robots) to store business-critical data? ... Because it costs them a lot less to buy the tapes than to pay the damages caused by lost data.

Berserga wrote: "I have only ever had one disk go bad" Sometimes that might be enough to spoil an otherwise working back-up plan.

Yea well I'm not looking to keep my Poser files for 100 years... 6 years is a good enough stretch to me. It won't happen with cds - with current cd-drives. That is because of the data amounts needed to be beacked up! Only 1 unco-operative CD spoils a decent back-up plan. Backing up 50 gigs... once a week ... with guaranteed working back-ups (I keep 2 back-ups)... Lots of cds... I've already experienced that. RReynolds talks about optical medias life-time... however HOME BURNT CDs are a different story altogether - they are TOTALLY different story than professionally created optical storage disks that are meant to hold data. In many cases, as I pointed out already, the facts that cd-writers and readers use exotic standards (yep, different manufacturers make their own "standards" when it suits them) make the cds burnt home not readable by other drives - I've seen it happen multiple times. I have burnt cds at home that can be read only by old 4x cd-readers etc etc. CDs are a good media for transportation of data, but for back-ups... for stuff I've paid money for ... not my choice. Just 3 days ago I experienced an event at work: two burnt cds could not be read by my work comp's cd-reader. I used another cd on another pc over lan - that is not always possible. But I guess everybody makes their choices.

As a Software Engineer I know how poor CDs are as a long-term storage medium. Many CDs work just fine AS LONG AS THE READING DRIVE IS THE SAME AS THE WRITING DRIVE. If not ... you may be out of luck. Very often backups are needed to recover from a systems crash - or when the user buys new hardware. In both cases relying on one particular drive is not very wise. This is not a joke - simple Google searches confirm this to disbelievers. Also the quality of the cd affects greatly: it's not a big secret that cds costing 50 cents DO NOT hold data as well and as long as cds that cost 5 dollars a piece. Quality costs. I've been using CDs as storage medium and transportation medium since the very first cd-writers came out sooo many years back. Nowadays I use only tape-backups to make REAL backups of my stuff - cds are not reliable enough. Tape backups have saved my arse from 2 disk crashes. As a side note ... businesses almost never back up their items on optical medias for the exact same reason - it's not reliable enough.

:) Already a subscriber, but it wouldn't hurt to get some more subscription time. Gotta try anyway...