Quote - The solution to solve these problems and maximize the profit is that if a computer requires software and space for storage and there is no way to fit the storage requirements into a cell phone

You can buy an IPhone today with a 32gb solid state drive. While that's getting small by today's standards for all the photos, videos, and Poser content we've all accumulated, it's still more than enough space to store all the software that even a 3D fanatic could want.  I forget what the biggest runtime reported here was, but it would probably fit in that amount of space along with all the graphics software most of us need. It's not enough to store all the 3D content I've downloaded across the last decade, but 32gb is a very adequate amount of space to handle all active projects.

You are right that there will be software vendors trying a "pay as you use" approach to remotely offer software. Depending on how they cost the software usage, it might be a very viable change for software distribution--particularly for niche software that most people would only occasionally use.

I'm a little surprised at the reaction here because everybody in this forum is fairly computer savvy. Anybody using Poser enough to want to regularly visit forums is to some degree a technology geek. I doubt that we're going to lose any functionality that is already available. Nobody is going to be doing detailed graphics work on a smartphone screen. A desktop CPU may be a mobile component, built into a phone, that gets disconnected from a desktop docking station so that it can be used remotely. Instead of carrying a notebook or netbook, a person would carry a smartphone and a dumb tablet screen/keyboard to use as a monitor. They'd either connect physically or more likely through a wireless/bluetooth arrangement.  A person would still be carrying a phone and something approximating the size of a laptop/netbook/tablet, but it wouldn't have to have its own completely independent set of hardware/software.

Instead of having three different computers with a mix of duplicate/different information on them, you'd always have all your information with you. That information will be mirrored on the desktop docking station, so a smartphone loss isn't a catastrophic loss. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm often missing something that I wish I had with me when I'm travelling with a notebook or netbook. This isn't a radical concept. It's a matter of having everything with you wherever you are so that you're not maintaining multiple disparate configurations of your computers and constantly copying information onto flashdrives from one device to another.

A phone will probably be the vehicle for carrying all that information around because it is the single electronics device that most people have with them (at least in the US). It's just a matter of beefing up the device that nearly everybody is already carrying. 

For the sake of disclosure, I'm the only person I know that has neither a smartphone nor even a cellphone. In a year or two, I expect that to change, though I'm way too cheap to ever pay $60/month for a smartphone internet service.

I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happens within a decade. Look at where computers were a decade ago.  Who would have imagined a decade ago that a phone would be able to connect to the internet from nearly anyplace in the civilized world, play thousands of songs, watch TV shows, have GPS maps, etc.? Weren't we still on Pentium computers with 1Gb drives just starting to come out? Sandisk is working on a 128 Gb micro SD card that they expect to have on the market next year. Amazon has 64 Gb SDXC cards for sale now for $220. We're a little ways from having a fairly powerful CPU in a smartphone, but it's not too hard to imagine that being conquered within a decade based on how far we''ve advanced from a decade ago.

What I see potentially happening someday is that smartphones will have the same computing power of a desktop. At home, the smartphone will be plugged into a docking station that has a graphics card accelerator. By plugging the phone into the docking station, users will have keyboards, large monitors etc. HDTVs will have docking adapters so that the TV screen can be either a full monitor or display the phone's info in a window (some HDTVs already have IPod adapters). One could hope that there would be only one broadband internet bill that covers both mobile and connected requirements.

Essentially, the end user experience will be the same as it is today. The only difference would be that the computing power is put into a smaller portable device that the person carries with them. That device doesn't need to have a fast graphics card built into it any more than today's computers require them. Current desktops are built to be expanded with a dedicated graphics card if needed. Today, laptop docking stations have multiple monitor outputs even though the laptop doesn't. Take the same expansion capabilities being used now, add a few more, and make them work with a more powerful smartphone. That phone won't have a quadcore chip, but an adapter could be built to allow it to interface with a quad chip on the adpater. Portable computing needs don't need to be as powerful as what's needed at home. Offload that computing power to the docking station.

Smartphones aren't powerful enough to do that now. They can take the place of having to carry around an MP3 player, a pocket ebook reader, and a few other electronic devices. Why carry around a pile of different things when one might do the trick? I've already abandoned having a laptop for a netbook for my portable computing needs.  The netbook isn't powerful enough for everything I do on a computer, but plugging in a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse makes it a reasonable substitute. Doing the same with a more powerful smartphone would make it a viable option--particularly if docking stations are beefed up to provide all the additional computing power a person would require.

Another option for conforming hair is to export it as an object, reimport it and save it as a prop that can be parented to the figure's head. Short conforming hair doesn't really need to be since it doesn't have to move with the body the same way long hair does.

If you want to use kids in a project, you need to download the free ones at DAZ because they're the only ones that have close to any level of support--with the boys having the least amount of clothing available to them. Even though I've been indexing a lot of the content I've collected over the years, I found very little for these characters other than what came with Poser.

Your only other option is getting Wardrobe Wizard and using it to convert clothing for use on the children.

I don't know why I didn't notice it before, but Will and Penny were probably named after the Lost in Space characters.

Depending how bad the stutter is, it might be best to explain that you can't do phone customer service. I've seen mild stutters, simlar to Mel Tillis, that are kind of cute, but not major problem in conversations. I once had to handle a phone call from a severe stutterer where the person took upwards to five minutes to say a single word. Since it took so long to get out a single sentence, he'd often start over and have the same problems. In retrospect, I should have politely told him to send me an email because it took an hour and a half to resolve a two minute issue--and only got done that quickly because the person called somebody else, that didn't have the answers needed, that filled me in about the question that I had the answers for.. I was able to prompt the stutterer with what I already knew so that he only had to give yes and no answers in some cases. Otherwise, it might have taken half the day waiting for his questions to be formed.

Not every job is suitable for every person. I've met a few stutterers, but nothing even close to the person I talked to in that phone conversation. Somebody, who takes a half hour to say a single sentence, has a severe enough handicap that forces them to communicate in writing. A person like that is perfectly suitable for online customer support. Customer support represents a company and less than adequate capabilities to do the job will reflect on the company. I'm sure most of us have had inadequate technical support on computer products that left us abandoning a company's products because of problems with that support--and conversely staying with a company because their support was great.

As has already been mentioned, speaking gets better with practice and experience.  My first effort at public speaking with an absolute sweaty disaster. I'm now a passable public speaker after many, many years. It's still not something that I'll ever be completely comfortable doing.

Did Poser 8 do anything that takes advantage of graphics cards? The graphics card only gets used in the preview window, not in rendering.

I had a problem with older CDs where nested directories couldn't be read past a certain level. If I had something in a directory structure like this:
Victoria
        Clothing
                 Footwear
                          Heels
I could read files all the way down to Footwear, but nothing in Heels.

My old computer (a notebook) could read them, but not the newer ones. I spent a weekend using the old computer to copy files to an external drive and then used that to burn new DVDs. I've now got files on the original CD, newer DVDs, and on two external drives, one at home and one at another location in case something happens to my house.

Try reading reading your disks on an older computer's CD drive/burner.

There's times I wonder how we ever filled up our days without the internet.

It's why I cannot overly blame young people at work for not knowing classic movie comics such as the Marx Brothers and Laurel & Hardy. The half dozen TV stations I grew up with could only broadcast older movies, so they filled much of their schedules with films that were decades old. First run movies didn't go to TV until years after they were in theaters and, if you didn't watch it when it was broadcast, it might be years till it was available again. A child can grow up today without ever seeing a black & white movie.

With the dozens of posts dp's made about Posette, there's not much question that he's got an addictive personality. I can't even guess what got him annoyed enough over this post that he feels he should try to be disruptive and mildly insulting. It's not as if I ever felt it necessary to complain about his many Posette posts. Frankly, that figure is last decade's model. There are many better female models available today that lack widespread support. Some morphs and modern textures help make Posette a better figure, but it still has a lot of limitations compared to more recent figures.

This post came about as a result of discussions in a board game forum whether collectible card games, such as Magic the Gathering, are addictive. I didn't think so and, in the process of talking about the game, it got me thinking about addictions and gaming. One thing I realized is that so many people hated collectible games, with Magic in particular, is that they had once spent tons of money to build fast killer decks that essentially broke how the game ought to be played and stopped making it fun for them. Magic's a great little game that plays out in under half an hour. It was the first card game sold in the same format as baseball cards--minus the gum. The cards come in different levels of rarity such that a pack of 15 cards might have 1 rare card, 3 uncommon, and the rest common. People thought this was being done to hook them on the game to buy more and more packs to get all the rares, but it was really part of the game design to keep the most powerful cards in limited quantities in decks players put together to play the game. It's not much different than chess having a bunch of low powered pawns, some middle power pieces, and a single rare all-powerful queen. People were buying boxes of booster packs for $90 to build decks with all rare cards. That's like playing chess with all queens. It takes the balance away from how the games should be played.

Ten years ago, I'd spent hundreds of dollars buying boxes of Magic cards and stopped when people I played the game with lost interest in it. I could see how I did go overboard on the game, on Poser, and other hobbies. I wondered if other creative people have similar tendencies. I saw them in myself and a few other artists I knew. I still wanted to open it up to a larger audience of creative people to get a better sampling of opinions.

Overall, the majority of people responding to this post consider themselves as having somewhat addictive personalities--though not enough that there is a real addiction. That was something that I wasn't entirely sure about before asking the question. A few people didn't think they had addictive personalities. If I've learned anything in life, it's that everybody is different.

Anything that has a steep learning curve is only going to be mastered by somebody willing to invest the time to learn it. People with creative energies will make the effort to do that. If a little obsessiveness helps get that done, that's not a bad thing.

Quote - It just seem to me that we're expending an excessive amount of energy, and ruminating in a long and effusive manner, about something of very little importance.
dph

It's one post out of dozens over the past few days. Do what I do--ignore posts you're not interested in reading--unless you have an addictive personality... Are there any forum anonymous programs to help us?

Quote -
Someday someone will draw a big chart of disorders represented by circles and someone will notice that all the circles overlap and that every conceivable personality trait falls within one of the circles.
They will also discover that there is a medication designed to treat all of the circles.

From what I've read, they use an OCD medication. Unlike physical dependencies, which have drug treatments tailored to the specific addictive substance, psychological addictions have one course of treatment. That would pretty much indicate that there is only one problem--and it's not what the person is addicted to.

The ability to highly focus on a single task is not in and of itself a bad thing. Without it, we probably wouldn't have cars, buildings and all the accoutrements of civilization. I sure as hell want the guy, designing a new bridge, to be especially obsessive about doing it right. I'd be a lot less comfortable if it were being done by a hyperactive person who cannot maintain attention on a task for more than a few minutes. Without creative people having a passionate focus on various entertainment arts, we'd still be picking fleas off one another for fun. We also wouldn't have some of the cool Poser figure remaps that DP's given us. It's important to have people who are highly driven to find solutions and create new things. OCD is a real disorder that is probably the ability to concentrate gone haywire--somewhat akin to allergies being the immune system out of control.

There seems to be differences between a creative obsession and many other obsessions. An artist is making something new and controlling the results of the obsession. It's a very productive obsession. It's also mostly a solitary passion. Most other addictions seem to be passive in nature to some degree. They're also often socially structured. People who spend way too much time watching sports and observing religions are doing so in a social fashion where what they are doing allows them to participate in a larger group structure. The effort they put into that structure allows them to conform and be a greater part of it and--if the most knowledgeable one in that subject, to even control some aspect of it. Collecting hobbies are a little less social, but are still a bit about control. Collecting is about completing a sequence and restoring an order to a small corner of a chaotic world. It's a little more OCD oriented. A lot of collecting is about showing off what's been collected and that becomes part of one's social fabric.
 

Hopefully the new DSM update will be more reasonable than the last. The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--essentially a directory of mental diseases. I remember a Time magazine article from a couple years ago accusing that the last DSM update had been usurped by pharmaceutical companies that drastically increased the number of disorders being covered--such that even shyness was included. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but the pharmaceutical industry had drugs to help overcome all the newly added disorders.

The problem with trying to cure psychological addictions is ensuring that there really is a problem. Societal attitudes too frequently paint the problem as being due to what a person is addicted to. Society says that something is seriously wrong with a person who looks at porn two hours a day while not considering anything wrong with watching sports four hours a day. I was looking at one religious site that focused on porn addiction and one of the highlighted articles was about a woman who had to divorce her husband due to his porn addiction. She caught him watching a porn pay show ONCE and immediately labeled him a porn addict and the site touted her bravery and misfortune to be married to such a horrible individual. I've got a brother-in-law that, at any social gathering, will walk in the door and sit on the couch and turn the TV on to watch a sports game. Even if he doesn't want to be there, it's still a crass thing to do. It's not as if I'd go to his home and find the den so that I can sit down and play on the computer instead of interacting with his family. Whatever "addictions" I might have, they're not as bad as his sports addiction.

Generally, psychological addictions aren't classified as a problem until they interfere with life. If a person can hold a job and maintain healthy relationships, they probably don't have an out of control addiction. One bit of good news is that a classic sign of addiction is an inability to recognize that one is addicted. It's one of the things that makes recovery so difficult. Since most of the people responding see some level of an addictive personality, there's a good chance there's nothing to worry about.

I was trying to find a good medical definition for psychological addictions, but couldn't find anything consistent. It's even harder finding anything from established medical sites. I tried following one of the links from Wikipedia to a site that was downright illiterate and useless. Substance addiction definitions are very clear and consistent. There's a long history on the physical dependencies caused by drugs. Psychological addictions are less straightforward as an illness. Whenever I see sites classifying them into subject categories, I know they're on the wrong track. The obsessiveness is in the person, not caused by the subject of the obsession. If there can be a cure for psychological addictions, it will be in stopping the obsession, not in attacking the object of obsession. Religion has often been cited as a means to cure such addictions, but usually just transfers the addiction from the original obsession to religion.  It's less a cure than a change to a socially acceptable medium.

A creative passion is very different from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). An OCD condition is very ritualistic, doing the same things over and over. Creative impulses are anything but repetitive. OCD is an extreme condition, but there has to be varying levels of that condition before having something bad enough to require medical attention. Lucky rituals would be an example. Eating and going to bed at set times could be another example. I just took a retirement course and they emphasized the need to have something to do in retirement because many people cannot adjust to the lack of structure in their lives when they no longer have to go to work for set periods of time. A former boss of mine ran into that problem.  He handled the first couple months of retirement fine and was suddenly confronted by the reality that he woke up the same time he did when he was working, but now he had no place to go when awake. A lot of groups rely on rituals that members find comforting.

It is interesting that people with creative passions seem to largely tackle any project with great intensity for long periods of time. Unlike real addictions, where usage increases at a higher and higher level until the person has either overdosed, been forced into rehabilitation, or quit the addiction out of sheer desperation, the kind of "addictive" personality I have tends to shift from interest to interest. After delving into one passion for a many months, or even years, something else engages my attention and I fixate on that. I can go back to the other passion at a lower level without being "hooked" again on it. That's very different from a former alcoholic or smoker--one drink or cigarette can start the pattern of abuse again.

It would seem that some degree of obsessive passion is almost necessary to create something significant. The time and effort needed to master a craft and create something new out of it would necessitate some degree of obsessive behavior or passionate focus or whatever it ought to be called. A person, who lacks focus, is going to have a hard time creating anything of significance. Having that ability to focus on something for long periods of time doesn't guarantee being an artistic genius, but it does seem as if it might be a prerequisite.

Poser doesn't use the graphics card for rendering, so it doesn't matter there. It might help a bit for the preview mode. A faster processor/multiple cores will help more than the graphics card.

Quote - If, on the other hand, you're trying to get perfect photorealism, then doing the same things a photo camera does is essential. And every single digital camera on the market is converting linear luminance data to an sRGB or AdobeRGB color space in a process commonly called gamma correction.

If it's automatically being done on cameras, which aren't software intensive, I wonder why it's not a given in Poser. It's less likely to get used in Poser if people have to learn about it and put in extra effort to get it.

In a nutshell, gamma correction is about having contrast in an image. That's not everything to know about gamma correction, but it's essentially the desired result. There should be a deep black in an image and a bright white in an image (if the image has a black and a white). A typical Poser render tends to not have either and the end result is a murky look to an image that lacks the kind of crispness that it should have.

It's something that can either be corrected in Poser to a degree or through a photoediting program. My preference is the latter because there are more controls that allow the correction to be made in real time and allows a great deal more experimentation. Doing it in Poser is a global render. If that doesn't look right, something has to be tweaked and rendered again in a non-real time process.

Bryce can convert a grayscale map to a 3D object "similar" to Poser's displacement/bump maps except that the end product is not a rendered effect, but an actual mesh.