From: "Tim" <tjp314@pacbell.net>

Date: July 15, 2005 2:44:34 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: just wishing

Well, I'd buy AstroIIDC again if I had to as well...  ...not that my $50 will make that much of 

a dent.

You haven't seen any pictures from me yet because my seeing has pulled a good vacuum 

for all this time.  ...and while  I was away on vacation I spent my nights with my new Meade 

DSI Pro on faint fuzzies (including the comet on impact night).  Fun camera, but not that 

great for planetary.  But that's another board subject.

I'm still  interested  in what Milton might recommend for planets/DSOs, assuming that a 

firewire camera could do both well.  I never got a response about my question regarding 

the one cooled microscope camera on the list of supported cameras on Milton's website - 

the Quantifire.  But considering it's a scientific camera with 4M pixels, it's likely very 

expensive.

planetarily,

-Tim.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Alan Friedman <alan@g...> wrote:

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@o...

www.outcastsoft.com

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