"I'm sorry Mike, you can't do that"

Just a short blog-ette. Maybe it is due to the economic circumstances, and companies are running down their stock levels to make their profitability look artificially better, but I do seem to be hitting "Current stock: 0" quite a lot recently, mostly with IC suppliers, and Analog Devices especially. I emailed AD yesterday asking for an estimated lead time for a couple of reasonably common chips and they haven't got back to me yet. I hope all is well inside AD, there are no alternatives for some of the stuff they make, particularly Direct Digital Synthesis chips.