X___

Make it ten...

I thought that was the first... at least according to popular secular tradition: link I guess this is the old question of which one came first of the hen and the egg...

Actually the original is quite possibly funnier: Oh, and there is a second version of it: and even a Wikipedia page with very interesting background information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator

I've got to ask: what is the second oldest?

He that is without CIN among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her

I will grant this to NI: they use real blood and flesh employees, not bots (yet). The second employee I talked with to get to the bottom of NI's price gouging policy was just as detached from logic and reality as the first one (with the excuse that his kids were causing a ruckus in the background, so that added to the stress of dealing with a frustrated customer). According to that employee, I should provide a copy of an academic quote from the past to even listen to my claim that the VDM DL academic version used to cost $110 in 2019. Never mind that I felt this was important enough to write down this information on my software release website at the time, emphasizing the differential with the regular price... Not only that, but (according to this employee) the new policy of NI is to grant academia a systematic discount of 10%. Which does explain the $407.40 vs $582 current price differential...not (I didn't bother to bring up the discrepancy I noticed across two NI webpages, see previous post). Before that, I had to listen to a discombobulated speech about the new subscription policy and its justification by the included technical support, which has obviously zero bearing on a deployment license, which grants no support right to a user of an executable not developed by NI. Of course, I did not get any answer to my question about the reason why the differential between academic licenses and regular license went from a 1 to 4 ratio to a 1 to 1.4 ratio. Clearly, I should not be expecting a front line employee possibly getting entry level wages to justify why the corporate sharks instructed their minions to raise all prices to milk as much revenue as possible to sustain their own salary and compensation increases and shareholder returns. I wonder whether NI has considered recruiting Martin Shkreli or just decided to follow his business model... I then asked how I could lodge a complaint and whether I could have a case number to refer to when sending that complaint. Aside from almost having to arm twist the guy to get the customerservice@ni.com email, I learned that, for price quote, there is no information asked from the complaining customer, no case number is opened, and it is up to the employee to send feedback to their management. In other words, NI is not expecting any customer to complain about quotes. I am suspecting they are up for some surprises. My feeling is that the software division of NI has been granted the status of "business unit" and is tasked to generate revenue to justify its existence. Good luck with that... The "agile" software development jargon is a marketing ploy justifying the release of minor updates as full-fledged versions (e.g. 2022). Not that it is a radical change from previous years as far as the product itself goes, but it certainly is as far as pricing. The head of that strategy? Shelley Gretlein: https://www.ni.com/en-us/about-ni/leadership/gretlein.html "Shelley Gretlein is focused on empowering NI’s broadest set of customers", which means there is a fringe that is not supposed to be empowered (less power to them!) and that fringe is clearly those who refuse to pay for a periclitating software at inflated price (aka not big corporations). "She led one of the most successful rebrands in the test and measurement market." That, I am not quite sure what it refers to. The failure of NXG? The move to a subscription scheme? Something else? Of course, this type of sentence does not even need to refer to anything. It just needs to use bombastic qualifiers. I'll leave it to you to read this masterpiece of a corporate double-speak. My bet for NI's next move? Offer their service to VW to save them from their software development failure: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/from_beetles_to_bugs_vw/

Update on the pricing changes. A Vision Development Module deployment license used to cost $440 ($110 with Academic discount). The new price appears to be $582. Now, since I am in Academia, the price that I see is different: This was a bit of a shock to me (remember, it used to cost 4 times less), so I tried to look for alternative sources of information. The page for quotes has a a phone number (which I called, more on that below) and an online quote link, which I followed. Being logged in as a duly registered academic user, the resulting quote specified that an Academic Discount was applied: Yet the price appears as $582. Which one is correct? I called. Long story short, the guy on the other end of the line did not know, then knew it was $582, but then when I mentioned that I had seen $407.40 on one of the page realized it was $407.40 and when I mentioned that the quote I had requested online showed $582, told me that then it would be $582. When I tried to explain that this was at the very least confusing and additionally looked like a rip-off, he simply hanged up. I am ambitiously engineering my replacement to the small part of the VDM I was using before I complete my migration to Python....

Can someone clarify this on the Readme page for 2022 Q3? Known Issues and Bugs Known issues document technical problems that can range from common issues to severe issues like crashes or hangs. NI did not create this content for this release. Bug Fixes Bug fix lists document technical problems that NI has acknowledged and resolved in a specific version of a product. NI did not create this content for this release. Additional Release Information These documents contain other information that is specific to the selected version, such as migration and upgrade guides. NI did not create this content for this release. I mean, there is this: Accessing the Documentation Refer to the LabVIEW Help, accessible by selecting Help»LabVIEW Help from LabVIEW, for information about LabVIEW 2022 Q3. but does this mean that you need to install LV 2022 to know what is new in 2022 (besides checking the beta thread, which will most likely disappear once closed). There is this bit from Darren's post in the beta threads, which links to this page https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/upgrading-labview/page/labview-2022q3-changes.html

You're ruining all the fun 🙂

The problem with versions posterior to 2021 is that you'll have to find a way to link that information to the actual payment of the subscription to NI.

OK the Help file not showing its content is courtesy of MS. Simply "unblock" the chm file using Properties, 'cause: "The file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer"

Bump.

If I open the content of the "Installer.zip" file, it appears to be missing the "Install Y Control Support.vi", "UNInstall Y Control Support.vi" and "Installer READ ME.txt" that you had in the 1.x version in that thread. If I copy those items in the Pure G Installer version 2 and run install, things seem to work fine. For some reason, the help file is showing a TOC but the content appears blank (same for version 1 BTW, so it might be something related to my installation in LV 2021 SP1 64 bit/Windows 10).

But if you provide a string that should be interpreted as a 1D array, and chose "create indicator", the created indicator is a 2D array: Try to force the output to be 1D by connecting a 1D array indicator, and you get a broken wire: In other words, it seems that if you want a non 2D output, you need to specify the type. BTW, in the first diagram above, the 2D array output contains a single row, so the string is properly decoded (ignore the missing format string). Bonus: did you know that if you set the expected type to be 1D (and obviously the output to be 1D), a "2D" string will be cast to 1D?

Probably not the first one and most likely not the last?

From the link above: LabVIEW is now third party software for NI? Kind of consistent though with making it its own independent product line, the survival of which will be justified by number of annual licensed paid for...

The software subscription model is the future...says this article of 2013 I wonder whether NI has any idea of the "churn rate" discussed there. I guess the first year will give them a clue. I also wonder whether the same brain who made the NI logo become a green deflated ..NI. is at the origin of this marketing decision? And is now gone, after having made wonders.

It turns out that this was a classic case of a spawned VI and orphaned references (and after all, swapping my VI for the 3-button dialog did not change the pattern, although it improved the look), even though I am not quite sure this all makes sense to me... But anyway, the bottom line is that I managed to circumvent the problem by keeping some references alive in a hidden launcher VI which shuts down when no more windows are left open.

Let me try this @Wiebe@CARYA

I listened with interest to this presentation by Wiebe Walstra: https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/GLA_Summit_2020/A_By-value_OpenCV_Library Does anyone know what the status of this is?

We are working on it. We just need more funding...

Just reflecting on what some not-to-be-named companies have accustomed us with... But in answer to your question, if you have irreversible actions taking places (that would be the case in the type of stuff I do, which is mostly computational when it is not DAQ - I don't suppose you want to undo drilling or cutting physical parts 🙂, clearly you need to store intermediates states to be able to backtrack to those and since juggling between different cases might be tricky. this might be your best approach... And since even the not-to-be-named company has been unable to find a satisfactory solution despite their elite team of programmers after 20 years (not mentioning that there is no undo in tons of locations in the IDE), this is clearly not a trivial problem. But that might be one sentence too much. Hold on, Musk hasn't bought that site yet, has it?

I'd just pop up a dialog with a "Please contact our company's support channel and Idea Exchange forum to discuss or request implementation of this feature. Reminder: access to future improvements of our software is reserved to continuing subscribers. Other cheaper and more powerful alternatives may be available".

Nope. The CORE.vi was called by the 3-buttons dialog VI (the "white" version of the CORE.vi, i.e. a wrapper to the CORE.vi), itself called from a dynamically launched VI. As I said, a pared down test version of the program was working just fine (which is why I was not able to post such an example). I guess I must be getting old, as I have decided to move on without fully understanding what was going on, having solved this issue with a custom dialog VI. This being said, if someone can recreate a situation such as illustrated in my original post (a non-reentrant stopped VI whose icon in a calling (stuck) subVI being debugged shows the "green" arrow), maybe we'll get closer to figuring out what was going on (no need to focus on the CORE.vi).