Shared variables are deliberately crippled

[Andromeda]

One of the nice features in the last few versions of LabVIEW is the Shared Variable. Unlike global variables, they can be programmatically created, which would appear to open up a range of new applications for LabVIEW.

Unfortunately, they cannot be assigned default values unless the customer purchases the onerously expensive DSC module. Making matters worse, there is a run-time license associated with distributed copies of an application which uses the DSC.

Naturally, this severely limits the usefulness of shared variables.

This is not the first time that we have seen NI take a key feature which a customer would expect to be part of the PDS, and put it into an optional module. I'm sure that this is intended to “encourage” customers to purchase optional modules.

Our corporate experience has been the opposite - we have seen one of our clients blacklist NI as a supplier, after they were burned by another instance of NI's callous feature bundling.

[JackDunaway]

It's killing me. I've got to ask. Many have been wondering, but nobody's spoken up.

What's a stative object?

[AristosQueue (NI)]

In this context, "stative object" is being used to describe an object that maintains state, as opposed to an object that has a fixed value from the moment of creation. If you had a class that only had read methods and no write methods, that would be a read-only object. If the object's fields can be modified over time, that's a stative object. Whether or not the term is well defined elsewhere, that's what it means in this discussion.

[Darren]

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