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I just went though this for my business. I am based in the USA, and I am a small LabVIEW consultant. There are 3 types of insurance you generally need for a business. General Liability, Workman's Compensation and Professional Liability (aka Errors and Omissions). General Liability protects you if someone on your premises falls and wants to sue you. Mine has an additional rider called Baily's insurance. This covers equipment not owned by you. If you drop it, and break it, your Baily's will cover it. This is not expensive insurance and is great value for the money. There is also some product and data loss protection in my general liability policy. Workmans Compensation is if you get you hand chopped off at your customers site or someone working for you. It will pay for your (and employee) medical costs, and protect you from some liability. This is generally what customers want to see you have. Having this insurance protects the customer from getting sued by you if there is an accident (that is why they want to see it). This insurance is based on your payroll. It is not that expensive because computer programmers are at a low risk to get injured. (I got into the accountants category). In the US Workman's Compensation is by state. Michigan workman's comp laws are different than Ohio. If you have employees you MUST have workman's comp Professional Liability (aka Errors and omissions) protects you if you mess up and somebody wants to sue you. The thing you really want is the insurance company to pay for the lawyer. Legal fees will KILL you. I am more concerned about the cost of litigation than the amount somebody would potentially sue me for. Professional Liability insurance is expensive, and most folks in the insurance industry don't understand what we do. I went through IEEE. They spent the time to find an insurance company and explain the risks of our job. That means better and cheaper coverage for us. IMHO it is very rare to get sued. The costs of litigation for both sides usually causes cooler heads to prevail. However it only takes 1 a**hole... Reason does not exist in a legal situation. The judges, jurys, and lawyers have no clue on technical matters, and don't care. You could be totally in the right and be liable. Having a big bad insurance company with an army of lawyers on staff who don't want to pay claims is what you are paying for. Using a building contractor analogy, having LabVIEW certification and insurance you are now "licensed and insured". IMHO this is a very marketable thing.

The LAVA forums have just been updated to the latest version which includes several cool new features. Let us know what you think. During the upgrade, some avatars got replaced with profile pictures. You now only have one image for yourself which is used in your profile and as an avatar. If you are looking for your old avatar, see the attached zip file which contains all the custom LAVA avatars. You can find your old one in there. avatars.zip

I've decided to try a new improvement on the LAVA reputation system. You can still give positive reputation points to individual posts. This has not changed, however now It is called a "Like" and your name shows below the post to indicate you like it. I think this is a better way to show support and encouragement to a user's post and increases networking between community members. I "like" it!

OK I am getting there with the new unread contents pages, I see it potential. So have a like from me plus this is my 301 post yippeee

If a page linking these should be created then I suggest one be created on labviewwiki.org.

Where you have a 10-element array, you need to replace that with a 10-element cluster. There should be no arrays in the final cluster - everything must have a fixed size. Once you do that, you can wire your cluster directly to Type Cast, or use it as the Type input and wire a string to it to convert that string into the cluster. For the two-dimensional array of strings, I assume that it's actually a two-dimensional array of chars (bytes) - this is a big difference - and that the intent is to have an array of 32 strings, each 64 characters long, or vice versa. If that is case, create a cluster of 64 U8 values, then put 32 of those into another cluster. The "Array to Cluster" function speeds up this process enormously because you can enter the number of elements you want in the cluster, then create a control from it. To get string data into that format, convert the string to an array of bytes, then use array to cluster. Use the reverse process to get data back into a string from the cluster. Here I've modified your VI to demonstrate this. In the process I removed one dimension from the string array, so that you have an array of strings, not a two-dimensional array of strings. LS35_SetFrequency-modified.vi

And as most people know (based on the content of many of my weekly nuggets, as well as my penultimate response on AQ's thread linked above), I often *encourage* people to use VIs that are not in the palettes/Quick Drop. I would venture to say that, since the config VI debacle (which occurred with the LabVIEW 2009 release), we haven't had any major upgrade problems associated with changed interfaces to VIs...our developers are more well-informed of the issues, and we have processes in place that analyze our shipping VIs for interface changes between versions. Jarrod wrote a great Quick Drop Keyboard Shortcut that allows you to easily add a selection of code (which could just be a single VI) to the user palettes so it's accessible with Quick Drop. You can get it here.

Not true. You can do what you want with the new Unread Contents page. Just click on the date you desire on the left. You will then see all your items. They will never go away. You can preview read each item (without setting the read flag) by clicking the little arrow next to each post title. Any items you have already read will have the light grey background. It's pretty nice.