X___

Update on "disappearing" permanent license. Well, there is at least one helpful person at NI, and I was lucky enough to find him... Long story short (this has been going on since my last post on the topic, more than 2 weeks ago) NI screwed up internally (or, a possibility that was cautiously hinted at, the licensing code is buggy) and voided our permanent license. After (presumably) some testing, they haven't been able to fix the problem and offered me to: 1) exceptionally issue a new permanent license number that will replace our voided one. 2) escalate the issue to the R & D team to figure it out (the hint I was referring to). I chose 1 after having strongly suggested they go for 2) anyway, as I (we) can't be the only one affected. It also turned out that they screwed up our license renewal (i.e. the migration to an annual academic subscription license) and gave our Department a quote for a one month (!) license, soon to expire. I don't really care about that one, as I have no intention to upgrade, but just sayin'... There is truly something rotten in the State of Denmark.

You have two very similar threads on this forum, which makes it difficult to have a linear discussion: https://lavag.org/topic/22489-let%E2%80%99s-make-deep-learning-easy-with-haibal-library-on-labview/#comment-142891 We all agree that graphical programming has tons of advantages over pages of text code. However, most of us hate to be arm-twisted in having to pay annually for new versions of a language that fixes bug at a snail pace (if ever), release features that take 2 to 3 versions to work as advertised, and is offering abysmal level of technical support (and the list of recriminations could go on and on). Your toolkit looks truly amazing, but I would argue that you are not alone in having invested massive amount of time and effort in G-code. Yet, some of us who have, have come to the conclusion that we cannot reasonably tie our work to NI's whim and suicidal plans for LabVIEW. I have decided to migrate as fast as I can to Python. I'd argue that someone who is willing to do so (migrate to Python) will find the resources to master the basics of DL in Python, not mentioning that you'll have to keep running to stay on top of the new developments in the field with your toolkit. How you can hope to do that for free is a mystery to me. As I said, admirable, but a tad idealistic... Sorry for being he bearer of bad news, but "un homme averti en vaut deux", as the French say.

To tell you the truth, right now I am feeling owned for not being able to open LabVIEW 2021 SP1 after having installed it in December 2021 under a "permanent" Academic License (idem for the Vision Development Module). I am being told there never was such a thing as a permanent academic license. Oh yeah? So why can I open my LabVIEW 2019 SP1 and LabVIEW 2018 SP1 versions installed with the same license number on the same machine? I forgot to say that another NI employee I was talking with today (I talked with three, not including the Newark guy) told me that this was impossible because an academic license was only supposed to allow using the latest version of LabVIEW. Needless to say, she had nothing to answer to my explaining what I just said in the previous sentence (that is that I was running TWO old versions simultaneously). So far, I haven't talked to a single NI employee who seemed to really know what they were talking about. It's absolutely all downhill and I have absolutely zero trust in this company. Stock is doing great though, so the smokescreen and psychedelics are doing wonders.

BTW, if someone still believe that a debug and deployment license will allow them to develop software, they need to wake up or prove that this is the case. According to the NI home employees (and beyond, see below) I talked to, that is not the case. For LabVIEW, for Vision Development Module, etc. True, these are PERMANENT licenses, but you can't do much with them. The funny part is that a guy from Newark (the company that distributed NI product, to which NI sales transferred me to get additional information - this gets better by the hour) tried to explained to me that with a debug and deployment license, you cannot develop new code, but you can debug and fix a released executable (exe file). I asked him how that would work and then thanked him very much. 😭

Agreed, it is a shame.

I wished I could be as excited as this deserves, but with the abysmal transformation of NI in a money machine making it impossible to get support for something as simple re-activating a permanent license, I am on my way to Python...

As part of their 100-year of "Engineer Ambitiously" TM "at your speed", NI has in fact implemented a very clever strategy to motivate people from migrating away from their products: make permanent license re-activatable every year and make the reactivation process completely opaque or downright impossible. The idea is that after a few frustrating phone calls ending in the connecting ending in prolonged silence after an attempted "transfer" with tech support, you are supposed to give up and write off 25+ years of code development using a desperately closed and outdated language to finally embrace the open source Now tech support is working from home, so they are probably free to decide that they won't pick up calls, or maybe the call routing system at NI is hopelessly rotten (dropped calls appear to be systematic), but this problems would not exist in the first place if permanent licenses were really what their name indicate. This is not just me saying that: https://lavag.org/topic/22538-labview-activation-issues/ I am not in a mood or position to file a lawsuit, but this is erring on the side of commercial deception...

Just don't hold your breath.

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...