Yair

It's quite possible that I'm not the only one who tends to believe people, especially when they bring bad news. You need to remember that we (at least some of us) don't know you personally, we don't know the exact nature of the relationship between you and Jim (for instance, why do you post a question instead of asking around the office first?), we don't know exactly how much of an effort it is to maintain this site or how much it costs and we do know that NI does have a tendency to take over competitors. Just remember how Ben Bailey explained his views here and then did come to a compromise with NI. I don't know how the MCC situation turned out, but these things do happen. You're right that there were some dead give-aways, but as I said, people tend to believe bad news. Also, people don't always "think". Sometime they just react as they hear something. I can say that my first reaction was "O.K., that's bad. How do I get the most out of this?". Only later came thoughts about the other meanings. I will just say again: "That's not funny!". The use of NI personnel participance was a good point, though.

Well, they just stole NI's idea!

OK, Jim, since you and Michael don't seem to be in on this together, would it be possible to use the JKI site to host the deleted content (not as active forums, but as an archive)? Or maybe OpenG? I realize this is mixing unconnected entities and scrounging (and I have no idea whether this is legally possible), but it would be a real shame to see this content go down the trash can of history. Edit - Yeah, I saw the april fools post now and I do feel like one now. Yes, I have to admit that than having a complete disregard for the calender, I also tend to believe people when they say something and was not even set back by the obvious signs like Michael signature. Yes, I am that gullible. I believe serious people. And yes, I actually did spend some time downloading some valuable stuff, which I will not consider a waste of time, since I have found some good stuff I missed on previous rounds. So, just to quote John Cleese - "That's not funny!" (to be read with a German accent).

BTW, Michael, I have a question on an important point, since you and Jim seemed to be advocates for this - what happens to the licensing under the creative commons license? What happens to the posts made up until now and what will happen to posts made from now on?

Well, that is definitely somewhat sad and it doesn't sound good. I'm definitely not suspecting Michael of selling out, as I'm sure maintaning this community is a costly issue and not having even paid to be a premium member I'm probably not one to complain, but it would be a shame to see a proper independent site become less so. I would like to deeply thank Michael and anyone else involved in the forums for the time and effort spent and I just hope that the forums will maintain some level of independence and free speech. As for the removed stuff, I guess I will just have to go through the scripting board and extract the good stuff. At least we got a heads-up.

Thanks, Rolf. I couldn't find any decent info about this when it became clear that it's time to replace that battery, so it helps to know this is common. I'm going to keep doing what I outlined because replacing the battery is not a problem as long the computer is connected to the outlet. The only time I could run into problems is if there is a power outage and I have to shut down the PC in order to replace the battery.

You can replace the windows shell application as outlined by Rolf here. Another options would be to run it as a service. There's a tutorial on NI's site for how to do this.

Here's one example of how this could happen.

I hear you. Mine takes a couple of minutes to shut down and several more to start up in the morning (and I still do it). When travelling I go into sleep or hibernation modes and it's definitely much faster.BTW, what do you do about the battery? My laptop (an HP) is usually connected to the wall with the battery inside and it took about 2 to 2.5 years of this to get the battery to a state where it barely holds for a few minutes. I now switched to using the old battery at the office and putting the new one in only when going out and that should hopefully make that new one last much longer. By the way, it is also claimed that Windows Vista will do this and that most modern PCs can do this on a clean installation of windows XP (and that video looked like a clean installation to me).

I added 2 VIs to my structures palette which simply have a while loop with a wait and a stop button and a while loop with an event structure and a stop case already set up. By setting them to be merged you can drop a loop ready for a quick testing of something very easily. Note - to modify the palettes you have to rename the readonly.txt file found in the menus\paletteviewname directory.

Welcome to the forums, Colin. The TOU may be written by lawyers, but I'm sure someone at NI can guide them to fix it. The contributors which make up the community on the NI forums (and which are practically the glue which holds it together) do NOT like the fact that their postings can be taken and used elsewhere without even giving a reference to say where the information came from. I'm sure an amendment which states the source will always be referenced could be made to the TOU were the lawyers instructed to do so, although the preferable option for the users might (I'm not sure about this) be that NI has to contact the user and ask for their permission to use the information (I see how this option won't be "fair" to NI, which is the one spending the money). BTW, why doesn't your blog appear on the list of NI blogs? Are there any other NI blogs which are not on that list?

LV decorations are vector graphics objects and not regular images (an NI AE once said that their format was called PICC, or picture in C format). Normally, you can copy in vectoric images from other programs (like Word or Powerpoint) and resize them freely, but you won't be able to change their color. It seems that this is reserved to LV elements. You could try finding an LV graphic element with the right shape and ransacking it, but I don't know of one.

If you have a numeric control in a subVI and you wire an enum into it, it will be coerced. My understanding is that David wants the same to happen with a string control.

It was mentioned recently on Info LabVIEW. I agree, that one is definitely a "life saver".

Actually, you can get rid of them. Just add the line showTipStringsOnDiagram=False to your Labview.ini file.

I think you need to use the Connector Pane Data property and look at the flags element of the termAny array or use the Get Wiring Rule method. Setting should be done through the Set Wire Rule method.

I totally agree. It doesn't look like NI currently considers the PDA market as a priority market. I wouldn't be surprised if that was because of a small market size and the amount of work they have to do in order to be able to use LV to build PDA apps (and it still isn't up to the PC standards). It looks like they're just trying to get those who do need to buy to buy the PDA module to pay a lot (relatively) so they can cover some of the development costs. The main reason I was thinking of getting 8 (or, as seems more likely, 8.1) was the improvements to the PDA module, but if it requires having another software package AND paying licenses AND not getting very good results I'm afraid we'll just have to resort to using other languages for PDA apps and that way I don't know if we will get 8 at all.

One other thing to keep in mind is that the PDA module seems to have some serious timing issues when it comes to anything under 200 ms. From my experience it seems that you can either have roughly 5 iterations a second or millions (0 or no wait). Anything in the middle usually comes out as 5. As was said, having the timeout terminal in the Dequeue function should help and you can use the timeout output to decide whether you even want to do the serial write. Note that the PDA module has quite a few bugs and it doesn't always work as you would expect it to.

Yes, but with only 3 happies - .

And what am I? Chopped Liver? I didn't notice the part about the resolution but I did specifically mention the 16 colors and I still do have a couple of months to my 0x19th birthday. Yes, Schlepp-Top is a good one (as long as you don't mind puns).

Although I was fortunate enough to have a pretty good VGA screen with my first XT PC (which lasted all the way through to my 166 MHz, MMX, 32 MB RAM (!), 2 GB HD Pentium I), I definitely remember EGA, CGA, Hercules colors, Tandy colors and even monochromatic screens with green and orange. If I think about it I might even be able to name all the 16 EGA colors (CGA is too easy ). I remember installing a 4 MB extended RAM module and being able to perform miracles (or at least to play some of things others couldn't).

I knew something didn't sound right.

If I remember correctly, NI's Clear Whitespace VI came after the OpenG Clear Whitespace VI and is almost identical. I'm sure Jim could verify this (assuming I remember correctly).

Feel another case of Clear Whitespace coming?

No Ben! That was in "Wag the dog"! :laugh: I doubt NI will delete "bad" entries, because once they're there they can be linked to from other places. In any case, a forum thread can be used for this, but it is not a truly appropriate tool. As Jim pointed out, there are real bug tracking tools (which NI probably uses) and some sort of read access to a version of NI's DB would be interesting. That would truly allow searching for bugs, but I don't see it happening.