From: "funemea" <behaegel@pandora.be>

Date: August 24, 2010 5:32:22 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: basler vision technology

I understand there needs to be à business case to support Development,fine to me.

However your data About mac growth vs pc is wrong, with the only exception of education Mac outperforms the pc market

Fortune reports on a new research note from Needham analyst Charlie Wolf breaking down Apple's Mac sales by market segment for the second calendar quarter of 2010 and comparing that performance to the PC industry's as a whole. While Wolf found strong across-the-board growth for Apple, the company saw its strongest performance in government and business sales, where it far outpaced overall industry growth.

Among his findings:

- At 35%, Mac shipment growth in June easily exceeded the market's growth rate of 20.9%.

- Mac shipments grew 31.4% in the home market, topping the market's growth rate of 25.2%.

- At 49.8%, the Mac's growth in business was three times higher than the market's 15.7%.

- Mac shipments in government grew 200%, sixteen times faster than the market's 12.1%.

In the business market, Wolf revealed Apple's strongest growth occurring among larger companies, with "large" and "very large" businesses seeing on the order of 100% growth, presumably on a year-over-year basis.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@...> wrote:

Dear Christophe;

On 23-Aug-10, at 8:08 AM, funemea wrote:

Hi,

Question to Milton actually.

Then why not ask me directly?

Will there be support for the Basler ACE camera series in the future.

No there won't be in Astro IIDC. As I said before on this list, I will

not support other cameras within the Astro IIDC application unless

they at a bare minimum support the IIDC protocol.

To support some other protocol or specification, It would have to be a

new product and would be very expensive.

Right now there are two competing ethernet Camera protocols that costs

in the $1000 range for information just to buy the spec before one can

get started. And what I have seen does not impress and will have

really horrible performance for controlling the camera . It's all

packets of XML data, so to change the brightness from one value to

another means writing about 1 to 4 kilobytes of XML data over ethernet

to change the "profile", where as for both USB 2 and FireWire it's 4

bytes to control a register.

Gigabit ethernet is basically designed to be for Machine vision

(locked down, solid, never changing) and not interactive.

They use fast/gigabit ethernet interfaces.

And Apple doesn't. Apple's Gigabit Ethernet doesn't even match what

one can get with FW800 for throughput.

To gain the performance that is supposed to be there, I would have to

write our own PCI Gigabit drivers to support Gigabit Ethernet hardware

(not Apples), tuned for Cameras and Apple only has two expandable Macs

to add PCI Express / PC34 cards too do it with. So it would only get

"high" performance on two of Apples least selling and most expensive

Mac models.

The nice thing of course is that they offer a competitive (lower

price) alternative to the PRG offerings but still with similar ccd's.

I see. So I'm supposed to plunk down $50,000+ buying hardware and

software and spend 18+ months development time to save you a few

dollars?

I've read with proper tuning and ROI 200fps can be achieved on the

smaller models.

You can get that already with FireWire 800 without any screwing

around. I had a PixeLink CMOS FW400 camera here for testing a few

weeks ago, I was recording to disk at 320x240 at 240 FPS without

breaking a sweat.

So you'd have to convince me that this would make sense from an

economic point of view, and I just don't see it. Apple's Mac market

share is effectively stagnant compared to the total number of PCs

being produced annually, so growth for me is basically non existent.

The fact that Macs' were not even mentioned at the WWDC this year

speaks volumes to the direction Steve / Apple is going with Macs.

HTH..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1106 - 428 Chaparral Ravine View SE.

Calgary Alberta T2X 0N2

1-(403)-453-1624

milton@...