Have the same 5, plus the Northbridge 486-style fan plus the 2 in the P/S on my Athlon - but the unit is almost silent! Some work, and I occasionally have to service the 486 fan, otherwise ... bliss. Now if I could just silence the whirring of my laptop's HDD - it's the loudest thing in the office ;-) The trick was switching to the Antec P/S with integrated temperature related fan speed regulation - including the case fans. Plus substituting a big slow 80mm case fan for the CPU fan! CPU and motherboard temps went down 1F too :-)

IIRC the new Intel is truly double core, meaning 2 - or a joined pair of - die in one package, versus AMD's product-specific dual core die. If so then Intel are really price cutting as costs should be higher, although each die may be smaller reducing yield losses. But my big concern would be the heat. Anyone seen info on Intel double-D versus AMD dual-core re heat?

Haven't made the move myself, but my understanding is that dual core will help, as the rest of system, including the OS can run on 1 core while render is taking nearly 100% of the other. HT is becoming discredited with findings that almost all, not just many, applications run slower with HT on than off. That's not to say that at a given instance you can't get faster response, but if you had the wall clock time available doing each task one after the other would be more efficient in total CPU time, than using HT to do both in parallel. Poser will not be able to take advantage of HT or dual core internally - it's base code is just too old - by at least a decade! AMD 64 will give you more CPU bang for the buck than any current Intel product currently. So a dual core AMD 64 is the way to go IMHO, but I'm waiting for prices to drop out of the stratosphere - shouldn't be too much longer for the bigger cache models...

Attached Link: http://www.lunarpages.com

Lunarpages referenced earlier is 3GB data, 400GB per month, free domain, $7.95 per month, 30 day money back guarentee, unlimited dbs, can use a second domain, unlimited parked domains, unlimited email accounts. And free help with moving your site over - with a few minor conditions.

Go with Petunia's recommendation. 24/7 email support (yes, really), 7 days a week phone support. Over last 4 years they've improved the package with numerous upgrades (disk space, bandwidth, web support), free domain, and every upgrade is available to all customers immediately - no resigning, etc. Under $100 per year. And they really are helpful, polite and courteous. And they know their stuff. I have five clients use them, not a single issue with any. And, uniquely I think, one of the most secure CMS's (CPG-Nuke/Dragonfly) is a "one click" install. This includes phpBB derivative and Coppermine Photo Gallery. IM me if you want a link (which will give me a kick back ;-) and I'll give you more info, orientation, help with the decision/setup process if you want.

Re auto loading: Another problem with autoloading using PoserStartup.py is that the poser script has to run for the whole time that your Poser app is running. Due to the way poserStartup itself is called, there is no way to safely end the loaded routine, as the routine you loaded is essentially Poser to the OS, so anything you do to it - like closing it - impacts Poser too. You can fudge it so it doesn't actually kill the Poser task, but that results in a modal dialogue box coming up with a serious sounding error message, which you have to manually close to allow Poser to proceed. Not elegant. So until/unless CL/EF change the way poserStartup.py itself is called (to spawn rather than start it?) using poserStartup.py to load an external rountine is a no-no.

Attached Link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1888877,00.asp

Seems their concerns for protecting their IP does not get extended to respecting the IP of other ... See link. Do what I say, not what I do?

Attached Link: http://www.groklaw.net/

EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has filed suit on Sony BMG for XCP *and* MediaMax (the latter of which is on 20M CD's - Sony BMG's numbers). Also Texas Attorney General has filed suit for XCP. Details at the link provided. Per the EFF complaint, MediaMax is almost as nasty as XCP, and the uninstaller for MediaMax has same security concerns as the earlier one for XCP (see my earlier posting above). Pamela Jones - at the link provided - has a great anology for today's EULAs: (from www.grolaw.com 11/22/05) Perhaps you saw the joke on IRQ about throwing a brick through a window with a EULA attached: I will write on a huge cement block "BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING." Perfect!!! :-)

Attached Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/21/gaffer_tape_trips_up_sony_drm/

duanemoody, I meant the legal downloads of Sony BMG. That has to be DRM protected if they are this paranoid about preserving their antiquated business model. Else how did 52 CD's in US only, and a subset of that in Canada get to infect PC's worldwide??? Yep, they have copied LAME which is LGPL. Ironic that it was LGPL, because if they had cared a rat's ass they could have legally used LAME code, with Lesser GPL they basically only needed to credit the author. Just all indicates that they - F4I - used a light weight to screw with the low level innards of millions, it now seems, of "customer" PC's. Re the media cover up, even the original article on CNN has disappeared! And at least 1 journalist claims that the anti-spyware vendors have deliberately ignored this threat. M$ have already demonstrated their perchance to selectively detect" spyware, and Symantec (who helped develop this rootkit) are equally dubious when it comes to helping fuel the virus/spyware business model. But all the others - except Karpinsky who blew the whistle early on - have "missed" it. A coincidence, or does it just mean that most of the industry just reverse engineer each others' products to find the bad guys? Latest news is that there is a workaround of sorts - see link.

Attached Link: http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/

Yeah, but... When Sony BMG isn't including the XCP rootkit, they have been including MediaMax, which is also not secure. And it has been phoning home with your CD listening details since as early as 2003! (In fact any DRM is inherently insecure unless you implicitly trust the company managing it - and as Sony BMG seems to outsource this, all bets are off.) Also note that one of the uninstallers Sony BMG first delivered for XCP leaves your PC even more vunerable than living with XCP (installs a "safe for scripting" Active X control with no checks or balances on who runs it!!!). Numbers of PCs infected with XCP (derived from DNS call statistics) is close to 0.5M. This can't be from 52 CDs!?! So there seems to be another source. Downloading Sony BMG tracks??? The link has much of the details, inclduing manual steps to turn XCP off until Sony BG or your anti-spyware vendor finally responds to this 8-month old menace.

Are you saying that rendering is slow, or that morphing/posing the figures becomes unbearably slow?

If the former, then the responses above pretty much cover it. If it's the latter, then welcome to the Poser folly! Each version, including SR's, adds yet more code and/or more cached data to Poser's memory model (I'm probably doing it more justice than it deserves calling it a "model" :-) Nothing is ever made as an optional load, so Poser's base memory requirements just grow and grow. With a finite upper limit of 2GB (imposed by Windows), more Poser base code/data means less memory for figures and more page swapping for normal (sub multi-GB) systems.

Some of us complained bitterly when P5 made this huge memory occupancy jump. ProPack's was trivial by comparison. Most users seemed happy though, because either they only use 1 or at most 2 complex figures in their scenes, and/or they were using very fast systems with extremely large amounts of memory. The most common symptom seems to be a slower and slower response to dial changes - not helped by having to go through Windows OS intertask switching since P5's introduction of a separate thread for the Parameter Dial window!

Realistically I don't expect Poser to be able to have limitless capacity, but I see no reason why each version should be capable of smaller and smaller maximum scene size.

Only solutions appear to be: Temporarily hide as many figures as possible while you pose the others (tough if they interact), as this reduces CPU load. Pose as much as possible before adding clothes (which just adds more figures to the scene). Save out your fully morphed and/or characters as new figures before you start the scene, and use the saved figures exclusively, to reduce the memory footprint per character, in your final scene. Wait for CL/EF to come to its senses and make the less used options (Setup, Face room, Dynamic, etc., etc) load on demand (or put the Parameter Dials back in the main Poser task - at least on Windows which has such slow intertask communication). Or wait until Daz|Studio advances enough to create your scene in - which may be a while, but likely will be quicker than CL/EF addressing Poser's memory hogging...

thefixer, You must be loading something which is really a figure. The character to receive injection must be the the very first figure loaded into a new scene. An artifact of readscript used in Daz injection - and readscript predates even P4 (and I suspect predates 2 figures in 1 scene, which is why it doesn't support it). A true prop would not give you this problem, so suspect the one you are using this time is a figure disguised as a prop.

There is a way around this, it was discover by Maveris, and is sometimes referred to as FII, Figure Inpedendent Injection. You can find details by a search in this or the Poser Tech forum. Be warned that unless you are on a Mac, or know your way around an editor which handle recursion, it's a lot of work to set up (1 time - it's atually easier to use when set up than normal injection). Early references state that clothing is a problem with FII, but Jim Burton found a solution to this, and that is also easy now with Crosstalker free automation of Jim's discovery from Hogsoft.

But fear not, a respected Poser Utility developer (guess...) will have a product out soon to address this for all versions of Poser.
[edit to fix typo]

Message edited on: 11/16/2005 11:07

My hunch is that when they moved the parameter dials out into a separate thread (dumb idea if ever there was one) they passed across only the internal FP representation of the number. Then when it necessarily gets converted back to real numbers you get this error. With P4 and PP the original real number is presumably still accessible, so the rounding error isn't displayed. As diolma points out the error will exist internally anyway, because the rendering engine (preview or final) will use the internal FP number. So you can safely ignore the error. But it is every annoying given that the dials are effectively broken in P5 and P6 on Windows due to that separate thread design screw-up, err, choice. It bites you when you are forced to make small changes via typing in decimal place increment changes: you end up often having to re-type the whole number, rather than just the digit you were changing. Can we start a lobby for CL/EF to put the dials back inside the main Poser thread so they can again work correctly and responsively? If they did that we could finally all drop P4?PP and stay exclusively in P6.

Agreed, I should have said "... from within Windows". But not all Windows users know how to make/acquire a DOS boot disk, or run Knoppix... The problem with the Sony install or manually deleting from within Windows is that the F4I hook is done poorly, so removing while Windows is running - as the Sony Uninstall does - can have disastrous consequences if something else has hooked in since the Sony F4I installation. Details in the link I provided above.

"3) I don't know how much autonomy and power has each branch of the Sony organization." Huge, see my post above. They are to all intents and purposes separate companies. This is even more true of those based outside of Japan ('cos the top-level parts of Sony common to all divisions conducts business in Japan, in Japanese obviously). Sony & M$ have had joint (Internet) development deals for last 6 years. M$'s anti-spyware product already flags as "OK", and by default does not remove, spyware from vendors who advertise with M$ - this includes a couple of the hardest to remove and the one which opens the "backdoor" to other spyware. (More sypware coming in makes M$'s anti-spyware tool look more valuable to "average Joe"?) Media, e.g. LA Times, CNN, Associated Press have corporate relationships with Sony.