Sounds like the start of the plot for a heist movie
Readit NewsToddWBurgess commented on Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US ft.com/content/e39390cc-e... · Posted by u/cempaka
ToddWBurgess commented on Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016) modelshipsinthecinema.com... · Posted by u/nixass
Fyi, based on a true story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_frigate_Storozhevoy
"Gregory D. Young was the first Westerner to investigate the mutiny as part of his 1982 master's thesis Mutiny on Storozhevoy: A Case Study of Dissent in the Soviet Navy. One of 37 copies of Young's thesis was placed in the Nimitz Library of the United States Naval Academy where it was read by Tom Clancy, then an insurance salesman, who used it as inspiration to write The Hunt for Red October."
There is a great YouTube video on the subject if you are interested. Its 38 minutes long but worth the watch.
When The Soviets Hunted Down Their Own Warship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkBQl7YRI3E
ToddWBurgess commented on The April Fools joke that might have got me fired oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/... · Posted by u/goldenskye
I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).
Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!
ToddWBurgess commented on Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died · Posted by u/AaronFriel
QModem allowed me to explore the wonderful world of BBSs before the Internet was a thing. Having access to BBSs gave me a leg up when I got to University and got access to the Internet. BBSs are what got me seriously interested in computers and helped me launch a career in software development.
Your Dad's legacy will be writing the software that opened doors for many of us when computers used to be a walled garden and talking to another person on a computer was still a foreign concept for the general population. Condolences on the loss of of your father but hopefully you can take comfort in the fact his legacy made the world a better place for PC users.
Just wanted to add, found this YouTube video of your father launching QModem on an old PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs7XZs6jOhc
The intensity of feeling within the Linux community towards Windows and Microsoft back then was intense. I remember turning up to my university CS course and witnessing the formation of a Linux clique - if you ran windows you weren't really welcome! Dual-booting might get you reluctantly accepted though.
I wonder if the same thing still goes on. It probably was quite an effective filter for the nerdiest and most obsessive people back in 1999, and it probably still is, but somehow that kind of mindset seems a bit outdated today. If it does still exist I'd be interested to know what kind of status macOS has! Literally nobody on the CS course had a Mac, despite the very cool and colourful iMacs being very popular.
I was one of those Linux evangelists back in the 90s. Tried to get all the undergrads in my CS program migrated to Linux back in the day. Fun times.
ToddWBurgess commented on Another burnout post gushogg-blake.com/p/blog-... · Posted by u/gushogg-blake
My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".
I like solving problems using programming languages, and like designing large systems with computers, but I don't actually enjoy the programming itself. Programming without the designing part just feels like data entry to me. There's nothing clever, or creative, or interesting about it.
For years I've dealt with severe burnout because I had been lying to myself and taking jobs that where I didn't really have to "think", and I had no fun doing it, leading to me feeling like I had really chosen the wrong career path and that I was stuck feeling bored for the rest of my life.
Once I realized that programming for the sake of programming isn't fun, I started putting my attention to jobs where I made it clear that I'm going to be involved in the design and decision-making process, and almost immediately I actually enjoyed working again, after many years of not.
I'm not saying this is universal, if you like writing Java for the sake of writing Java, don't let me take that away from you, it's just not something I enjoy. Figuring out what you actually enjoy doing is deceptively hard, but a worthwhile goal.
I had the opposite experience. I actually left the industry and then suffered a workplace injury in the new job(PTSD). Trust me when I say this, PTSD really messes you up. One of the biggest injuries was my brain's ability to logically reason.
So with lots of free time due to medical leave I got got back into coding. Picking it up after having not done it for some time was not too bad. After a while I was ready to start learning new stuff. As I got better at coding a lot of my PTSD symptoms started to subside. I had an easier time organizing my thoughts.
Eventually my PTSD symptoms subsided and I knew enough code to get a job writing code. So while yes, I have burned out on coding it was also the old friend that dug me out of the hole.
Spent hours back in the day getting my ass kicked playing this with my grandfather. It quite often got used as a chance to get some grandfatherly advice. The one lesson he taught me and has stuck with me:
"If you can't win. Make it hard for the other guy to win."
ToddWBurgess commented on Building for DOS, OS/2, and DOS on a MacBook Apple Silicon retrocoding.net/building-... · Posted by u/ingve
Wow, the name Watcom takes me back 30+ years. My first job was porting actuarial valuation software in FORTRAN from System370 to PCs. We used Watcom for the FORTRAN and the C orchestration part, hosted on OS/2. Probably the top C compiler for PCs back then IIRC.
Seeing the name Watcom takes me back to my days of high school computer science doing BASIC and Pascal.
ToddWBurgess commented on Zip – How not to design a file format (2021) games.greggman.com/game/z... · Posted by u/sph
Anyone here old enough to remember from the BBS days when Phil Katz was embroiled in a legal dispute over his program PKARC and the ARC compression file format? At the time it was cast as a David and Goliath story (with Phil being David) when it was really just two small home based software developers fighting it out.
Long story short, Phil lost the arc dispute which is why I assume he moved onto the ZIP format. In the end, Phil Katz was taken from us too soon because his personal demons got the better of him.
ToddWBurgess commented on What can medicine do for people with genes for ALS? statnews.com/2023/09/21/a... · Posted by u/swid
I lost a parent to ALS.
Morbidly, I guess for me it might be a race between that and the cancers that killed off the other side of the family.
I don't really care to get checked for the gene, but I do have a general idea of what needs to happen once the speech starts to go.
Lost my mother to ALS. She was a nurse so she made a point to ask if there was a chance she passed it onto her kids and was assured no we are fine. It is a small consolation considering all she had to endure.
ALS is a horrible way to exit this earth. It is a death I would wish on no one