Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Creativity Interesting, I just posted that report on NI and the creativity of its users, then opened my email and saw this on the daily quote from Nightengale-Conant: "If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected." --Bill Gates: Entrepreneur, chairman of Microsoft, and philanthropist 7:50:37 AM    comment []

NI Week 2007 I'm in Austin at NI Week--the annual National Instruments user bash. This year bigger than ever--I'm told a 20% increase over last year which means probably close to 3,000 users. This year's edition has the feel of the old ones, too. The last two years were good, but didn't have the same feel. (this is my 10th, so I have many to compare) Lot of excitement and buzz--great time. NI is unique among the companies I cover in that it doesn't supply finished systems, but supplies tons of things connected by LabView (its programming environment) and just looks with amazement at the creativity of its users. This year's T-shirt theme is "Limited Only by Your Imagination"--probably one reason why there's so much buzz at the meeting. Sr. VP of R&D Tim Dehne's annual "gee whiz" keynote of technology and products featured a system by a company called Ambient that developed a system that senses when the brain is sending a message to the voice box through a sort of collar with sensors, and using LabView of course, and can translate that to speech or use it to control a wheel chair. Way cool--and think how useful to say a stroke victim who can't speak. The company's big announcement was version 8.5 of LabView that Automation World covered Monday. There's a lot to the release. Check it out. Two things featured here. First is support for multicore processors. As microprocessors have reached just about the limits of physics on speed, the way to boost performance of these chips is to multiply the number of "cores." Since LabView inherently supports parallel processing, it was designed 20 years ago to support this new hardware design. In fact during Dehne's demos, NI engineers showed how performance increases were linear as the number of cores increased from one to two to four. This leads to a discussion of one of the things I look forward to--a discussion of the future directions of PC technology and measurement. James Truchard (Dr. T), CEO and co-founder of NI, called the future "concurrency." He said during his keynote, "Concurrency may be the revolution today that object-oriented was." And his company's engineers showed the performance gains available just at the beginning of this curve. The second important thing, to me at least, is the implementation of state charts. Todd Walter showed me where NI has mapped PackML to its state chart implementation. At the top layer, designers can draw the state chart (or a user can see it in operation as steps are highlighted), then drill down with code that supports each state or transition. This is the first step toward what I've been calling for during the past two months. Of course the second step is hard because it's not technology but people working together--that's the extrapolation of ISA-88 and PackML to cover all machines. That'll take years, in part because no one has indicated willingness to step up and begin the process. But with the NI implementation, machine designers working with end users could begin. I have a meeting with the product manager who covers this tomorrow. I should know more then. 7:47:05 AM    comment []