Labview

[Dracos]

Never...ever install this program.

I have spent 3 hours today trying to remove it from this machine.  It's like IE in how fucking crazy it is to remove from windows.  Not only did it's uninstalls not work in the most pathetic and messy manner possible, but removing it's registry files revealed.... around 1000 entries to itself.  Of course, this is only a harp on the fact that trying to do a clean install of it is fucking impossible as it has a tendancy to crash midway....flinging shit all over the comp when it does so.

Dracos

[Bjorn]

Why the hell would you want to install it, anyways?  Labview is designed to control and run experimental and engineering hardware.  Unless you have a DAQ card, or a rack full of GPIB/PXI instrumentation, or, in general, are engaged in R&D, Labview has no appreciable use whatsover.  It's decidedly inferior for sophisticated data analysis, and sucks utter ass as a substitute for a real programming language.

I've used and installed Labview, because for what it's meant for, there's no real alternatives (though Matlab is getting close) other than tedious homebrew.  But it's not even worth taking the time to learn it outside a working enviroment, because a) it has a very low learning curve, and b) any tricky parts to the software can't be learned without the various thousands-of-dollars bits of hardware with which it was meant to be used.

[Dracos]

Unfortunately, National Instruments has a nice little relationship with the school that results in us having one of their stupid daq cards.  Moreover I've been over-ruled with "Labview is retarded.  We should not use this.  It will only lead to disaster."  And well, what we are doing is 'R&D'.  Crummy R&D, but R&D.

I'm supposed to utilize it and a ten year old daq card to control a few motors and given the general expense of hardware and the existence of said daq card, I can't really manage to get any other equipment to work around labview.  So I'm forced to use it, interface with it's daq card, and try to give the circuitry attached what it wants.

Either way, I curse it's name.

Dracos

[Bjorn]

National Instruments DAQ cards are, simply put, probably the best on the market.  I know any number of labs using NI-DAQ cards ten years older or more, simply because they're that good.

I'm surprised that you weren't given a computer with Labview already installed to work on.  If different software was an option, you could probably make do with Matlab, but seems you're stuck.  Having said that, though, for what you're saying, Labview is by far and away the easiest solution.  It's not really a very well-designed application, true, but the assumption is that it will be installed on a fairly powerful machine that will have no other applications installed on it.

[Dracos]

You know, if that assumption was true, it might indeed be an excellent product.

Unfortunately, it's being used under entirely different setups, namingly personal laptops with a bunch of other stuff there.  Moreso, we lack anyone on campus (At least according to the professors I've asked) who is remotely proficient with the use of it.

Personally, I'm more just annoyed that it couldn't just be cleanly uninstalled and reinstalled.  Had it been, I probably would've been done with the whole mess by now.

Dracos