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Domain: alignment.net

Stories and comments across the archive that link to alignment.net.

Comments · 5

  1. What about Independance Day (ID4) by Fjord · · Score: 3 · on Hollywood and Hackers
    In the movie Independance Day, Jeff Goldblum's character, Dr. David Levinson uses his 31337 sk1llz to hack into an alien computer system to save the world. Not only does he figure out the network protocol use by the distant race, but is able to use his Virus Upload Utility v0.9 (the one that says "Uploading Virus" as it counts its way to 100), to bring down the VWAN (Very Wide...) that coordinates the malicious visitor's attack. A billion greys near-simultaneously rush to the attachment of an email labeled "I love you", expecting a eCard, but instead rob their own network of its resources, and seal their own fate (if only they weren't so vein). Now that is hacking.

    Sure, pages like a nitpicker's guide to ID4, say that Levinson could not have created the virus and the VUU v0.9 in the 4 hours 30 minutes the movie plot allots him, but Levinson is smart and knows how to program. The guy who wrote the Ana virus didn't know how to program and was caught (showing he isn't very smart). Levinson is no script kiddie, but a white-hatted wizard, and the VUU was written by the thousands of ready developers who signed on to SourceForge, who had been patiently waiting for any project, let alone one of this importance.

    In the epilogue, the aliens were defeated, but some survived to use the DMCA against Levinson, who went bankrupt on the settlement.

  2. Been there, done that, got the web page by CrayDrygu · · Score: 2 · on How Many Boxes In A Decent Beowulf Cluster?
    http://beowulf.alignment.net/

    Me and a few friends built a Beowulf out of 10 486/66 and P100 machines the school had laying around. There were more than that, but they all had some broken part...we managed to build these 13 machines out of the pieces, though.

    We tested the speed with PVMPov. The scene took 12:20 to render on my K6-2/400. The cluster took just over 7 minutes.

    Full details are on the page, reply here or email me if you want more info =)

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  3. Re:POVLAB by PovRayMan · · Score: 2 · on GPL'ed 3D Modeler And Renderer

    Ok ok, As a POV-Ray freak, I just gotta reply to this. POVLAB went open source a while ago (I think, I don't use modellers for povray, I Hand code). So I guess you can consider that a good thing. However one thing bothers me. It says on the site

    The aim is to make a complete free 3D package with POV-Ray which could compete with commercial softwares (like 3D Studio).

    Now POV-Ray is no where near as advanced as 3D Studio is for rendering. POV-Ray totally requires floating point for rendering, while 3d studio uses a 3d card for rendering (I think that's right, I don't really use 3d studio :/)

    The only thing I feel POV-Ray has an advantage over 3D Studio is that it is opensource, freeware, and multiplatform. HELL you can run pov-ray on an Amiga system. Who the hell uses Amiga anyways? But hey, it'll work! It'll work also on *NIX, SunOS, DOS, etc. Point is, you see 3D studio isn't open source and what, only works in Windows 9x/NT? With things being open source and all, people with enough time can port these things over to other platforms. It would be nice to see this OpenFX thingie be ported over and what not.

    as a little bottom note thingie, I would like to point out a few things. First of all, I really don't know the difference between all this opensource/gpl/whatever stuff. All I know about it is that the source code is right there to play with. Another thing is just because my name is PovRayMan (and have a 5 digit /. UID) doesn't mean I'm the smartest POV-Ray guy in the world. I started using POV-Ray four years ago, and became obsessed, so I called myself PovRayMan. But nowadays, I just don't find time to play with it. The last major project I did with povray was build a beowulf cluster that used PVM-POV.

    This completely unorganized ramble has been brought to you by me!

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  4. Re:fp by PovRayMan · · Score: 2 · on Cray Linux Beowulf Clusters

    I made a beowulf cluster too.

    You can read more about my beowulf cluster at this site.

    Slashdot is a good place to spam your own beowulf website!

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  5. Hey by PovRayMan · · Score: 1 · on Beowulf For Dummies?

    I'm a dummy. And I made a beowulf cluster. Check it out here.

    Any dummy can make a beowulf cluster.

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