• An experimental AI combat drone being tested by the US Air Force turned the tables when, stymied from achieving its goals by a no-go signal from its operator, it decided to take the human out of the decision loop - permanently.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This story came out a couple of days ago but I held off on it because it sounded more like a morality play than the kind of accident that actually happens with advanced weapon testing, which tend to be loud and messy and not relegated to a presentation at the Royal Aeronautical Society.
  
  And in fact there were two issues with the way this story was at first reported:
  
  1. It was a simulation rather than a live test of actual hardware.
  
  2. None of it ever happened.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Does the First Amendment protect the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of their grievances?
  
  It depends.
  
  
  
  
  Depends on what?
  
  
  
  
  Oh, yeah.  Right.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is planning to end support for its Cortana virtual assistant in Windows by the end of this year.  (Thurrott)
  
  And replace it with something much worse.
  
  
  
• Microsoft had a ten-hour outage of its Azure platform in Brazil after a typo led to deleting a production database instead of just removing a backup of the database.  (Azure)
  
  That sounds like bad design - that the same command with very minor differences would delete your database instead of just cleaning up old backups.
  
  But it's alarmingly common.  ZFS uses the same command to remove snapshots and entire filesystems, and LXD uses the same command for removing backups and deleting virtual servers.
  
  Both have some degree of protection in that they won't normally delete resources that are in use, but it's a good practice to have two completely independent backup mechanisms.
  
  
  
• Or three, if you care about your data.
  
  
  
• More details of the alleged Arrow Lake desktop chips expected from Intel late next year.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This year's Meteor Lake is expected to be a laptop-only release, with only a minor refresh for desktop users - maybe another 100MHz or so.  Arrow Lake will double the number of Efficiency (E) cores from 16 to 32 but will otherwise be very similar to current chips.
  
  In 2025 there will supposedly be a new architecture with a greatly improved Performance (P) core design, up to 40% faster, similar to leaks about AMD's Zen 5 cores.
  
  
  
• Building a tree-walk interpreter in Julia.  (Luke Merrick)
  
  Pro Tip: Don't do this.  The results are...  Bad.
  
  Julia is a fine programming language but dynamically-typed interpreters are not its métier.
  
  
  

How That Bottle of Cherry Soda Gets from the Farm to Your Fridge USDA Documentary Video of the Day

God bless the food scientists, because they know what goes into this stuff and they still drink it.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, June 04 2023 11:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Sunday, June 04 2023 11:59 PM (rglbH)

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• YouTube has announced that it will stop removing videos about the widespread fraud within the US election system that the company claims without evidence are false.  (The Verge)
  
  The article asserts that the obvious and widespread fraud does not exist six times in five paragraphs, not counting the same assertion in the headline and subhed.
  
  The comments are even worse, filled with Russiagate dead-enders and people who have long since forgotten that there were widespread violent riots following Trump's election in 2016, assuming they ever knew.
  
  As to why YouTube is making this tiny step in the right direction?  It's not clear.  They are still left-wing and authoritarian, and nothing they say can be trusted.
  
  They unfortunately also host almost every small video channel I care about.

• Maybe reality is setting in with the global recession and they need the viewers, even nasty right-wing ones.
  
  The valuation of design software company Canva has been marked down by 67.6%, and buy-now-pay-more-later company Klarna by 85%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Reddit meanwhile is down by 41% since last year.
  
  All of these are private companies so there's no public share price to track, just individual investors prepared to actualise their losses for tax reasons.
  
  
  
• AMD's Epyc Rome (2nd generation) server chips could hang after 1044 days of uptime.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's some kind of timer overflow that prevents the individual CPU cores from waking up after being put into low-power sleep mode.  
  
  The solution is to either keep them so busy they never sleep, reboot the server once every three years, or turn off sleep mode...  Which requires a reboot anyway.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Book 9i is a rather neat laptop with dual 13" 2880x1800 OLED displays, a detachable keyboard, and pen support.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It can lie completely flat on a desk and you can use it with a pen, or you can clip on the keyboard and use it like a normal laptop, or you can stand it upright to use both screens side by side or one above the other with the keyboard detached.
  
  Only problem is, for the same price you could buy a regular laptop, an external 4k monitor, a decent graphics tablet, a good Android tablet, and whatever keyboard you prefer, and still have change left over.  (I know this because those are all things I've bought in the past two years and I just added them up.)
  
  
  
• The Beelink EQ12 Pro almost doesn't suck.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a NUC - a palm-sized computer - that uses Intel's N305 CPU, which has 8 E cores and no P cores at all.
  
  Which means it is an Atom chip, though Intel prefers not to use that name anymore because for many, many years, their Atom CPU range completely sucked.
  
  This one doesn't completely suck: Compared to the 2017 Dell Ryzen 1700 system I used until I moved house last year it is 15% faster in single-threaded performance, though 30% slower in multi-threaded performance.
  
  That AMD chip was 65W and the N305 uses just 15W, so I'll cut it some slack.
  
  And compared to the 2015 Atom N3050, the new N305 is more than four times faster single-threaded and 15 times faster multi-threaded.
  
  Unfortunately the overall system still sucks, hamstrung by the other problem with Atom chips: Their limited I/O.  It supports just a single memory module, and while it has an NVMe slot (again, just one), it only supports one lane of PCIe 3, so it's 1/16th the speed of the latest models, or more reasonably, 1/8th the speed of a decent and not insanely expensive SSD.
  
  Given the pricing there are likely better options.  If it were passively cooled thanks to the Atom design's low power consumption things might be different - but Atom's power consumption has never been that low.  It has not just one fan, but two.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, June 04 2023 10:32 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 04 2023 04:56 PM (PiXy!)

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• In the feel-good story of the day, Ella Irwin, Twitter's head inquisitor, successor to the odious Joel Roth, who survived the revolution that deposed former dictator Vijaya Gadde, has resigned.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  As the article notes, the timing of Irwin's abrupt departure coincides with the debacle du jour of Twitter first welcoming and then censoring Matt Walsh's film How to Stump a Supreme Court Nominee.
  
  Though the article also notes that Irwin's brief tenure also saw Twitter welcoming "neo-Nazis", so it would appear that Tech Crunch is hiring meth heads straight off Skid Row, which while perhaps commendable as a form of social outreach is unlikely to improve editorial standards, or, this being Tech Crunch, unlikely to improve them much.

• Reddit is planning to charge lots of money for its API, just like Twitter.  (The Verge)
  
  Not quite as lots, but still lots, with the cited number being $12,000 per 50 million API calls.
  
  As a baseline example, blockchain gateway Infura charges $1000 per month for 150 million API calls, while at the other end of the scale Twitter charges anything up to $2 per API call.  Not $2 per million, $2 per call.
  
  A reasonably configured server should be able to handle 10 million API calls per day, meaning that Infura has something like an 80% margin to cover all their costs beyond the bare hardware, Reddit has around 99%, and Twitter 100%.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  One Reddit user commented:
  
  They're digging their own grave.
  
  Reddit used to very much a bit player behind market leader Digg, until Digg released a hugely unpopular update and told users who complained to fuck off.  
  
  And fuck off they did, in droves, to Reddit.  I'm not sure if Digg is still alive.
  
  Update: Sort of.  The top post on Digg right now links to a Reddit thread.
  
  
  
• Intel is planning to release 40 core Arrow Lake desktop chips next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This year the company is not expected to release a new generation of desktop chips at all.
  
  Next year's 15th generation though should bring a substantial upgrade, though not all that substantial, as 32 out of those 40 cores will be half-speed quarter-size "Efficiency" cores.
  
  I'd much rather see 16P + 16E cores, but that would make for a substantially larger chip.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, June 02 2023 11:12 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 03 2023 06:54 AM (obo9H)

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• Silence those annoying little negative voices in your head - by electrocuting the bastards.  (The Bulletin)
  
  Interesting first-person account of tDCS - transcranial direct current stimulation - by an avowed skeptic, who found the effects instant and obvious.  As soon as the current was turned on she went into a state that programmers call flow, where she was focused on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else, to such a degree that her sense of time was off by a factor of 10 when the experiment concluded.
  
  The literature for tDCS and tMS - transcranial magnetic stimulation - is mixed, and I lean on the skeptical side myself, but it's harder to discount this particular report.

• Adata has showed off its next-generation memory modules for laptops and servers, due later this year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not just new DIMMs - only one of these is a DIMM - but new module types entirely.
  
  Of particular interest is CAMM, originally designed by Dell and released as an industry standard.  This takes the LPDDR memory chips commonly used in laptops and puts them on a module, making laptop memory upgradeable again.
  
  The electrical characteristics of LPDDR make it faster and less power-hungry than regular DDR RAM but also mean it can't work in regular DIMM slots, so right now everyone (except Dell) solders it directly to the motherboard.
  
  And they only put 16GB in, so your shiny new laptop becomes e-waste if you need more than that.
  
  I'm very much looking forward to this seeing widespread adoption.
  
  
  
• There's a potential firmware backdoor in 271 models of Gigabyte motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not as nasty as it first sounded, though it's not good: The BIOS checks for firmware updates to give you a download alert in Windows, but it doesn't check that the site it connects to is actually Gigabyte's real download site.  So if someone can compromise your DNS to point you at a fake download site, it will happily prompt you to download and install a fake BIOS release.
  
  So...  Don't take your desktop computer to a cafe and connect it over untrusted wifi.  Or just turn off the updater.  That works too.
  
  
  
• This is the first x-ray taken of a single atom.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The atom is pregnant.

Posted by: Moron Pundit at Friday, June 02 2023 03:04 AM (IZNME)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 02 2023 01:38 PM (BzEjn)

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• The current AI boom is the crypto boom of recent memory, except without even the benefits of libertarian wish-fulfilment.  The "AI bros" are just idiots:
  
  
  
  
  No, Kody, I've never wondered what the rest of the Mona Lisa looks like, because there is no rest of the Mona Lisa.
  
  His thread has accrued 6000 quote tweets so far, none of them kind.

• Corsair has announced new DDR5 memory modules running at 8GHz.  (AnandTech)
  
  
  
• SK Hynix has announced new HBM3E memory modules running at 8GHz.  (AnandTech)
  
  The difference is that DDR5 uses (typically) eight chips to populate a 64-bit memory bus, while HBM uses one chip to populate a 1024-bit memory bus.  Which makes it just a tiny bit faster.
  
  
  
• ASRock has announced a 55" 8k monitor.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I've been looking at getting a 65" 8k TV to act as, well, a TV, but also as a computer monitor - though I just checked current prices and they're a complete joke.  No, wait, there's one LG model that isn't insanely expensive.  Anyway, to serve as a dashboard for everything I do that's legible from across the room and still looks sharp when viewed close-up.
  
  An actual 8k monitor would be preferable, but the very few models available so far are aimed at professional use and cost a fortune.
  
  We'll see how this one fares.  With that 55" screen it clearly reuses a panel designed for TVs and should bring costs way down.
  
  
  
• Crucial's new T700 is the fasted consumer SSD available.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Though if you try to run it without a heatsink it might slow down a little bit.  Where a "little bit" in this case can exceed 99%.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 31 2023 06:08 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 31 2023 09:24 PM (oJgNG)

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• AI makes shit up.  (PowerLine)

  Crawford H. "Chet" Taylor served as the 14th governor of South Dakota, from 1949 to 1951. Taylor was born on July 23, 1915, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and he grew up in nearby Flandreau. Taylor attended the University of South Dakota, where he earned a law degree.

  Of course, this is ChatGPT "hallucinating" again.  Chet Taylor not only was never elected governor of South Dakota, no such person ever existed.
  
  While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is announcing incomprehensibly expensive AI supercomputers at Computex, the actual results of generative AI - in the field of language and information, where all the interest and the big money is right now - are frankly, shit.
  
  Things are looking much better when it comes to AI-generated art, because there the look of the thing is what matters.  Is that a period-accurate representation of 2nd century Rome in the background behind the topless gladiatrix?  Nobody cares, so long as it looks good.
  
  Well, one person cares.  We'll get to him.
  
  And Chet Taylor looks good too.  He's just not real.  And since ChatGPT can't sustain a hallucination long enough to form a coherent short story, just for a couple of paragraphs, so it's utterly valueless.
  
  Nvidia still has a valuation greater than AMD and Intel combined, but at least one corner of that market cap is built on sand.

• Computex - the world's largest computer industry show - is back after a three-year Bat Flu hiatus, and there's an absolute flood of announcements to catch up with.  (The Verge)
  
  Just kidding.  There ain't shit.
  
  
  
• Solana's founder sees potential for it to become the "Apple of crypto".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  I've mentioned before that my job involves practical applications of blockchains, and I've worked with Solana.
  
  It's crap.
  
  
  
• MediaTek's next high-end chip could contain four Cortex X4 cores and drop the low-power cores entirely.  (Notebook Check)
  
  If this comes to a laptop it could finally be worth checking out.  Earlier attempts at Arm-based PCs have been pretty sad affairs.
  
  
  
• A professor who was stitched up by the FBI has won the right to sue the government.  (NBC News)
  
  Xiaoxing Xi was arrested in 2015 on charges of fraud related to economic espionage, but the case folded like a damp tissue when it went to court thanks to the FBI basically just making shit up.
  
  As they do.
  
  
  
• What kind of idiot would buy a DRAMless PCIe 5 SSD?  (AnandTech)
  
  You'd only buy a PCIe 5 SSD if you needed the absolute best speed you can get, and most of the time you'd be better off with a regular PCIe 4 SSD with a DRAM cache than a more expensive PCIe 5 model without.
  
  
  

That Guy Video of the Day

He actually discusses the historicity of topless Roman gladiatrices in another video (spoiler: they were real, and spectacular).   Here he's just debunking the notion - nearly Jaynesian in its vapidity - that the ancient Greeks couldn't see the colour blue.



Well-researched and well-argued, including a deconstruction of an old RadioLab episode that I had assumed was largely accurate.  He is careful to address the argument rather than attacking the arguer except in the case of the BBC, who just made shit up and fully deserve it.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 30 2023 11:29 PM (k3/O4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 30 2023 11:33 PM (k3/O4)

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• Computex is here and Nvidia has announced another new graphics card.  This model has 144TB of RAM, is cabled up with 150 miles of fiber optics, and weighs 40,000 pounds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't even afford  to ask for the price for this one.

• The Snapdragon 8cx gen 4 is 32% faster than Apple's M4, at least on one benchmark.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Of course, neither chip is out yet, so take that with a sack of salt.
  
  But it does look like the commodity Arm market is finally shaking off the dust and competing seriously with Intel and AMD for laptop parts.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Arm announced an entire family of new cores, with 40% better performance, making them 15% faster.  (AnandTech)
  
  The catch there is that mobile chips come with a mix of fast, power-hungry cores, and slower more efficient cores.  It's the slower cores that are 40% faster, and the faster cores are only 15% faster.  That fast core - the Cortex X4 - is alternatively 40% more efficient for the same performance, but expect phone manufacturers to take the 15% and sacrifice your battery.
  
  But the mid-tier and low-end A720 and A520 cores are both faster and more efficient, so if you're in the market for a $500 phone - or a $250 one - rather than a $1000 model, things look a bit brighter.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, May 30 2023 04:48 AM (BzEjn)

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Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, May 28 2023 10:07 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 29 2023 08:42 AM (obo9H)

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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried shares his optimistic vision of our AI future.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He explains that European-style regulation, which extracts huge fines from large American tech companies because there are no* large European tech companies for some strange reason, for any reason or none at all, is bad, while US-style regulation which simply crushes his smaller and less dementedly woke competitors is good.
  
  * There is one - Dutch company ASML, which is perhaps the single most important company in the world today.
  
  
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried raises $115 million for a crypto company that scans people's eyeballs.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I am a meat popsicle.

• Why have air conditioning when we could all live like termites?  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, apart from the fact that you're talk about demolishing every human dwelling in the world and rebuilding from scratch, apart from the infrastructure problems of such dense living spaces - not to mention the psychological and sociological ones, apart from the fact that termite mounds are found in very few and specific locations in the world for a very good reason, apart from the fact that the one example presented is located in a city at an altitude of a mile where nobody needs AC in the first place, apart from the fact that in any cold climate the people on the outer edge of the building - you know, the only part that has windows - would all freeze to death when winter arrives - termite mounds not notably common in Norway, for example, apart from all that, the square-cube law would mean that twice a day you'd have hurricane-speed winds blasting through the insides of your incomprehensibly expensive new megastructures.
  
  Apart from that, sure.  Eat the bugs and live like them too.  I'll be over here.  In my house.  Eating steak.  Or chicken nuggets anyway, given the price of a good steak.
  
  
  
• Electric truck maker Nikola is at risk of being deleted from NASDAQ mostly because it hasn't made any electric trucks.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It has faked some videos of electric trucks, though, so maybe Disney will buy it.
  
  
  
• IMEC - the global body that tries to manage the semiconductor industry the way an ailurophobe manages thirty to fifty feral cats - has laid out plans to reach the 2A node by 2036.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  2A - two Angstroms - is 0.2 nanometres.  Which is slightly smaller than a single silicon atom.
  
  It might seem impossible to construct silicon chips with features smaller than silicon itself, and you'd be correct, except for the fact that these are not engineering numbers but marketing numbers, which is to say, lies.
  
  And that would mean the whole plan is nonsense except for the fact that the current mainstream production nodes - 7nm and 5nm - are also marketing numbers.
  
  So, yeah, chips are going to keep getting larger and smaller and more complicated at a rapid pace for at least another decade.
  
  
  
• Am I the asshole unethical one?  (Daily Nous)
  
  An ethics professor - I've made my opinions on the field of ethics clear before - made it very clear to his class that if they cheated on their exam, they would fail.
  
  Then he posted a sample exam with obviously incorrect answers to a known cheating site.  We're talking about 2 + 2 = banana kind of answers.
  
  Then his students cheated.  
  
  At least he didn't have to fail them for cheating, because they failed in the old-fashioned way of getting zero on the test.
  
  I think they have a bright future as ethicists.
  
  
  
• Don't buy HP printers.  (The Verge)
  
  HP offers a "Plus" program where - if you sign up within seven days of buying your new printer - you get "free" ink for "six months".
  
  Oh and also HP locks your printer to prevent you ever buying non-HP ink cartridges, even if you later cancel your subscription, even though HP inkjet printers are certified as not locking out third-party ink cartridges.
  
  Epson and Brother both sell inkjet printers with ink tanks that - this is complicated, so bear with me - you fill with ink.
  
  
  
• "China's" "home-grown" "Powerstar" CPU is a painted-over Intel 10th generation Core i3.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not in the sense that China stole Intel's design and made the chips itself while claiming credit for the design effort, since Intel's 10th generation chips were made on a 14nm process and China does have 14nm production capability, but in the sense that these are made by Intel and then literally painted over with new part numbers.
  
  Which is one way to do it, I guess.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in Real China TSMC is preparing a 6x reticle size CoWoS-L super carrier interposer for extreme SiP processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  You know how a few years ago AMD launched its new Zen CPUs, and rather than making an 8-core chip for desktops and a 16-core chip for workstations and a 32-core chip for servers (which they couldn't do because they didn't have any money), they made a single 8-core design that you could use one or two or four of according to your need?
  
  That's what this is about.  Only six times bigger.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, May 27 2023 09:24 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 28 2023 01:52 AM (BMUHC)

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• An idea so bad even the crazies at Ars Technica are calling it out: Google Search has started rolling out "ChatGPT-style" generative AI results.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The only thing we want from a search engine is to report accurately on what has been said on the web relating to our search term.
  
  The most notable thing about ChatGPT and its relatives is that it will simply make shit up, including quotes that were never said and scientific papers that were never published.
  
  This is going to be a disaster.
  
  It's opt-in for now.
  
  For now.
  
  
  
• JPMorgan says hold my Bud Light as plans leak for a ChatGPT-based investment advice service.  (CNBC)
  
  To be fair, the company hasn't officially announced anything; this could just be a case of staking a claim on a trademark to make sure nobody else nabs it.
  
  To continue being fair, on the scale of dumb ideas this is a polar ice cap to Google's iceberg.
  
  Either one entirely capable of sinking the Titanic, mind you.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Acer's new Swift Edge 16 is a laptop.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has the latest Ryzen 7840U - the lower-power variant of the 7840HS - with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA3 GPU cores.
  
  The screen is a 16" 120Hz 3200x2000 OLED model covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour and reaching 400 nits brightness, all of which sounds good.  It has two USB 4 ports, two USB 3 ports, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack, plus a 1440p webcam (commonly these are 1080p or even just 720p) and the latest WiFi 7.
  
  The Four Essential Keys are present in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, which is not perfect but something I can live with.  Price starts at $1299 with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and there's a second M.2 slot for expansion.
  
  Memory is soldered (LPDDR4 according to the article, which I suspect is wrong), but at least there's a 32GB model on the way though pricing for that is not mentioned.
  
  The other point of note is that it weighs 1.23kg, which is actually lighter than my current 14" laptop.  Could be worth checking out.  There are plenty of more powerful 16" laptops with better keyboard layouts, but they are also anything between 50% and 100% heavier than this one.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's 2TB SN850X is available for $135.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a good drive.  It's TLC, has a DRAM cache, and supports PCIe 4 with a top transfer rate over 7GB per second.  It's a little more expensive than other models in the current market, but even so costs less than the cheapest, nastiest 2TB drives from just one year ago.
  
  
  
• Final Cut Pro is here for the iPad.  It sucks.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Not because Final Cut Pro is bad.  Not because the iPad hardware isn't capable of running it.  But because Apple has deliberately crippled iOS to such a degree that it is useless for any remotely serious task.
  
  For example, if you edit your video in Final Cut Pro, start exporting the final compressed version, and then switch over to play some Flappy Bird while that runs, your export will simply die, because iOS won't do that.
  
  Can.  iOS is Unix.  Just won't.