From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: July 14, 2005 3:31:53 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] just wishing

I went through Streampix info and it doesn't say if it does more than 8 bits or not. It looks like they don't use the WDM drivers, so its possible they support more than 8 bits. The Lumenera cameras use a 10 bit A/D converter actually and most of the "up scale" Firewire cameras do 10 or 12 bit (My Flea is 12 bit).

10 bit is what I've heard.

Yep - which is part of the quandary I am in currently since WWDC 2005.

I had a feeling the intel thing is not good news.

Guess I am going to have to make my Titanium powerbook last another 5 years.

Maybe the big money is in ASTROIIDC lite for the iPod?

Whatever needs to happen with the software, if you keep it running I'll buy the upgrade. It works great for me.

Alan

It took me a week to move Astro IIDC from CodeWarrior to XCode 2.1 (it's all C code - no fancy classes or other encumbrances) and XCode as a development system sucks even more than MS's development system does when I last used it in 2001/2002.  After investigating all the performance options with XCode 2.1, Astro IIDC takes a minimum 25% performance hit using Apple XCode 2.1 over the same build with Code Warrior 9.5. This means your performance has dropped by a minimum of 25%, your battery life will be reduced by at least 25% and your CPU runs 25% hotter than it needs to because Apple is incompetent and can not build a decent compiler. With the $6 billion in the bank, they could have bought or licensed a best of breed PPC compiler for a few million dollars - but Steve would have to admit that Apple is a big part of the problem with performance on PPC - and that isn't going to happen as "Steve is never wrong".

I also have hundreds of thousands of lines of code and months of 12+ hour 7 day per week work to do to bring Astro IIDC to OSX x86. Unlike Apple, we hand optimize and performance tune our code, so it's tied tightly to PPC architecture (i.e. endianness, utilizing all 32 integer and fpu registers in the CPU and using Altivec as much as possible) and now I throw it all away. Despite Steve's hype, Apples market share is not growing at all and Apple sold more Macs in the first quarter of 2000 than they announced yesterday (which makes me wonder if the increase sales over last year is mainly because people are upgrading their Macs after 5 years of use and are obsoleted).

So my quandary is  if I have to re-write all this code for x86, do I take that extra step and go WinTel (30 times Apples market share ) or MacTel to cover these costs? I have limited resources, will be forced to buy a minimum of four x86 OSX boxes (probably $15,000 CDN) for testing purposes and so I have to make some hard choices over the next month or so about what is best for me - as Apple could care less about it's developers.

Lastly regardless of what I decide, I consider a x86 a version for all our software a "new product" and none of the unlock keys are going to work on MacTel or WinTel systems - you'll be re-buying it again.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com

www.outcastsoft.com

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