hooovahh

I appreciate the tips but why not post some code showing how to perform these operations?

EDIT: Okay I do see the blog post has screenshots of LabVIEW code but no VIs posted.

I'm only just coming into this, but is this the same as NI's Ethernet/IP toolkit?

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/209676

I saw that this existed in NI Labs before it was an official product, but those files have been taken down.

Good thing NI isn't a democracy.

While I agree NI isn't a democracy, they do have to cater to their customers and adding or removing features that the majority are asking for (mostly adding) is what keeps customers buying and using LabVIEW, which keeps customers buying hardware.

I think it is in NI's best interest to add features that are asked for by the most number of users. Which is why the idea exchange seems to work well for feature requests in LabVIEW. Now that's not saying that some features haven't been added in the past which a minority has asked for (or even no one). I can think of several features of LabVIEW that must have taken alot of hours to implement which I've rarely used, and I would have preferred those hours been used on some other feature I wanted, but I'm just one customer.

Could you either post a screenshot or explain a little more. Are you saying the window doesn't fit on the screen? I'd recommend increasing the resolution of your monitor if that is the case.

Alternatively you can run the installers of the products you want to install by browsing the Distributions folder on the DVD.

No offense taken, we are all entitled to express our opinions!

I can come across as harsh over text some times, glad you don't feel that way.

I understand that from a Linux perspective, driver support is very important, but from Windows side drivers for just about any thing are included in the base install (which is why it has ballooned in size in the last few releases). Of course it doesn't include drivers for all hardware in existence, but installing a fresh Windows 7 on any netbook should have drivers for all hardware.

I have not found the Atom to be too slow for basic browsing, games, emulators, or video play back of non HD video. I have used an Atom for 1080p video play back at native resolution but it was using hardware acceleration which for this discussion of netbooks I am ignoring that. I've also installed LabVIEW and done some (very little) programming. The resolution is what is a killer for me but performance wise it handled it fine. Of course it probably won't be able to handle a full fledged DAQ application but then neither can an iPad, neither were designed with that in mind (at least I hope not)

I was unfamiliar with an ultrabook and my first quick google search brought up atom based PCs which is why I asked if there was any benefit from them. That being said they are two to four times more expensive than a netbook, and personally I don't need the extra performance for what I am using it for.

Gaming on netbooks has alot more options than tablets. I personally prefer a USB game pad (something no tablet I've seen can do). Has rumble two analog sticks and a bunch of buttons, and lots of options for USB game pads. I have used the keyboard and mouse, but I can also use a wireless mouse for FPS gaming. (again no tablet i've seen does this). There are also touch friendly netbooks (which I've linked to earlier) which can have a simple interface for launching applications that are as user friendly as an iPad, where 3 year olds can touch things.

Both Andorid and iOS have free texting? No extra data plan needed? Because I don't have a separate monthly bill for my netbook to have internet. Skype is not very system intensive and has desktop notifications. I'm not sure if it is free but google talk has free texting and that can just run in a web browser. I think they have a stand alone application with desktop notifications too but never used it.

I used the word "better" because you did in your original post. I would not consider a netbook rugged, but I would not consider a tablet (any I've used) rugged either.

As for why I prefer a netbook? I believe I've already mentioned the fact that a netbook gives me many more features than tablet and most the time I've found cheaper netbooks than tablets. I know there are sales and such but the ipad starts at $500, netbooks start at $200. I have other things to spend $300 on, I'll just buy a netbooks which I can upgrade and use extra peripherals, and install any application I want, or write any application I want, with any language I want, etc.

I do not agree with several things you have said.

• iOS
  
  • Average user OR gamer
    
    • iOS has by far the most support for gaming (including kids games)
      

    [*]If you already own Apple products

    [*]For teens since iMessage allows "texting" their friends

I do not believe the iOS to have more support for games than a PC. I would suspect that the number of games I can play or emulator and play on a Netbook likely outnumbers the number of total apps in the app store (which is over 600,000)

Why is the iOS good for texting? Why can't teens text with GoogleTalk? Or Skype? Or a web browser? I would say that a PC would have more accessibility with communication through voice, video, images, and text than a iOS device.

• Netbooks
  
  • Tablets with a Bluetooth keyboard are a better option
    
  • Ultra books are a better option
    

What makes a tablet with bluetooth a better option than a netbook? A tablet will still cost more and have less features than a netbook won't it?

What makes an Ultra book a better option? Does it not have less features and cost more than a netbook?

In closing don't take this as a personal attack I am just trying to counter point an argument for any iOS device on the merit that it has more functionality than a PC.

LabVIEW 10? Well there's your problem. LabVIEW does well every other release it seems. 7.0 - Not Good 7.1 - Great. 8.0 - Not good, 8.2 - Decent, 8.5 - Kinda Okay, 8.6 - Great, 2009 - Also Great (combo breaker), 2010 - Not so Good, 2011 - Good Again.

But on a serious note I would try to build in debug into the EXE. This makes the EXE much larger but you can run the EXE while performing basic probing on it like it was source.

I remember one time I had an EXE that has similar issues, I think it reported that it was broken as an EXE so I added debug to it and then it was no longer broken. It made the EXE larger but we didn't care at the time and was happy to see it working.

You want flash and separate user accounts? Windows does that. What's wrong with a netbook? Wife got one new for $250. It was fine as is but I put a 9-Cell battery and a 64GB SSD in it. Now it gets over 9 hour running Windows 7.

If you want a touch screen they have netbook tablets, refurbished $400, http://pcdirect.com/deinduo10con1.html new $500 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834200288 comes with 320GB of space. Holds alot more music and movies than any tablet does. You can also plug in SD cards or USB drives, use USB printers, USB TV tuners, USB CD/DVD drives, USB keyboards and mice, external monitors, join domains, comes with 802.11n, and have a full physical qwerty keyboard.

I don't want to add more options to your list but I personally don't see a need for any tablet. I understand they are cool, but if you are looking for a large feature set for the price, tablets don't seem like a good choice.

Did anyone else find the 4 second video less than satisfying?

Pretty sure you could have abbreviated that and it still would have been funny.

Just wanted to chime in and put a vote in for non-icons. Again I've never known anyone to prefer them.

I don't use express VIs often, but when I do I always change them to the icon view and remove the caption. Probably to save on block diagram space.

...wow well that site is interesting. FYI it seems that the NI forum has found it as well.

http://forums.ni.com...p/310730/page/6

For those of you that are interested the site appears to take a VI and overwrite the password with a known one, and then recalculate two hashes needed.

It seems to me the person that owns that site must have some inside information from NI about the file structure. Not necessarily in how to parse the blocks of data (I can see that) but I'm not sure I would have been able to determine the two hashes that need to get recalculated when the password is changed.

Your reasoning mixes again two rather unrelated things.

What I was trying to say is hackers adapt every 6 months or so to crack the latest LabVIEW, which makes me think that the same effort could be put into cracking LabVIEW passwords.

This means, don't trust your super secret 5 million dollar idea to password secured VIs but also don't expect or require NI to provide such a possibility.

Well put.

The fact that every half year a new executable is released makes the task even more hopeless. So while I'm sure there exist hackers who have hacked one or two versions of LabVIEW to that extend they really won't keep on doing that over the years as the gain of this is minimal.

You say that because new executables are released every 6 months, that this would deter the hackers. But then you mention the license generating hacks.

As to the licensing. I believe there exist Key generators to fake-license LabVIEW installations.

And these surely change with every version of LabVIEW released (likely every 6 months). I would be surprised if there didn't exist a license generator for all versions of LabVIEW. I also don't know what techniques the hackers use to create license generators, but from your explanation it sounds like alot of work went into figuring out how to modify this one version of LabVIEW to open VIs with passwords.

I guess the point of this post is that I believe someone out there has the ability to open VIs with passwords, in all versions of LabVIEW. I haven't seen it, but this post leads me to believe that.

If I did find some page on the internet that explains how to hack all versions of LabVIEW, I'm not sure I would post it. Even this thread makes me nervous. Are we spreading the word on hacking LabVIEW, by just talking about it? However not talking about it may give the false sense of security, thinking that LabVIEW is secure when protecting source code.

EDIT: It seems rightfully so, that the page at StackOverflow has been removed.

I'm not a cryptology at all, zero experience what so ever, but I've often mentioned how not secure the password protection method is (despite a few NI employees telling me otherwise). But I'm starting to understand now why it is done the way it is. I thought that the whole VI should be encrypted, making it impossible to find the MD5 of the password in the file. I now know why NI can't do that.

Using a few graphics cards you can get above 3 Billion hashes/second (if you are going the MD5 route). Which would still be pretty secure for passwords 10 characters or greater (which aren't susceptible to dictionary attacks).

But as already mentioned there is the LabVIEW.exe modifications that can take place as well (which are against NI's agreement).

Theres an example that ships with LabVIEW that is called Basic Input Demo or something that interfaces with mice keyboards and gamepads if they are supported. Search the palette for Joystick and you'll find some VIs.

I'm a little surprised the native Remove White space doesn't work. I also tried the OpenG remove white space and it didn't remove it. There's alot of over head but I think a simple solution would be to use the String to Byte Array, then use the OpenG Filter Array to remove any zeros, then use the byte array to string.

EDIT: Sorry thought of an easier solution. Use the Search and Replace string, where you search for the 00 and replace with nothing. There is a boolean input to remove all, that needs to be set to true.

I'm sure there is a DLL call you can use but a simply hacky way of doing it is if SpeedFan supports logging the temperature. I know CPUtemp can be configured to log to a CSV file every minute or so. If SpeedFan supports this you could then re open that log in LabVIEW.

I know this my not be NI's official response, but I've never been very official anyway.

I really wish NI would be less "official". Like for instance I was wondering, why are there VI's in my vi.lib with passworded block diagrams? Before I was told it was because these VIs had scripting and NI didn't want to expose people to that. But now I can't seem to think of a good reason to hide any source code, other than the code may not be very professional looking.

I saw the random multiple untitled VIs as well.

One thing I noticed is this doesn't seem to work with arrays, but if it did I could see some issues with it. What I mean is I have an array of a cluster, and in that cluster is a 1-D array of strings labeled "ArrayString". When I use the Xnode on this data type it recognizes that I have an item named "ArrayString" but according to its output the data type is a Void. In a perfect world I would expect it to output a 2-D array of String where each row is the 1D array found in the cluster.

To be fair it isn't often that I have an array of string, inside a cluster inside an array, this was just a test to see how well the Xnode did what I expected. It of course did work with a 1-D array of string, inside a cluster, inside a cluster, inside an array. Here the output was an array of a cluster with one item which was the 1-D array of a string.

So I built an application that I had built many times before, and when it finished there was an error.

I turned on error logging and when I built it again it worked just fine. Figured I'd share. I'd just never seen a blank error before. This was LabVIEW 2010 SP1 Windows 7 32-bit.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is native in LabVIEW. Make a new MCLB and right click then go to Drag and Drop, choose to allow dragging and dropping, and you can choose to drag and drop to outside controls if you'd like. Then in Drag Mode, select Move Only (I think this is what you want).

EDIT: sorry re-read your post and it is about Columns my answer was to re-arrange rows.

Wait, which controls are you talking about?

I'm also wondering what controls you're talking about. There are a bunch of things I don't like about Windows 7 (removal of up button, highlight whole row in explorer, unintuitive search, sorting windows constantly) but I didn't find anything wrong with the new controls.

If there is no pop-up asking for a password when you press "CTRL + E" then my guess is they removed the block diagram. In some versions of LabVIEW you could choose to save without block diagrams, but later I think you have to do it through scripting, or a Build Specification in a project.

Try opening the VI in another version of LabVIEW. I think you won't be able to open it if there is no block diagram. If this is the case then there is no hope in getting source code out of that file. You'll need to get an original copy or recreate the functionality.

Wow thanks, there are some really neat examples in there. I think alot of engineers struggle with UI design (myself included). This is probably why it is so easy to spot a LabVIEW program from other programs, the controls and indicators tend to look all the same without much effort going into the UI.