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Nice try, NSA.

Amazing news has anybody else seen this http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/213095 LabVIEW Home Bundle for Windows. Great news from NI

I also imagine people in favor of this model would be happy to mistake liking a piece of software vs liking a style of sw. For example for a long time my group has used yEd for diagramming things. yEd is fine, but its kind of irritating to use and last year I found a similar tool online (https://www.draw.io/) which is significantly better in terms of usability and a little bit better in terms of features. But I'd really love it if I could just download it and use it offline.

NI already has this - the LV web UI builder is one example. FPGA compile servers are another (although that's essentially just processing). I think this model has its place, particularly in providing some muscle to web apps, which I assume is part of the intention of Azure. I certainly agree that I wouldn't want to see LV moving in that direction, and I don't think it's very likely either, but I would like it if LV did adopt one feature from this model - frequent updates. It would be nice if instead of having to install incompatible LV versions once or twice a year to get features and bugfixes I could just apply auto-updating patches which would be released at much smaller intervals and so only need to actually install a new version every 3-5 years or so.

Oh good lord I hope you're wrong. I could always start training to be a carpenter. I always wanted to be a carpenter.

There's a few of us at NI -- in several different products -- that saw this trend a couple years ago when Adobe first started trying it out; we preemptively raised objections to LabVIEW moving in that direction, even though there were absolutely no plans to do so at the time. I'm glad we did... because although I can imagine NI will have some products at some point that follow this model, but I do not expect LabVIEW to go that way. Speaking as an R&D insider: I observe enough of an "allergy" within NI to LV adopting this model that it is unlikely to happen. Now, taking off my R&D hat and putting on my LV user hat: I don't like the software as service model. I get why businesses like it though. If you also don't like the software-as-only-a-service model, please mention your objections to your local Field Sales agent, as a ward against future ideas. There are a lot of advantages to *customers* to the software-as-only-service model, and Adobe was able to make the change because it got the customers who liked the portability/upgradability/no-IT-involvement-ability of the service model excited about it first and closed down a lot of the objections before they even got raised. By the time most Adobe users even heard about the change, it was fait accompli, with blog posts from users excited by the change holding top search result slots. So you might want to occasionally mention to Field Sales, "You know, I really like owning my own software." Express not just objections but also advantages with the current situation. Doing so will help keep the allergy strong!

It tells me I look 47. I blame the Actor Framework for turning my hair gray

If you want to use an analog out for generating you setup you can. You'll have other limitations that might get in the way making that difficult. Like the fact that when a new buffer is put down, you'll either need to stop your task, which will drive the output to 0 while for some time, or you can replace the buffer values but you can't resize the buffer. So say you want to generate a waveform that is a PWM at 100hz and 50% duty cycle. Using an analog out you can generate a single cycle of this wave and tell it to repeat. But if you want to change to 50hz and 50% duty cycle you'll need to stop the current task, create the new buffer, put that buffer down, and start the new task. This will mean that for a few milliseconds your output will be 0v. A counter output gives you more some features that an analog out can't, and an analog out has some features a counter can't. Some tasks can use either. Your 9178 chassis has two BNC connectors on the front that can be used as counters. And my example was designed and the 9188 which I'm guessing has very similar features. If you can get my example working, then it shouldn't be too difficult to replace the array of frequency duty cycle pairs with your own and have it work.