``... Law enforcement officials refused to say anything other than that the suspect's home computers were seized and later found to contain illegal copies of several versions of gcc. The Chief of Police had no comment on the widespread rumors that printouts of errno.h were found in the suspects home while police executed the search warrent. The President, commenting on the arrest following today's Rose Garden ceremony in which he signed into law a bill extending copyright protection to `forever and a day', said: `America is a safer place today as a result of the actions of these brave police officers. We should be proud.'''
I mean, it's got subdirectories (ok, ok, so they got the delimliter backasswards:-) ) and the ``CD'' command is obviously lifted right out of UNIX. Is Microsoft going to provide indemnity? I still have MS-DOS on several system to run hardware/firmware diagnostics and I'm worried that the SCO will be kicking down the door at any minute. (Darnit! And I just tossed out my old DR-DOS floppies a few months back.)
Idea for an experiment: Put Darl McBride in some old clothes and stick him on any street corner in a large city and see if anybody notices him while he's ranting. I'm betting he'd be ignored. Pretty much the same way the UNIX/Linux community is ignoring him now. Of course, a follow-up study would have to be done to determine why the UNIX/Linux community is being told by the press on an almost daily basis that they're wrong while the same press would merely note that the people who were ignoring ``Darl the street-corner loonie'' were just getting on with their lives.
Oh, yes. They're the ones associated with Darl McBride's infamous code presentation at CDXPO. So I guess if you can't impune open source development by supporting McBride's inane ramblings, encourage one of your publications to sling a little mud with old, outdated theories that being able to see source code means that the criminal element will be writing exploits for it or infiltrating the kernel develpoment team and inserting backdoors.
Yes, sir! At DevX and Jupitermedia, security through obscurity is alive and well.
I couldn't find a single idea in this ``piece'' (oh, it's a piece alright) that was original or to be taken seriously. I suspect that the author just had a flash (``Ooh! Ooh! "Who will guard the guards?" That's clever now I can write an anti-Linux article!) and saw a chance for his employer to get some web page hits.
``... Wallin said that product revenues were currently "negligible."
"Our main focus is the IP [intellectual property] business now," he said.''
This sounds awfully familiar. Where have I heard this. Dang! It's right on the tip of my tongue. Can anybody help me out? This'll be bugging me all day.
Don't do anything yourself. Buy everything from a company that's already built it for you. Don't learn how to cook. Drive to the fast food drive through and buy your meals from them. Don't think. Buy your thoughts from someone else.
The article did mention that one company has already licensed the technology. Will this standard wannabee be free from steep licensing fees and nondisclosures? Who can tell but if Microsoft is involved I imagine that it will be difficult if not impossible for a Linux distribution like Debian to deal with this; Microsoft will fight for either secrecy, patents, or gigantic licensing fees. Will Linus Torvalds and others be able to write for a kernel that has a non-public hardware interface? Hmm, I'm smelling trouble brewing. The good thing about this is that Intel doesn't much care whose software runs on their chips. I suspect they will push for this to be an opened up standard that doesn't have a big monetary requirement in order to be able to write software that's compatible with it. Intel, show some backbone and tell any software company that tries to make this proprietary to take a flying leap.
I've long thought that the reason that I disliked most of what passed as ``popular'' music was that it was too formulaic. I used to think it was just ``herd think'' by music industry executives but now it turns out that they've just been following a recipe and these guys just reverse engineered it.
How long before I can get a box that I can connect to the stereo that displays the level of adherence to The Formula so I can get a visual indication of why I dislike a certain song and can change the station. Oops! Bad idea. The indicator would pretty much peg whenever I had a commercial radio station selected.
``... there are arguments that Merrill would have to provide their proprietary trading application in source form to everyone...''
And those are what most people would call uninformed arguments. Darl, would you please take a second (OK, a few minutes), read the GPL, see if that argument makes any sense at all, and get back to us.
I suspect that it will take a relatively low-paid law professor to explain this to some very overpaid lawyers.
One of these overpaid lawyers seems to be challenged by the concepts surrounding copyright. So it's understandable that he'd get all tangled up in his underwear trying to comprehend the GPL. Bob Cringely hit it on the head: these guys are not IP lawyers. And a growing number of legal writers appear to agree and are writing to point out the flaws with the SCO case. Personally? I think Boies and McBride are both blinded by all the dollar signs and media attention to see how screwed up their whole case is.
... but I thought it was the funniest. I actually saw a want-ad in the paper that explained that applicants must have experience in all of the following software packages. Then it went on to with a fairly lengthy list of the required packages. But the one that cracked me up was ``After Dark''. I guess they had a lot of employees who were having trouble getting their toasters to fly.
``With no IQ, I think they'd act totally randomly and, therefore, would have to do something smart from time to time, even if the probability of such an act were very small.''
``Originally, it included a snippy remark about how what they were doing was not spam, despite what everyone on the internet says.
And, AFAICT, they're correct. It wasn't really spam and ``everyone on the internet'' that called it that were wrong. What everyone on the internet should have called it is ``a broken router'' which should have been recalled or replaced free of charge. Gosh, isn't nice of them to offer a firmware fix. What happens when the fix isn't applied properly by the end-users? Well they're pretty much screwed as far as their internet access now aren't they? Belkin should do the right thing and ship everyone using one of these broken units a brand new router that properly routes.
Almost makes you wish for a certification process for any equipment that's connected to a public network. If it doesn't strictly adhere to IETF standards, it doesn't get connected. Just out of curiosity, what RFC specifies the manner by which a router is supposed to replace requests with preferred advertisers? Oh yah. The same one Verisign referred to when designing their SiteFinder atrocity.
... Mr. Strauss's most recent achievement on campus was the negotiating a discount for Microsoft products. And he's ticked off because the work he's done convincing the faculty (that's the ``outreach'' part of his job, eh?) to do all the lectures using Powerpoint and require students to turn in assignments only in Word format will have gone to waste.
``I know my clients love it when I tell them they have to make big hardware purchases to replace something that's already working fine for them, especially when they hired me to solve a software problem.''
No I didn't suggest a fork-lift style replacement. I said ``begin replacing'' the token ring. (I guess the subtle nuances of the English language are a bit much for some folks.) But to cross something like Linux off your list of potential solutions because it doesn't support token ring -- which is obviously false and has been for years -- would be just stupid. I've worked in environments that used both token ring and ethernet. The token ring problems were always more expensive to solve and adding something to that type of network just costs too much. Many meetings were devoted to whether the use of token ring would be continued due to its costs. (Ever priced token ring cards? There are about 20 times as many ethernet products to choose from that are about one-tenth the cost of a token ring adapter.) If you're not recommending getting rid of it over a period of time then you're doing a disservice to the client.
I assumed (yah, I know all about assuming...) that the original poster had inherited a system that already had a token ring adapter in it. And, if they'd bothered to check, they'd have been aware of the token ring support on Linux so you wouldn't have had to make the silly decision that the original poster did (unless you're that poster:-) ). Imagine what the client's view of that consultant's skills will be when they find out that the recommendation was so obviously wrong.
As for the transmission problem: I stopped working on engines once the auto manufacturers rendered my timing light useless. It's no fun any more.
I blame it on it too darned early, having woken up in a surly mood, and the morning coffee not having kicked in yet. Normally, I wouldn't have even read the original post but there were too many replies that piqued my interest in just who could be so clueless.
As much as I hate feeding trolls, I wanted to thank you for your clueless post. It made my morning.
``(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system)''
What's the deal with Window's people always defragging disks. It's an utter waste of time. A day later the disks are fragmented again. Hell, I gave up that fruitless exercise over a dozen years ago. And Linux filesystems don't require defragmentation. At least that's my experience in the 8-9 years I've been running Linux. I've never encountered a filesystem whose performance seemed to be improved by more that a couple of percent following a backup/delete/restore. (One exception was a MUMPS database that had some files scattered across nearly 6000 extents -- a condition caused by a spectacularly uninformed system manager who thought that breaking and reestablishing mirrors (for nightly backups) automatically defragmented disks.) Have you really seen e2fsck report more than a tiny percentage of files being fragmented? Save yourself the time. Unless you like bilking your clients by billing them for some ``defragmentation service''.
And token ring? The world was giving up on token ring about the same time 8-inch floppies were going by the wayside. If you're looking to increase your consulting firm's revenues and get your client out of the paleolithic age of networking, advise them to begin replacing that and begin using commodity networking gear. Unless, of course, you prefer holding your client(s) back by using a technology that fewer and fewer consulting firms will have any expertise in. Is this your company's way of holding clients captive? And there is token ring support in Linux. If you'd bothered to look. (Hint: check the files under/usr/src/linux*/Documentation/networking.)
``So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use.''
``Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.''
The above comments point out a major, major problem: You need to get new lawyers. There is nothing in the GPL that forces you to release source code if you are not distributing the code outside the company as you stated:
``Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code.''
Finally, I'd like to thank you for the following:
``After my experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".''
Again, thanks. I had a really tough day at work yesterday and was afraid that my spirits would still be down today. But your post made me laugh so hard that now my sides hurt.
Oh how I wish you'd had the guts to include your name and the name of the so-called consulting company that you work for. That way others would know to keep you off their preferred vendor lists.
If I enter a bogus URL I get a web page instead of an error message. That's helpful to the web user how? If someone's looking for a web site and they get slapped in the face with a sales pitch (``Now you can own "www.gogole.com" for only...'') every time they press ``Enter'' following a URL with a typo, how long before that user gets fed up with the Web?
How helpful would it be if you misdialed a phone number and, instead of getting error tones, you have some automated answering machine telling you that the bogus phone number is available for use?
How helpful would it be if, when you were lost, you stopped asked for directions, and, rather than saying ``I don't know'', the person you asked gave you directions to some business in another city?
Jeez. I'd attribute their behaviour to cluelessness if I wasn't already positive that it was really greed driving them.
Telemarketers begin calling cell phones in large numbers. Cell phone owners/users complain to the phone companies in huge numbers. Phone companies do nothing. Users cancel their cell phone accounts and go back to land lines or use disposable cell phones. A couple of cellular phone companies go belly-up when most of their customers leave them. Under unprecedented public pressure, the remaining phone companies lobby for and get permission to adopt Accept Use Policies similar to those used by ISPs. Telemarketers' phone service is terminated due to abuse of the phone company AUPs. There is peace and harmony throughout the land.
RI-I-I-NG!! ``Hey, get up. You'll be late for work.'' (``Damn! And that was such a good dream.'')
I have an old Adaptec 1542 that I use to run my scanner, mainly because it's the only thing that my scanner seems to play well with. The scanner interferes with the disks on the 19160 and isn't recognized at all on the old NCR adapter that I run the tape drive off of. One day, I'm going to have to find a replacement (once this motherboard dies and I can't find one with an ISA slot.:-( ) Manufacturing dates on some of the chips on the 1542 go back to something like '92.
I used to run an old 80MB SCSI drive (from a Mac and found in the bottom of a desk at work) in a system mainly to terminate the bus (I lost the termination resistors during a move... bummer) that I had my CD-R drive on. Later on I replaced it with an bigger drive: a whopping 540MB Seagate that I actually put a filesystem on (it wasn't worth putting one on the 80MB disk:-) ).
I still have my ALR 386/2 system originally purchased in the summer of '87. Original floppy, memory maxed out at 2MB (no... I didn't spring for the US$800 naked memory expansion card). It had the original Maxtor 42MB full-height hard disk in it running off a Western Digitail WD1006WAH MFM controller when the missus used it to run Windows 3.1 to work from home (up until about '97). The Maxtor finally died and I've been planning to slap that 80MB SCSI drive in it and running DOS on it again (mainly so I can fool around with Wordstar and play Zork and Ractor again).
My Samba and print server is an old IBM P100-based desktop system full of whatever disk drives I have been able to scrounge for it. And the firewall was another of those IBM P100s until it died (this past August) and I dragged out the old Pentium/233/MMX that I had left over from the last upgrade to the missus's system that she moved to after the 386/2.
I left my original PC -- a Columbia 1600 XT-clone -- with my parents years ago when they said they wanted to learn something about computers. They got rid of it (Arrggh!!) some years ago but it was still in working condition. (At least when I last saw it. RIP old friend.)
I've been going through some of the older stuff I have stashed in the basement but, man, I still have too much old crap laying around.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever Darl and company decide it means. Today. No telling on what that means tomorrow.
... only outlaws will have compilers.
``... Law enforcement officials refused to say anything other than that the suspect's home computers were seized and later found to contain illegal copies of several versions of gcc. The Chief of Police had no comment on the widespread rumors that printouts of errno.h were found in the suspects home while police executed the search warrent. The President, commenting on the arrest following today's Rose Garden ceremony in which he signed into law a bill extending copyright protection to `forever and a day', said: `America is a safer place today as a result of the actions of these brave police officers. We should be proud.'''
I mean, it's got subdirectories (ok, ok, so they got the delimliter backasswards :-) ) and the ``CD'' command is obviously lifted right out of UNIX. Is Microsoft going to provide indemnity? I still have MS-DOS on several system to run hardware/firmware diagnostics and I'm worried that the SCO will be kicking down the door at any minute. (Darnit! And I just tossed out my old DR-DOS floppies a few months back.)
Idea for an experiment: Put Darl McBride in some old clothes and stick him on any street corner in a large city and see if anybody notices him while he's ranting. I'm betting he'd be ignored. Pretty much the same way the UNIX/Linux community is ignoring him now. Of course, a follow-up study would have to be done to determine why the UNIX/Linux community is being told by the press on an almost daily basis that they're wrong while the same press would merely note that the people who were ignoring ``Darl the street-corner loonie'' were just getting on with their lives.
Where's a William Proxmire when you really need him? A Proxmire impersonator would do just as well.
Now we'll find out who all the Baby Boomers are. Are rather who isn't. (They'll be all the people postings ``Huh?'' and ``Who's that?'' replies. :-)
Now where have we heard of them before?
Oh, yes. They're the ones associated with Darl McBride's infamous code presentation at CDXPO. So I guess if you can't impune open source development by supporting McBride's inane ramblings, encourage one of your publications to sling a little mud with old, outdated theories that being able to see source code means that the criminal element will be writing exploits for it or infiltrating the kernel develpoment team and inserting backdoors.
Yes, sir! At DevX and Jupitermedia, security through obscurity is alive and well.
I couldn't find a single idea in this ``piece'' (oh, it's a piece alright) that was original or to be taken seriously. I suspect that the author just had a flash (``Ooh! Ooh! "Who will guard the guards?" That's clever now I can write an anti-Linux article!) and saw a chance for his employer to get some web page hits.
This sounds awfully familiar. Where have I heard this. Dang! It's right on the tip of my tongue. Can anybody help me out? This'll be bugging me all day.
:-)
Don't do anything yourself. Buy everything from a company that's already built it for you. Don't learn how to cook. Drive to the fast food drive through and buy your meals from them. Don't think. Buy your thoughts from someone else.
The article did mention that one company has already licensed the technology. Will this standard wannabee be free from steep licensing fees and nondisclosures? Who can tell but if Microsoft is involved I imagine that it will be difficult if not impossible for a Linux distribution like Debian to deal with this; Microsoft will fight for either secrecy, patents, or gigantic licensing fees. Will Linus Torvalds and others be able to write for a kernel that has a non-public hardware interface? Hmm, I'm smelling trouble brewing. The good thing about this is that Intel doesn't much care whose software runs on their chips. I suspect they will push for this to be an opened up standard that doesn't have a big monetary requirement in order to be able to write software that's compatible with it. Intel, show some backbone and tell any software company that tries to make this proprietary to take a flying leap.
... would put as much time into forming realistic and meaningful legislation as they spent coming up with titles that form catchy acronyms.
I've long thought that the reason that I disliked most of what passed as ``popular'' music was that it was too formulaic. I used to think it was just ``herd think'' by music industry executives but now it turns out that they've just been following a recipe and these guys just reverse engineered it.
How long before I can get a box that I can connect to the stereo that displays the level of adherence to The Formula so I can get a visual indication of why I dislike a certain song and can change the station. Oops! Bad idea. The indicator would pretty much peg whenever I had a commercial radio station selected.
And those are what most people would call uninformed arguments. Darl, would you please take a second (OK, a few minutes), read the GPL, see if that argument makes any sense at all, and get back to us.
I suspect that it will take a relatively low-paid law professor to explain this to some very overpaid lawyers.
One of these overpaid lawyers seems to be challenged by the concepts surrounding copyright. So it's understandable that he'd get all tangled up in his underwear trying to comprehend the GPL. Bob Cringely hit it on the head: these guys are not IP lawyers. And a growing number of legal writers appear to agree and are writing to point out the flaws with the SCO case. Personally? I think Boies and McBride are both blinded by all the dollar signs and media attention to see how screwed up their whole case is.
Sounds like they're offering you a position for seven years. Not bad in today's economy. :-)
... but I thought it was the funniest. I actually saw a want-ad in the paper that explained that applicants must have experience in all of the following software packages. Then it went on to with a fairly lengthy list of the required packages. But the one that cracked me up was ``After Dark''. I guess they had a lot of employees who were having trouble getting their toasters to fly.
Brownian Intelligence?
And, AFAICT, they're correct. It wasn't really spam and ``everyone on the internet'' that called it that were wrong. What everyone on the internet should have called it is ``a broken router'' which should have been recalled or replaced free of charge. Gosh, isn't nice of them to offer a firmware fix. What happens when the fix isn't applied properly by the end-users? Well they're pretty much screwed as far as their internet access now aren't they? Belkin should do the right thing and ship everyone using one of these broken units a brand new router that properly routes.
Almost makes you wish for a certification process for any equipment that's connected to a public network. If it doesn't strictly adhere to IETF standards, it doesn't get connected. Just out of curiosity, what RFC specifies the manner by which a router is supposed to replace requests with preferred advertisers? Oh yah. The same one Verisign referred to when designing their SiteFinder atrocity.
... Mr. Strauss's most recent achievement on campus was the negotiating a discount for Microsoft products. And he's ticked off because the work he's done convincing the faculty (that's the ``outreach'' part of his job, eh?) to do all the lectures using Powerpoint and require students to turn in assignments only in Word format will have gone to waste.
So how long ago was 2.0.12 considered current? And guess what, token ring cards still cost about $150 (and up). Good riddance!
... on Pi. And it covers all the digits. :-)
Retirement, here I come.
No I didn't suggest a fork-lift style replacement. I said ``begin replacing'' the token ring. (I guess the subtle nuances of the English language are a bit much for some folks.) But to cross something like Linux off your list of potential solutions because it doesn't support token ring -- which is obviously false and has been for years -- would be just stupid. I've worked in environments that used both token ring and ethernet. The token ring problems were always more expensive to solve and adding something to that type of network just costs too much. Many meetings were devoted to whether the use of token ring would be continued due to its costs. (Ever priced token ring cards? There are about 20 times as many ethernet products to choose from that are about one-tenth the cost of a token ring adapter.) If you're not recommending getting rid of it over a period of time then you're doing a disservice to the client.
I assumed (yah, I know all about assuming...) that the original poster had inherited a system that already had a token ring adapter in it. And, if they'd bothered to check, they'd have been aware of the token ring support on Linux so you wouldn't have had to make the silly decision that the original poster did (unless you're that poster :-) ). Imagine what the client's view of that consultant's skills will be when they find out that the recommendation was so obviously wrong.
As for the transmission problem: I stopped working on engines once the auto manufacturers rendered my timing light useless. It's no fun any more.
I blame it on it too darned early, having woken up in a surly mood, and the morning coffee not having kicked in yet. Normally, I wouldn't have even read the original post but there were too many replies that piqued my interest in just who could be so clueless.
As much as I hate feeding trolls, I wanted to thank you for your clueless post. It made my morning.
What's the deal with Window's people always defragging disks. It's an utter waste of time. A day later the disks are fragmented again. Hell, I gave up that fruitless exercise over a dozen years ago. And Linux filesystems don't require defragmentation. At least that's my experience in the 8-9 years I've been running Linux. I've never encountered a filesystem whose performance seemed to be improved by more that a couple of percent following a backup/delete/restore. (One exception was a MUMPS database that had some files scattered across nearly 6000 extents -- a condition caused by a spectacularly uninformed system manager who thought that breaking and reestablishing mirrors (for nightly backups) automatically defragmented disks.) Have you really seen e2fsck report more than a tiny percentage of files being fragmented? Save yourself the time. Unless you like bilking your clients by billing them for some ``defragmentation service''.
And token ring? The world was giving up on token ring about the same time 8-inch floppies were going by the wayside. If you're looking to increase your consulting firm's revenues and get your client out of the paleolithic age of networking, advise them to begin replacing that and begin using commodity networking gear. Unless, of course, you prefer holding your client(s) back by using a technology that fewer and fewer consulting firms will have any expertise in. Is this your company's way of holding clients captive? And there is token ring support in Linux. If you'd bothered to look. (Hint: check the files under /usr/src/linux*/Documentation/networking.)
The above comments point out a major, major problem: You need to get new lawyers. There is nothing in the GPL that forces you to release source code if you are not distributing the code outside the company as you stated:
Finally, I'd like to thank you for the following:
Again, thanks. I had a really tough day at work yesterday and was afraid that my spirits would still be down today. But your post made me laugh so hard that now my sides hurt.
Oh how I wish you'd had the guts to include your name and the name of the so-called consulting company that you work for. That way others would know to keep you off their preferred vendor lists.
And this isn't just a Linux web site.
Sorry but this is a ``News for Nerds''-worthy story.
...in navigating the web?
If I enter a bogus URL I get a web page instead of an error message. That's helpful to the web user how? If someone's looking for a web site and they get slapped in the face with a sales pitch (``Now you can own "www.gogole.com" for only...'') every time they press ``Enter'' following a URL with a typo, how long before that user gets fed up with the Web?
How helpful would it be if you misdialed a phone number and, instead of getting error tones, you have some automated answering machine telling you that the bogus phone number is available for use?
How helpful would it be if, when you were lost, you stopped asked for directions, and, rather than saying ``I don't know'', the person you asked gave you directions to some business in another city?
Jeez. I'd attribute their behaviour to cluelessness if I wasn't already positive that it was really greed driving them.
Telemarketers begin calling cell phones in large numbers. Cell phone owners/users complain to the phone companies in huge numbers. Phone companies do nothing. Users cancel their cell phone accounts and go back to land lines or use disposable cell phones. A couple of cellular phone companies go belly-up when most of their customers leave them. Under unprecedented public pressure, the remaining phone companies lobby for and get permission to adopt Accept Use Policies similar to those used by ISPs. Telemarketers' phone service is terminated due to abuse of the phone company AUPs. There is peace and harmony throughout the land.
RI-I-I-NG!! ``Hey, get up. You'll be late for work.'' (``Damn! And that was such a good dream.'')
I have an old Adaptec 1542 that I use to run my scanner, mainly because it's the only thing that my scanner seems to play well with. The scanner interferes with the disks on the 19160 and isn't recognized at all on the old NCR adapter that I run the tape drive off of. One day, I'm going to have to find a replacement (once this motherboard dies and I can't find one with an ISA slot. :-( ) Manufacturing dates on some of the chips on the 1542 go back to something like '92.
I used to run an old 80MB SCSI drive (from a Mac and found in the bottom of a desk at work) in a system mainly to terminate the bus (I lost the termination resistors during a move... bummer) that I had my CD-R drive on. Later on I replaced it with an bigger drive: a whopping 540MB Seagate that I actually put a filesystem on (it wasn't worth putting one on the 80MB disk :-) ).
I still have my ALR 386/2 system originally purchased in the summer of '87. Original floppy, memory maxed out at 2MB (no... I didn't spring for the US$800 naked memory expansion card). It had the original Maxtor 42MB full-height hard disk in it running off a Western Digitail WD1006WAH MFM controller when the missus used it to run Windows 3.1 to work from home (up until about '97). The Maxtor finally died and I've been planning to slap that 80MB SCSI drive in it and running DOS on it again (mainly so I can fool around with Wordstar and play Zork and Ractor again).
My Samba and print server is an old IBM P100-based desktop system full of whatever disk drives I have been able to scrounge for it. And the firewall was another of those IBM P100s until it died (this past August) and I dragged out the old Pentium/233/MMX that I had left over from the last upgrade to the missus's system that she moved to after the 386/2.
I left my original PC -- a Columbia 1600 XT-clone -- with my parents years ago when they said they wanted to learn something about computers. They got rid of it (Arrggh!!) some years ago but it was still in working condition. (At least when I last saw it. RIP old friend.)
I've been going through some of the older stuff I have stashed in the basement but, man, I still have too much old crap laying around.