Reds

I've been to all of the NI Week conferences in the last ~ 10 years. I never attended a Lava G event, never saw one advertised outside of this forum itself, and never even noticed a room set aside for Lava G at the convention center (I frankly don't even know where the event is held). If people care strongly about this community here, the best thing to do is to casually let people know on reddit, or ni.com, or stack exchange that this forum exists. It's my belief that this forum only got traction in the first place because it's existence was announced on another forum, info-LabVIEW. I know most of you guys are hard core engineers, and "dont' believe in marketing". But, you know, the field exists for a reason....

I’m not so quick to use participation numbers on this website as a proxy for LabVIEW popularity generally. I would be real curious to know what percentage of active participants on this site only found out about it via the the old info-LabVIEW listserv. How would a brand new LabVIEW developer find or know about this site? Google? What are the odds that this site ranks better than ni.com in Google? Pretty much zero I would think.

So I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy.....but I've changed my mind. There is no conspiracy to kill LabVIEW here. I recently discovered that some of the toolkits NI sells, like the ones used to generate WiFi test signals for the RF hardware, are also going subscription only. Now this is pure madness. Who wants to buy a $75,000 signal generator for your lab, which will be useless if you don't resubscribe to the software package every year? Crazy. So I've changed my mind. They're not trying to kill LabVIEW with a subscription. These people are just dumb. Really, really dumb. Never attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by incompetence.

Re. the YouTube video... Yes, this is absolutely the problem! Great reference! (Start watching at about 2:30).

Related: Color of money is a big deal in corporations. Especially in sectors like defense and government. I've seen huge buckets of government money that have one big stipulation: They can ONLY be spent on CapEx, not OpEx.

I think the biggest problem with the subscription model is that it does not set incentives correctly for NI. In the olden days, a company had to actually improve their software and innovate in order to get paid more money every year. Now, with the subscription model, all they have to do is "lock someone in" to their platform, and they get paid forever. Why continue to add new features to your software every year? Your suc......err....customers.... HAVE to pay you. Even if you don't continue to improve the software. In this new model, what financial incentive does NI now have to continue improving LabVIEW? It seems to me like they only need to just enough to keep existing users from leaving. That's not exactly innovative stuff. You know what it leads to? Flat revenue for the product line. You know what Wall Street hates?

A stream of pictures at 30 frames per second or higher is best handled as.....wait for it.....video. I'm not aware of any software that could stream raw video into a database. It seems kind of crazy to even try that. My best advice is to start thinking about this as a video problem that requires video compression and video codecs. Those video codecs could be either hardware or software based. If each of your pictures is significantly different from the last, then you would want to use what's known as an "intra-frame" video codec. This type of codec does all video compression on a single frame/picture and does not rely on information from surrounding pictures/frames.

I have to admit I didn't read every word of this thread...but... In this type of scenario, I would normally use a Notifier, not a Queue. If the GUI loop can run fast enough to display all of that data, that's great. If not, some data is skipped. A lossy Notifier is perfect for this scenario.

That's a very common misconception. But it's actually not right. Service businesses definitely do not have 100% gross margin. "Cost of Sales" is a more accurate term than "Cost of Goods Sold" for a services business. But otherwise, it's the same calculation. Services businesses should be calculating gross margin by figuring out how much they pay an engineer directly for every hour that engineer bills. If you pay an engineer $50/hour, you'll need to bill him at $200/hour to get a 75% gross margin. And he's going to need to bill 40 hours every week. If he's not billing 40 hours every week, there won't be enough money to pay for sales, marketing, and G&A overhead. If you're a one-person company (i.e. a single person alliance member), you will need to be so damn good that you can support your own salary on 2 billable hours per day if you want to hit 75% gross margin. This is a great conversation. I hope we can have more business conversations like this on LAVA.

I agree with that general premise. But that same engineering team, with flat spend, is going to have to start working on new products that differentiate, or doing things a lot more efficiently or better. R&D is not going to be able to help NI drive revenue growth if it just continues to do all of the same things it's been doing for the last four years. I'm also baffled at how NI expects to maintain 75% gross margins on systems and services. Ask any alliance member if they have 75% gross margins, and they'll peel over laughing. But that's a whole 'nother conversation I guess.

For anyone interested in the business future of NI, I recommend viewing the "Virtual Investors Conference" from a few days ago. You can find it at www.ni.com/investors. There is a lot more useful and actionable information in these presentations compared to the re-brand event. Summary of what I took away from the investors conference: -- Flat spend on new product development for next 3 years (classified as "R&D"). -- Product price stability for next 3 years (flat gross margins expected). -- Focus on year-over-year revenue growth (including a lot more revenue from systems and software). -- Slash G&A to ensure net profit growth in case that whole revenue growth thing doesn't work out. I'm not really sure how revenue is going to grow with flat spending on engineering and sales. I guess they're just planning on doing everything a lot better? Unclear to me....

A few years ago there was a great presentation at NI Week where someone in the community demonstrated how to write a core measurement application in LabVIEW, while using C#/.NET for only the top-level GUI elements. Does anyone remember or have a copy of this presentation? I seem to recall there was a video of this presentation online at some point in the past?

Thank you AQ. I appreciate these comments. This is important information for so many of us who make our living inside the NI ecosystem. I wish NIC was generally more communicative about their changed view of the world.

Forget about colors and fonts, I want to better understand this quote from Austin Business news: Shelley Gretlein, NI’s vice president of global marketing, likened its old business model to being a Home Depot where companies can get the materials to build a treehouse. "More and more, customers are moving so fast, they don’t have time to make the treehouse," said Gretlein, a 20-year veteran of the company who spearheaded the internal group that revamped it inside and out. "They don’t have the time, and budgets and teams are shrinking. You need to deliver the whole treehouse."

For those of you who haven't seen, Dr. T is transitioning out of CEO role: http://www.evaluationengineering.com/ni-announces-transition-plan-davern-become-ceo-president-january-1

For me, less of my time is spent hardcore coding or engineering these days. More of my time is spent doing sales, marketing and business building activities. That's just been the trajectory of my career/business recently. So now I consume a lot more sales & marketing blogs. I have seen the same sort of dynamic at work over at www.Slashdot.org. We're all a bunch of old guys having conversations about management. Finally, it seems like everyone who used to hang out over at info-labview moved over to this website when e-mail lists became passé. Thus, LavaG didn't need to "advertise" to get new users. People just migrated over to LavaG organically because the word-on-the-street was that this is where the cool people are hanging out now. I mean...just putting on my marketing hat for a second....how exactly *are* the new kids supposed to find this site anyway?? In short: We are all getting older, our jobs are changing, and there is no organic way for this site to attract new users. I never really considered the possibility that this has anything to do with the popularity of LabVIEW generally.

Yes, I took a look at NI Requirements Gateway, but I thought it was weird that that tool was so focused on documenting *where* in the source code a requirement is implemented. That doesn't seem useful to me at all (maybe it is to the medical guys and others who are heavily regulated). I think (?) what I'm really looking for is something that links requirements to test results, not requirements to source code locations. I guess, I'm not really sure what I'm looking for, but I'd like to hear from people who have gotten more sophisticated than Microsoft Word and your standard Defect Tracking website/SaaS tool. I feel like in the LabVIEW community, our development processes and systems are often behind the curve compared to the traditional, text-based dev world. For example, it seems like it took us a lot longer to get on board with source control than the rest of the programming world. Perhaps it's because so many of us have to play the dual roles of both "domain expert" and "software developer".

I'm curious to hear what tools you guys are using to write and track software requirements/specifications. I'm especially curious to know if any of you have a workflow that can not only track requirements, but also document pass/fail test results for a given requirement in a given software release. For myself, I'm using Microsoft Word and FogBugz....i.e. I write the requirement in Word and then if it doesn't work, log it as a defect in FogBugz. However, there is a really naïve underlying assumption to this workflow: namely, that I would never release software that doesn't meet a requirement or pass a test. That's obviously a bogus assumption. A defect logged in FogBugz also doesn't have any sort of link back to the original requirements document for future reference. Most importantly, this workflow doesn't allow me to run a report which says something like: "show me all unmet requirements in release 3.2" or "show me which requirements have never actually been tested in release 3.2". I think (know) that it's important to track which requirements are actually implemented and actually pass tests in a given software release. This type of tracking would require some sort of relational database, and my existing workflow just isn't up for it. So, how many of guys are more sophisticated than Microsoft Word?

It is true that you don't actually have to register your software in order to obtain copyright protection. Copyright protection exists "automatically" as soon as you create the work. However, if you DO register it (in the US at least), you are entitled to recover far more damages in the event of a willful infringement. This means that you can actually find a lawyer to accept your copyright infringement case on a contingency fee basis, and don't have to front a huge wad of money to fight a willful infringer. If you DON'T register your software, you are only "protected" to the extent that you have tens of thousands of dollars in the bank waiting to be spent on legal fees. Additionally, you want to make sure that you provide legally correct notification of the copyright on the software itself. If you don't do this, then an infringer can claim "innocent infringer" status, which is a lot different than "willful infringement". Again, it will be a lot easier to find a lawyer to take your case if it is willful infringement of a work that is officially registered with the copyright office. So you really want to formally register your software if you are trying to make a living off it. Registration only costs $35 out-of-pocket.

Thought I would update this thread to let everyone know that apparently NI has (recently?) updated their EULA to include the following useful loophole (emphasis mine): You include the following copyright notice "Copyright [insert year] National Instruments Corporation. All Rights Reserved." in the Authorized Application's About Box (if applicable) and in (i) any applicable written documentation or, (ii) if no such documentation exists, in a "read me" or other .txt file distributed with each copy of the Authorized Application; (you may instead, or in addition, include your own copyright notice with the notice(s) required above, but in no event may you remove or alter any copyright, patent, trademark, or other legal notices or disclaimers that exist in the SOFTWARE I have no idea what moved NI Legal to make this change to the EULA, but I think it's a good change! Perhaps NI finally figured out that it wasn't a good idea to have people indiscriminately slapping the NI copyright notice onto the About Box of shoddily-written end-user applications??

Have any of you obtained a US Copyright for software you developed in LabVIEW? If so, did you file your software copyright as "Literary Work" or "Work of the Visual Arts"? To provide context, here is some actual language from the US Copyright Office circular: Because computer programs are literary works, registration as a Literary Work is usually appropriate. However, if pictorial or graphic authorship predominates, registration as a "Work of the Visual Arts" may be made.

Hi FrankH - can you provide an update? Were you able to use ASIO drivers with LabVIEW? I am also working on an application that requires low latency sound output. Thanks.

I'm working on a project that requires sound output via the Windows audio subsystem, and so I've recently found myself using the LabVIEW "Sound" pallet vi's for the first time in.....well...ever! The sound output ("Play") vi's allow you to setup and configure an output "task". As part of that configuration, you define a buffer size. Once that sound output task is configured, you effectively write your sound samples into this buffer over time, periodically refreshing this buffer with new audio sample data. That's all fine and good, but unfortunately it seems like there is no mechanism to query the buffer status and find out if the buffer is about to overflow or underflow. While this might not seem to matter if you're playing a sound file for a few minutes on a machine with lots of RAM, it definitely does matter if you're streaming live audio continuously through the system for several days or weeks. If you refresh the buffer with new audio sample data at rate that is just slightly faster than the audio card's configured sample rate, then it seems like the buffer will eventually use up all available PC RAM. if you are refreshing that buffer just slightly slower than the audio card's configured sample rate, then it seems like the buffer will eventually underflow and create a glitch in the audio output. And since there is no way to monitor whether the buffer is trending toward overflow or underflow, there is no way to figure out how to adjust the rate at which you feed new audio sample data into the buffers. Am I missing something here? Is the audio subsystem doing some sample rate conversion that I don't know about? What is the proper way to ensure that the sound playback buffers do not overflow or underflow over an extended period of time?