Lead time for new Intel NIC orders is quoted around 52 weeks
pcengines.ch
pcengines.ch
The problem is that we are trying to squeeze blood out of a rock. Demand exceeds supply, and it takes years to scale supply up. It doesn't matter if we are using JIT or not, the suppliers for the bottlenecks have all been working at 100% since essentially the start of the pandemic.
It’s not like people start dying on the streets, simply things are getting expensive and hard to get during disturbances.
Are there calculations demonstrating that JIT the risks of optimization are more harmful than helpful in the long run?
The dysfunction is the accounting games that companies are incentivized to keep stuff off of their books. Every company wants to look like a software company and avoid stuff like inventory. Some of this is absurd - many companies don’t “own” property, for example, they lease through entities that are sometimes only nominally separate.
Sometimes companies will outsource processes and fulfillment to layers of other entities, each of which do the same thing. Disruptions cascade - I had one issue last year where a supplier’s supplier had issues getting boxes, and a two week delay there delayed downstream fulfillment by 6 weeks. All because the people who ship the end product couldn’t deliver, and the “principal” outsourced the actual management of the process to a third party. If the principal controlled it, they would have gotten it done, as they were punished severely by the contract penalties. They bet on everything working out ok and lost.
JIT is a firm level decision, not a society level. It's up to each firm to decide how much of something they are buying.
> It’s not like people start dying on the streets
Well, that’s a good example: there was a huge rise in need for masks and other protective gear about 20 months ago and the supply chain couldn’t handle it. That was why people were encouraged to use makeshift cloth masks, to leave the surgical masks and respirators for medical personnel who had the greatest exposure.
Eliminating buffering cuts cost and can lead to lower prices as well. But at best it merely pushes the buffer elsewhere.
Another way of looking at it: leaving seatbelts out of cars would save money and really, most cars are not involved in accidents so are they really needed? Pass the savings on to the customer!
I like the way you put it, JIT simply pushes the buffer elsewhere. However, this seems like a very good thing to have because those who cannot afford running out of something can do a buffer themselves instead of blindly everyone keeps buffering.
The problem with that specific kind of stockpile buffer is that it can become quickly depleted. No mask stockpile would have been sufficient for the COVID pandemic.
From my layman's perspective, you need stockpiles and excess production capacity to weather a supply shock. It's sort of like backup power in a data center: you have UPS batteries (stockpiled power) to fill the gap until the generators (extra production capacity) can come online.
No, but I can see how someone would some to that conclusion by thinking narrowly in terms of pop free market dogma.
> Unfortunately, the people who like anti-price gouging laws appear to prefer shortages and misallocation of goods.
Price gouging is actually a worse misallocation of goods. It's still a shortage, but it just doesn't hit rich people as hard. If you have food stockpiles to barely feed everyone through winter, it's not a proper allocation to let the market price food so richer people can feast and some poor people starve to death.
Price gouging introduces a lot of (especially short term) inefficiencies as greedy parasites make profit-seeking decisions based on their greed and not social need.
Markets work very well in some contexts, but it's a mistake to think they work best in all contexts. Crisis shortages are not one of the contexts where they work well.
It sounds like you're assuming that increases in price don't increase quantity supplied. While this may be true in some contexts (e.g. completely unexpected global crisis), there are many cases in which it does:
- In a local crisis, an increase in price encourages shipping in goods from areas not in crisis. Why would someone take the risk of shipping for the same price they can get elsewhere?
- As the GP mentioned, the ability to raise prices provides an incentive for stockpiling goods. Why would someone incur the expense of maintaining a stockpile in exchange for no benefit in a case where the stockpile is needed?
I'd also argue that it's very unlikely for price increases to render all basic necessities impossible to afford, even for poor people. Consider water - even for someone living in poverty what percent of their budget would you guess is allocated to water? Maybe 5%? So even a doubling of the price of water (for context, price gouging laws typically restrict price increases to around 10%) would only increase that to 10%, leaving plenty of room for them to reallocate not-as-essential parts of their budget. For food perhaps the original percent is higher, but there's much more opportunity to substitute cheaper foods in a crisis situation.
One reason is that people don't operate exclusively in the market paradigm, but free market economics makes the (false) simplifying assumption that they do.
> - As the GP mentioned, the ability to raise prices provides an incentive for stockpiling goods. Why would someone incur the expense of maintaining a stockpile in exchange for no benefit in a case where the stockpile is needed?
If you think about that actual scenario, that makes no sense as a business decision. People aren't going to pay the costs of stockpiling something in the off chance they can benefit from price gouging during an unpredictable crisis.
What really happens is parasites try to drain the supply chain so they can flip the goods at a price-gouging markup. You saw this during the pandemic: dudes driving around buying all the hand sanitizers and masks they could, then keeping them in their garage away from where they were needed, hoping to make a big personal profit. All they did was exacerbate the shortages.
Anyway, what better way are you proposing to distribute goods?
Actually, I'm arguing that classical free market economics doesn't lead to the best (or even good) results over all scales. IMHO, advocacy for price gouging is sort of like insisting on using classical mechanics to model quantum-scale phenomena. Price gouging is properly understood as a market failure, in that some people respond to the price signals by doing socially counterproductive stuff (and the supposed socially productive stuff is mostly a chimera in that context).
> Anyway, what better way are you proposing to distribute goods?
Your question assumes I'd give one answer, when my point is it depends on context. In some cases that's dogmatic free market economics, in other cases it's literal central planning, but in most cases it's something in between. One thing is clear, though: crisis shortages are not the place for dogmatic free market economics.
I'm going to bump you just a little on this because your point is mostly right.
In the US, there were manufacturers ready to add extra shifts for producing masks, but nobody would cut them the check.
The point of JIT is also so that when something goes wrong in inventory you don't get saddled with a bunch of waste. The problem is that means that you need quick, accurate decision making for when the inventory situation does go wrong.
In this instance, all the players who could cut a check for masks were all paralyzed by their systems for various reasons (bidding/disclosure requirements, political ideology, etc.).
[edit]
There's also the "If I don't implement JIT, I'll get replaced with someone who will" effect in a lot of cases too.
This clearly holded for PC components, but rather not for, say, microcontrollers for conservatively developed products with a much longer service life and/or duration of sell.
Consider, for example, a stock of microcontrollers for an industrial machinery that
* will be used for 20 years by the customers,
* will be sold for the next 10 years,
* after these 10 years, for the remaining lifetime of the machine, the customer will still be able to buy spare parts.
Just think about evolution: species specialize for short(er) term benefits, but then conditions change and a lot of those specialists go extinct.
JIT is specializing for an extremely reliable and undisrupted supply chain.
Imagine a link-layer protocol without any buffers, no retransmissions or any kind of resilience, built on the most optimistic estimates; that’s essentially what the “business world” has built with their irrational philosophy based around “the market”..
So for VOIP "JIT" is a good thing and your "Inventory" levels need to be tuned at the receiver.
But isn’t it called tcp/ip for a reason?
(Edited because I forgot the big one) Have you ever used a name and not an IP address to connect to something on the internet?
Congratulations! You’re a UDP user!
I once built a prototype network stack on top of a udp library that simulated a physical network layer..
Doesn’t change the fact that tcp/ip was the network stack that enabled the internet.
But I was trying to sidestep that tangent by mentioning link layer protocols in my second paragraph.
The actual closings due to lockdown were only a couple of weeks in most industries. What really hurt imho was that orders were cancelled, production capability was scaled back, but demand came back faster than expected.
What we do when RPis stop being available is yet to be seen...
rpi4 are already getting hard to find.
If anyone knows or has an educated opinion, please let me know...
I'm starting to see end-of-life notices for a lot of parts that I wouldn't normally see at their age, but if they're low runners that would totally make sense.
If you see lead times longer than a year, that's your early warning.
I understand it makes sense to move slower for chips embedded in long-life devices, and they need additional validation; however, at some point if lead times are long enough and prices stay high it becomes reasonable to start that extended validation process on newer chips.
This would hopefully mean consumers start seeing infotainment with much better performance in the second half of 2022, and this lines up with industry expectations of when the squeeze will lift.
I'm a total layman, but that might be misunderstanding "state of the art." Larger feature sizes may be better for their applications if they allow the parts to be more reliable.
And if you think a car company wouldn't use a less-reliable part because of safety concerns, look at the Pinto: Ford knew it had a tendency to, erm, explode, but calculated paying off lawsuits would be cheaper than fixing the problem. [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...
I can only imagined how much money did the people who envisaged the shortage early enough got from hoarding chips.
There's a lack of shipping options available to get items to the US in the first place, that means that various bits and bobs necessary to manufacture a widget aren't available because they are stuck in a shipping container somewhere around the world and there is no available space to put it on a ship.
https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/capaci...
covid exacerbated the problem
And I cannot find anyone with Raspberry Pi CM3+ compute modules with delivery before April 2022.
As far as I can see, pretty much everyone who uses electronics seems to be not just "a bit short" but royally screwed at the moment.
People here are using all kinds of networking/hardware analogies and while generally I'm loathe to use those (they often reek of "All I have is a hammer"-syndrome), you do see these problems a lot in such designs. A good example is when something like a database goes down due to having too much load. Recovering from this failure often isn't just a matter of going from "too much load" to "enough load to handle", you actually have to shed significantly more load than that to recover the system, because that initial failure might cause a cascade of failures that prevents that. This often manifests as a kind of ritual where a system admin pulls a big number of levers in the engine room all labeled "Do Not Touch" in just the right order to shed load and reboot things correctly. Real world supply chains are doing the same thing, but their actions are priced in and done months in advance. Logistics is a hell of a thing.
I realize this is not a concrete answer about electronic supply chains (someone else can handle that) but rather a more abstract classification, but I think the general idea applies here.
I just left my last job (engineering services) a couple months ago, but we were already warning new customers that they should be prepared to buy whatever inventory we could find if they wanted to be able to ship product by Christmas.
People aren’t buying what they need for the next month, they are trying to get a year or 18 months of supply.
A few weeks ago they emailed me saying the AX200 is unavailable and my choice was Realtek WiFi, or cancel my order.
I'm seriously wondering if they'll ever deliver. I might cancel my order if Ryzen 6000 is released before they manage to ship.
https://www.jittruckparts.com/blog/post/3-takeaways-from-the... https://www.ccjdigital.com/maintenance/article/15066337/truc...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/pictures-china-builds-two-ho...
Looking back on that, it's interesting to think about how that should have been a major warning sign of things to come for the rest of the world.
We built multiple temporary hospitals in the UK too. And albeit not so widely reported, temporary morgues.
To be honest I assumed a whole bunch of countries were doing this...
I'm not sure the UK emergency Nightingale hospitals were actually _used_, since (obviously) you can repurpose a building but you can't just find a few thousand healthcare staff at short notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214
I’m not one to show much support for the current government but the negative (media) reaction to these hospitals not actually being needed was pretty short sighted.
We should be thankful that the hospitals were there and even more thankful that they weren’t needed.
There were more obvious things for which to hold the government to account.
Samples of sick people were recovered for researching that strain of influenza by locating large graves which had been created where it remained cold enough to preserve the bodies. Until I'd heard that and lived through last year, the gravity of it all totally eluded me. It takes a lot before people start burying the dead in trenches; it's perhaps second to the worst case in which we can't even manage that. A scenario common to war but nothing else I can think of.
I've been so isolated from these kinds of circumstances for all of the pandemic, but I try to remind myself that it's exactly why lock downs and masks and all the hassle are actually completely reasonable. The alternative is incredibly dark, evidently.
However, it’s really difficult to be proactive here as avoiding an issues means people assume it isn’t a problem. Shutdowns likely saved millions of lives in America but as people are only aware of the downsides they see not the horrors that where avoided.
Both went virtually unused.
[In NYC]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-u...
> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nycs-largest-emergency-h...
> But much to the frustration of healthcare workers, since that announcement, Javits has taken in nowhere near its capacity. As of April 7, the convention center had admitted only 66 patients. This was due in large part to the strict admission requirements. At first, a patient could only be transferred to Javits if they were convalescing, or in the recovery period. The fear was that Javits didn't have the ICU beds, operating rooms, or equipment necessary to handle patients who might relapse or need surgery because of an underlying condition.
Her country was on the safe (no isolation) list when her plane landed in China, and she then boarded a long distance, overnight train.
Her country then announced their first positive case.
When she left the train, two men with hazmat suits and a van were on the platform to meet her. They took her to an isolation hotel room with an alarmed door. (Not an actual lock, as I understand, so she could leave if there were a fire. But an alarmed door.)
Three weeks later we had 4 cases from Italian tourists - it all went pear shaped from there - 2.91M infected and 87,819 deaths.
I am still not completely convinced that the choice of blanket lockdowns instead of focused protection of risky groups didn't make things worse by prolonging the pandemic, a.k.a. "flattening the curve".
Old people are not very mobile by nature, and had we kept the economy working, but with government assistance, we would probably be able to improve the social distancing of the elder and the obese for as much as we needed. The rest of the population could live their life as usual, with minimal consequence, and the virus would peter out when it find it difficult to find new host without immunity.
Instead we lockdown indiscriminately, and opened up indiscriminately and probably sooner then the ideal, because you simply can't keep thing lockdown for the whole society for long: Your resources are going to exhaust some day.
No, the lockdowns were the cause not the pandemic. We didn't have to do lockdowns--they weren't on anybody's pandemic plans until March of 2020. Lockdowns and our reaction to Covid was entirely upon humans.
> It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals. China especially was hit so incredibly badly in that first wave
Were they really though? Or was the hysteria in March off the charts?
The lockdowns were the actual proximate cause for most business disruptions.
> It's not like everyone was going to continually working normally in crowded spaces with people dropping like flies in the hospitals.
People who are employed are usually younger than 65 and therefore were never at significant demographic health risk from coronavirus.
You could infer that if we hadn't acted the way we did, then what I described would have actually happened and things would be a lot worse. You could also infer that long-term and large-scale control of an airbourne respiratory virus through social means is ineffectual, and things would have been about the same anyway (from a death and disease standpoint).
I guess the potential nuance is, blaming it on "lock downs" gets vaguely political whereas blaming it on the root cause, the pandemic, puts emphasis on the wider point that any actual pandemic of this magnitude is of course going to disrupt the worlds supply chain one way or another.
Thank you for phrasing so perfectly the exact point I was making. It feels disingenuous when people solely blame the reactions to a worldwide pandemic while ignoring that the worldwide pandemic was still gonna be happening regardless.
As I also pointed out, we will also never know how much good we actually did. You can tell me it's "obvious" that it did, but there's no evidence to back that up.
And they should've just made vaccines mandatory, none of this bullshit soft encouragement while people can't cross borders.
People weren't "dropping like flies", either, especially not those of working age. Less than 0.1% dead worldwide, the vast majority of which were over 65.
Reminds me of that Reddit thread on psychosomatic death where people were sad their relatives suddenly died. Their 80-90 year old relatives. I mean, fuck me, that's a good life lived right there. Another year or two doesn't make much of a difference. But that's unrelated to Covid, it's just the same type of weird fearful thinking.
Many of those same politicians later benefitted to tune of millions of dollars from advance knowledge of federal bank intervention in markets. If there was no lockdown, this opportunity would not have occurred. There was a clear conflict of interest.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fed-vice-chair-traded-stocks-1527...
Its the same for individuals who bought into MRNA startups eg. BioNTech in 2019 - there's a clear financial motivation to promote disruptive lockdown, in order to position vaccines as the cure.
https://trialsitenews.com/gates-earns-10x-on-biontech-in-jus...
Its likely that lockdowns worsen COVID, because of the reduction in health from lower Vitamin D (staying inside), poorer diets, increased stress, and reduction of exposure of younger people (school cancellations, nightclub closures etc.) who usually form the bulk of the herd immunity population for seasonal respiratory viruses.
First, herd immunity does not benefit from more bodies per se. You are portraying it as some sort of wall, where taking members out of the wall reduces the effectiveness. It is not like that at all. The proportion of previously exposed individuals required for herd immunity effects goes down as the frequency of potential spreading interactions goes down.
Second, there is no correlation between lockdown and lower vitamin D.
Third, we have clear data showing a profound reduction in the spread of other respiratory viruses (RSV, rhino, influenza). So, we have had many fewer deaths during lockdown that in previous years. A win, and yet you characterize it as a loss. Odd.
There were many months where PCR tests were not available to hospitals and the CARES act gave hospitals extra money for covid cases, so hospitals obviously set the policy of “anyone with some covid symptoms is to be considered a covid case”.
> The CDC guidance says that officials should report deaths in which the patient tested positive for COVID-19 — or, if a test isn’t available, “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.” It further indicates that if a “definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.'”
What else were they supposed to do in that scenario?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/11/amid-c...
> The drop occurred despite a sixfold increase in testing at public health labs, most of which checked for influenza A and B along with the coronavirus.
> Clinical lab testing was slightly lower during the last quarter of 2020 as physicians ordered fewer flu tests because less of the illness was circulating.
Sweden had less formal lockdowns, but recommendations that was largely followed . Also limited opening hours for restaurants and closed events with live audience. Most workers stayed at home, traveling went down A LOT and people could not visit care homes etc. If you compare the effect on society it was largely the same as the rest of Scandinavia that did have slightly more formal lockdowns.
Lots of companies (restaurants, cultural events like concerts, theatre etc.) had real economical issues and a lot of people became unemployed. Could be worse, but still it is misleading to say life continued as normal. A quick google show that unemployment in Sweden doubled during the pandemic and that is largely attributed to the measures that took place as a response to the pandemic.
Exactly. Last year I watched (over the internet) Sanna Nielsen sing Stockholm in my heart to an empty field where there should have been an audience of thousands. Useful to have a bit of an awareness of foreign media to see what's actually happening, not what's reported by delusionists on the internet.
It was never true that there were no restrictions in Sweden, just less restrictions.
Edit: by the time I clicked submit, multiple people had also responded to this, which makes me feel better about HN today.
Sweden had the best requisites to come out of the pandemic largely unscathed, like its neighbour Norway. Instead they decided to just let people get sick and die.
edit: The nonsense about Vitamin D at the end is almost hilarious. We're talking about Sweden, right? The country on the Arctic Circle?
Please stop spreading conspiracy theories as fact. It is literally killing people.
Your own statement "conspiracy theories are killing people" is also a bit of a non fact.
While the result of believing in conspiracy theories have no doubt lead to someones death, somewhere; presenting it as a serious problem whose root effect is "Death" is incredibly silly.
Moreover Stats Canada found that in 2020 lockdowns led to more excess deaths in under 65s than covid, largely due to increased substance abuse: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210712/dq210.... "Based on the newly updated provisional dataset released today from the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database, from the end of March 2020 to the beginning of April 2021, an estimated 62,203 deaths were reported among Canadians aged 0 to 64. This represents 5,535 more deaths than expected were there no pandemic, after accounting for changes in the population such as aging. Over the same period, 1,380 COVID-19 deaths have been attributed to the same age group (those younger than 65), suggesting that the excess mortality is, in large part, related to other factors such as increases in the number deaths attributed to causes associated with substance use and misuse, including unintentional (accidental) poisonings and diseases and conditions related to alcohol consumption."
Similarly, England saw 4635 non-covid excess deaths since July 2nd (compared to 4981 covid deaths): https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi....
Your cited example is from before the WHO even declared a pandemic, and 1 day after the first case of community spread was reported in the US.
> Life continued as normal in Sweden, Russia, Belarus... If there is surge of deaths in nursing homes (typically 50% of COVID deaths), it has no impact on the rest of the economy.
Sweden GDP: -8.6% Q2 2020. Russia: -9.6 Q2 2020. Those are massive shifts to say "no impact".
Lastly: lockdowns have mostly exempted industrial production like Intel and only required operational changes.
It also used to attract far fewer idiots. Unfortunately, those days are long past. Now that HN actually has some (small) measureable influence in the industry we get brigading sock puppets, politically motivated nuts, and the dumpster-fire that is "weekend HN". Just consider the fact that a discussion that should be around the current nature of the supply chain and sourcing components is primarily composed of people arguing over lockdown.
The effect is amplified as companies are panic-buying every part they might possibly need for the next few years.
Yep this is a really good point, and not so widely understood. A compounding effect of increased demand and extremely limited supply...
I wonder how much commodities speculation are screwing up the availability...
It is not like life would have continued uninterrupted without lockdowns.
The scientists that spoke out against this were quickly shunned, the wagons circled, and when evidence became to crushing to hold the narrative, history was simply re-written via gaslighting.
With economists at least we know they will regularly be wrong and that you will openly see differing schools of thought on even the most foundational of issues.
You're taking the wrong lesson from lockdowns.
- China energy shortages forcing rolling blackouts.
- Long standing under investment in older chip fab manufacturing (eg. auto industry).
- Long standing under investment in US port infrastructure, causing unprecedented shipping backlogs.
- Copper foil shortage due to over reliance on Chinese sources.
- Covid negative impact on childcare, both informal and formal, requiring formerly working parents to now opt for unemployment or lower incomes.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/22/africa/coronavirus-famine...
I disagree. Something entirely different is going on. Before the pandemic, onshoring of basic components started picking up (Trump's erratic behavior made planning really challenging) but the pandemic kicked it into overdrive (and Biden's policy plans will only increase it).
I know people that are "Tier 3" manufactures - suppliers to the suppliers of the suppliers. They have more business than they can handle and are no longer willing to take on risk from sh*tty customers.
JiT/0-inventory doesn't truly exist - somewhere you have to build enough stock to ensure smooth delivery during line changeovers, shift changes, machine repairs, and all the other completely normal minor "disruptions". It's invisible at the high levels of manufacturing because it's not on your loading dock.
Smart business people will realize that supplier relationships are more important than ever. You have to screw them over less than the other guys or things get really choppy really fast.
Or they can just price gouge. Heads I win, tails you lose.
That idea doesn't hold a drop of water. If price gouging were legal, are you going to stockpile masks and sanitizer for a hundred years, so you're ready for the next gobal pandemic? Of course not: it's a dumb idea and you'd bankrupt yourself in storage fees and spoilage. Even an actual distributor wouldn't do that, given how short business time horizons are.
What a smart price gouger would actually do is 1) make what they would have made otherwise, except collect higher profits, or 2) watch the news closely and rush out to try to buy up as much as they can before the general public acts, then sit outside the store they bought them from and scalp the goods at an exorbitant markup. Then they can satisfy their greed without wasting money on long term storage fees.
You’re not understanding the play here. All you need to do slightly increase the amount you keep in stock and reduce JIT delivery dependence. This increases your capital expenses a few percent and only pays off if you can occasionally make big money by drawing on your extra stock.
You also seem to misunderstand the law - it’s not illegal anywhere in the US (afaik) for random people to stockpile and resell goods. It doesn’t matter, because that’s not really a viable distribution strategy. It is illegal in many states for stores to suddenly raise prices, and stores are the institutions who would actually be equipped to absorb demand shocks.
If signed with the right key, some can run entire stacks, such as iSCSI, FCoE and others. The Multiport ones can do switching, filtering, and some basic routing in hardware. The "other" operating system is totally unencumbered by this.
This is routinely used by e.g. Intel AMT/ME, which programs the network card to reroute some destination ports to (in this case internal) recipients (the ME-processor).
That feature is what makes out-of-band management possible for people having added the right keys to ME, or knowing one of the preinstalled ones.
And as a HW-Vendor you never know; maybe your client might one day want to use these "offloading" features. Maybe he just doesn't know it yet...
So when the good offer from Intel comes in, you go for it.
Also some distros just don't include the drivers. I had to build the realtek 2.5gbe drivers from source, on an unnetworked system, last month! Latest ubuntu distro.