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So, if Twitter started yesterday with about 3000 employees after the previous mayhem and carnage, and now a majority didn't sign up for Musk's 5pm ultimatum yesterday to "click here" to commit to working in an “extremely hardcore” fashion, with “long hours at high intensity,” do they even have enough employees to continue to operate, or is this the start of the actual implosion?

What is it that the employees call themselves? Tweeps? Tweeblers? Twirps? Twitlers?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/after-elon-musks-ultimatum-twitter-employees-start-exiting-2022-11-18/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/tech/twitter-employees-ultimatum-deadline
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twitter/

Perhaps that should be the new main page poll, "How many employees do you think Twitter currently has?"

3000? 2000? 1500? 1000? 750? 500? Less / Other (please describe below) ??!

We knew this was coming, since earlier this morning it was reported that the family was gathering at Balmoral to be by her side.

Oh, great... Now we have to start putting King Charles' ugly mug on our money!

For those of us in Canada, today is the Federal General Election.

Remember to get out and vote if you haven't done so already, my fellow Canadians!

Personally, I voted in person last Monday during early polling.

As always, it was a straightforward affair, including changing my registration from being in a former riding in another province.

No line-up, no muss, no fuss... Just plain, simple voting.

As always, it was a simple paper ballot, marked with a pen or pencil. Due to COVID, you were allowed (nay, encouraged) to bring your own pen or pencil, but if you didn't, they simply supply you with one of those single-use "golf" pencils. Or, should I say, "voting" pencils!

Why is it seemingly so difficult to do this smoothly elsewhere?

Many places in the US make it as difficult as possible for many of their potential voters to actually cast a ballot. I really don't understand why folks put up with these shenanigans.

In Canada, we do things a bit differently. We simply try to make it as easy as possible for every eligible voter to cast a vote.

How hard is this??!
Taken from https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=vote&document=index&lang=e

Vote on election day

The date, hours and address of your election day poll will be available online, on your voter information card or by calling Elections Canada.

To vote on election day:

        You must be registered to vote;
        You must prove your identity and address.

After an election is called, you can also register at your local Elections Canada office or at your polling station when you go to vote.

Vote at your advance poll

Advance polls are held on the 10th, 9th, 8th and 7th days before election day.

The date, hours and address of your advance poll will be available online, on your voter information card or by calling Elections Canada.

To vote at your advance poll:

        You must be registered to vote;
        You must prove your identity and home address.

After an election is called, you can also register at your local Elections Canada office or at your polling station when you go to vote.

Vote at any Elections Canada office

After an election is called, Elections Canada sets up local offices in every riding in Canada.

You can vote in person at any Elections Canada office across the country until the 6th day before election day.

To vote at an Elections Canada office, you must complete an Application for Registration and Special Ballot. Staff can help you with this form, if you'd like. You must show proof of your identity and address.

Once your special ballot application is accepted, staff will give you a special ballot voting kit. You can vote on the spot. Or, if you prefer, you can come back to the office to submit your vote later.

After an election is called, the address of Elections Canada offices will be available online or by calling Elections Canada.

Voting at an Elections Canada office means voting by special ballot.

Vote by mail

a) Vote by mail – for electors who live in Canada

If your home is in Canada, you must wait until after an election is called to apply to vote by mail.

After an election is called:

        Complete an Application for Registration and Special Ballot. The form will be available on this website, at any local Elections Canada office or by calling Elections Canada.

        Send us your completed form and proof of identity and home address. You can submit them by fax, by mail, or in person at any local Elections Canada office.

        Once your application is accepted, we will send you a special ballot voting kit by regular mail. (If you apply in person, staff will hand you the kit.) The kit explains how to mark your special ballot and mail it in.

Voting by mail means voting by special ballot.

b) Vote by mail – for electors who live outside Canada

If you're a Canadian elector, your home is outside Canada, and you meet certain eligibility criteria, you can apply now to vote by mail in a future election.

Canadians living abroad: Apply now to vote by mail in a future election

You can also get an application form by calling Elections Canada. Ask for an Application for Registration and Special Ballot for Canadian Citizens Residing Outside Canada.

        If we accept your application, we will add your name to the International Register of Electors. This is a list of Canadians temporarily living outside Canada who can vote in federal elections.
        When an election is called, we will mail a special ballot voting kit to everyone in the International Register of Electors. The kit explains how to mark your special ballot and mail it in.

Voting by mail means voting by special ballot. Learn more about voting rules for Canadians living abroad.

Important information on voting by special ballot

Voting by mail or at a local Elections Canada office means voting by special ballot.

        Anyone may vote by special ballot, but you must apply for this ballot in advance.

        Your application must be received at Elections Canada by the special ballot registration deadline: 6 p.m. on the Tuesday before election day.

        Once your application is accepted, we will give you a special ballot voting kit. This kit includes:

                a special ballot
                two envelopes (they keep your vote secret)
                instructions on how to mark and mail in your special ballot

        Your completed special ballot must arrive at Elections Canada by the election day deadline, or it will not be counted.

        Once your application to vote by special ballot has been accepted, this is the only way you can vote. You cannot vote at the advance or election day polls or apply for another special ballot.

        You may vote only once during an election, and you may vote only for a candidate running in your riding.

Learn more about voting by special ballot.

Both China and Cuba have sent teams to Italy to try to help the situation there.

What do you think the chances are that when the US' situation becomes dire, President Trump's narcissistic ego will allow the acceptance of any help from countries like China or Cuba?

The recent poll topic and my current project got me thinking about what kinds of (perhaps to some, seemingly ancient) storage technologies people still actually USE, say, on a daily basis?

I'm currently rotating out some old SCSI disks from my servers as a matter of routine maintenance but, get this, replacing them with the same make and model of disk drive after more than a DECADE of operation. :)

About 17 years ago, I was already using SCSI disks for most of my important or high-performance personal and server duties. Some Quantum Atlas 2GB and a few Seagate 4GB and 9.1GB Barracudas were already in the "stable" of disks (remember, this was a time where SCSI disks were still extremely expensive and most of mine were bought second-hand) and I had the opportunity to purchase still-sealed 10-pack boxes of factory-refurbished Seagate ST19171WC for a reasonable price that were surplus EMC Corp. warranty-exchange disks, so I picked up four or five boxes.

I've been using these for all my important server system disks ever since. Since they were refurbished, I've always used Jörg Schilling's excellent (but certainly old-school) sformat utility to do my own LLF and a full 14-pass read/write verify (pattern test with C6DEC6DE/6DB6DB6D/00000000/FFFFFFFF/AAAAAAAA/55555555/4A536368) before I put them in operation. I've (knock-on-wood) yet to have a single one of them that passed that test fail in actual operation. I've had a few out of that lot NOT pass the test and be shelved, and a couple more that passed but made funny noises or something so never got used. Maybe three or four, perhaps five have been bad out of the box so far? I've also sold a few of these fully tested ones over the years to people for ciritical things like POS system server disks, etc. It looks like I still have two more un-opened boxes of them left. :)

That was, or is turning out to be, a lifetime-buy. I'm pretty sure I'm as stocked-up as I'll ever need to be on 9.1GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SCSI disks. :)

I just ran out of ones I had tested the last time I tested a batch, (in 2002 for goodness sakes,) so I pulled the last five out of the currently open box and they're just finishing up testing now (it takes the better part of a day, and these are disks that are so small you can read or write the whole disk in about 12 minutes). Each one gets put into a DEC Storageworks BA350 "canister", tested thoroughly using sformat, then labelled with the disk model number, sequence (these next three will be ST19171WC numbers 24-26,) and serial number then it's ready to be put into service.

Why am I still using such ancient disks, you ask? Because they're SO DAMN RELIABLE!

Check out this SMART data from one of the ones I'm rotating out of active service:

Device: SEAGATE SX19171W Version: 9D32
Serial number: LA504199
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Thu Mar 12 00:15:45 2015 MDT
Device supports SMART and is Enabled
Temperature Warning Disabled or Not Supported
SMART Health Status: OK
Elements in grown defect list: 0
Vendor (Seagate) cache information
    Blocks sent to initiator = 663,190,551
    Blocks received from initiator = 4,197,805,002
    Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 74,883,847
    Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 427,411,568
    Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 74,334
Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information
    number of hours powered up = 121,022.40
    number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 80

Error counter log:
  Errors corrected by ECC (fast): 42,800 (read); 0 (write)
  Errors corrected by ECC (delayed): 65 (read); 0 (write)
  Errors corrected by re-read/writes: 56 (read); 0 (write)
  Total errors corrected: 42,921 (read); 714 (write)
  Total correction algorithm invocations: 51,869 (read); 1,387(write)
  Total uncorrected errors: 17 (read); 3 (write)
  Gigabytes processed: 3,124,939.477 (read); 2,149.276 (write)

Non-medium error count: 0
Device does not support Self Test logging

Yes, you read that right.... 121,022.40h of pretty much contunuous operation (!) AND still going strong... AND this is in a server!

This drive only had a few thousand hours on it when I got it and it was a fairly early one to be put into operation, so almost 14 years of continuous operation!

Now, in my humble opinion, that's downright impressive. :)

That drive was even one that was moved with the system powered on and running from one server room in one building to another server room in another building when we moved offices so I wouldn't ruin my >1000 day server uptime... It was only offline from the internet for about 20 minutes. :)

At about 3am, those (I think there were three) servers and StorageWorks disk racks were un-racked, loaded onto a trolley cart, along with a big UPS then unplugged from the internet, wheeled to the elevator, down to the van, loaded up, driven over to the new office, unloaded onto the trolley, wheeled to the elevator, up to the new server room, plugged into the waiting switch port and the command run to re-route those IPs to that leased line from the other. Only then were they re-racked at the new location... All with the power applied, though I think I did spin down all except the running system disks for the actual van ride but this one is one of the system boot disks.

Ahh, the fun we self-administered-network System Operators have when we go to ridiculous lengths to out-do even ourselves. :)

THAT'S why all my important boxen still have an old Adaptec, Tekram or QLogic SCSI card in them, even if it's in the lone PCI slot they still put on a motherboard these days, and a good ol' DEC StorageWorks disk rack attached to them (where I can easily plug in one of my tape drives, etc. too, very handy, those old StorageWorks BA350 beasts.) They may be alongside 12 x 2.0TB SATA drives in RAID arrays providing most of the actual storage, but the boot disks, the logs, the home directories, my personal files and important stuff? Still somewhere on some spinning rust on an "obsolete" parallel-SCSI disk. They're awfully slow by today's standards but still plenty quick for many applications, especially when you stripe across several disks.

The majority of them are those 9.1GB Barracudas but I'm also still running some 72.8GB Cheetahs, some 36.4GB Fujitsu 10Ks and a few really old 4GB, 2GB and I even just noticed I still have a vintage DEC RZ26L with the FreeBSD ports tree and /usr/obj on it in one of the racks for one of the backup mail servers. LOL, that one is a 1GB, probably a Quantum drive assembly and FAR too old to have SMART capabilities so I have no idea of the number of hours on it. LOTS! It deserves to be retired and put on a shelf with all my <GB CDC WRENs and 2-3GB Seagate Elites (5.25" Full-Height SCSI space-heaters for those of you who don't know what those are,) or perhaps encased in lucite and enshrined or something.

Well, these next three disks are on pass 13 of 14 in the verify cycle so I'll conclude this session of Vintage-Tech-Memory-Lane and get ready to move some disks.

If you have similar stories of ancient storage technology still in regular use, please share below!

I think we should add a field for a ('submitters' comment' / 'first comment' / 'first post') feature to the story submission process below the 'The Scoop' field. Submitters would then be able to use this new comment field for their personal comment to accompany the story (if desired, or leave blank), potentially helping to keep excessive opinion/comments out of what theoretically should be the news story section but still tied to the submission so that when/if it goes live, their comment is automatically posted as the first comment. (Or, perhaps a specially flagged 'Submitters' Comment' but I really think it should just come up as the first regular post.) Not all of us can sit around hitting refresh waiting to see if our latest story submission has been published to try to add our view/comment near the beginning of the discussion which is, i'm sure, partly why comments/editorializing so often end up in the story part which is not really the Right Thing for several reasons, obviously...

This way, extra editorial/comment included in the 'story' part could easily be moved verbatim to the 'comments' section by the editor prepping the story so the submitter's views/comments/etc aren't being changed/reworded/munged in any way while cleaning up the actual story. I think this would solve many problems/annoyances with story submissions both from those who submit them and those who read the story summaries and hate the blatent editorializing, etc. It also means that the submitter gets 'First Post' automatically if they choose to put a comment in there, which I have no problem with.

I'm not saying to go all crazy, always moving every bit that's not story fact out to the comments, etc. (indeed, some story submissions are by their very nature a comment/question/editorial in whole or in part) but I think it could potentially help to clean things up and make the process smoother for many people, in many situations.

I can't imagine this being too difficult to implement and seems like a win-win-win-win.. all around to me.

Comments?