Business heats up.(THE EDITORS' Page)

I left the oppressive August heat wave in New Jersey to fly to Austin, Texas where the weather was ... well, in the upper 90s. Even though I didn't escape the heat, Austin's regular high temperatures seemed the appropriate venue to view the hottest technologies National Instruments (NI) had to offer during the company's 11th annual NIweek. This virtual instrumentation conference and exhibition offered technical sessions, summits, exhibitions and hands-on workshops on the latest tools for test, control and design applications.

NI introduced 12 products during their exciting opening keynote. Demonstrations ranged from customizable measurement modules and new bus technologies, to distributed and real-time control, and analog and digital equipment. The most valuable benefit is the increased processing power of the products. This can be seen in the NI MXI-Express kits for test, measurement and control. According to NI, the MXI-Express link is transparent to software applications and drivers, so industry-standard desktop computers, servers and workstations can control PXI systems with no additional programming. Users can also take advantage of the 33% to 40% cost reduction of the MXI-Express. Another benefit for manufacturers is the industry's first PC-based multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express. "PCI Express provides dedicated, ...