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PS2 a Weapons Development Platform?
Moleman was one of the number of people who wrote in about the apparent move by the Japanese Government to restrict export of the Playstation 2. The reason? It has been apparently deemed to be a potential weapons development platform, in particular for missle guidance systems. Geez, get a couple and I can form my own rogue nation. The UK Telegraph has a more complete story - it's apparently only if you want to take two or more out of the country that they require permission - so you could fly and take one if you wanted without a problem.
It's been bombing since it's been released.
thank you.
... Get the Japanese government to enforce a weapons order on the export of >=2 PS2's, and you effectively cut out *all* foreign importer shops who would be willing to buy a bunch in Japan and sell them for $600 here in the US. In other words, only individuals can buy 'em directly from Japan, one at a time.
I bet we won't see this one get sorted out any time soon - at least not until after the US launch of the PSX2.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
You won't even want to consider using a CPU from a consumer product because they're not harden for military use. One good warm sunny day or a sudden change in temp from going 70F to -60F in the upper atmosphere and pop, the missile's brainless. Most CPUs in satellites and even the space shuttle are no more powerful than 486s because it takes at least 5 years of extra developement to get a processor redesigned and tested for such environmental extremes, plus they don't need to be anymore powerful. Read a few inertial devices etc. for positioning, recompute the correction and turn the fins.
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
Yeah, so it does kick-arse floating point, but the performance less than a factor of two better than what a bog-standard Athlon - provided you can write code that uses the chip to its full potential (and, given the brief description above, that's probasbly quite a challenge).
In any case, floating point is totally irrelevant for code-cracking, which is the basic reason governments restrict supercomputers.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"What are we going to do tomorrow, Brain?"
"The same we do every day, Pinky, try and take over the world!"
"Now stop playing those games on our weapons development platform Pinky!" "Narf!"
It's a modified (aka, reduced) MIPS III instruction set with 128-bit registers and multimedia extensions (PADD, PMUL, etc).
.25 micron process, but Sony just finished development of .18 micron fabs for EE production. Once volume production is started, and the initial Playstation 2 lauch hysteria dies down (early 2001 in the US/Europe, probably), multimedia and scientific computers based on faster Emotion Engines will be released. The workstation model should have 4 parallel Emotion Engines running at a slightly higher clockspeed (better than 25GFlop performance).
The main chip has the standard-issue 1xFMAC and 1xFDIV floating point unit.
Additionally, there are two more coprocessors: VU0 and VU1. VU0 can run in independent or MIPS coprocessor mode (typically used in MIPS coprocessor mode) with 1xFDIV and 3xFMAC. VU1 can only run in independent mode, and adds an elementary function unit (1xFDIV, 1xFMAC) to its standard 1xFDIV and 4xFMAC. VU1 has its own internal instruction and data cache
Total floating point performance: 6.2GFlops at 300Mhz, or roughly equivalent to a 1.5Ghz Athlon.
The EE is currently fabricated on a
Basically, as long as you're doing floating point operations, this chip would rock.
This is similar to the Apple commercial with the tanks.
The fact is Sony is willing to use whatever FUD tactics it can to control it's profit base.
Just about any advanced circutry can be converted to weapons use... if you are from a country that doesn't have the advanced circutry. This is why, in the 80's the Russians were buying handheld Pac-Man games to study the technology. It didn't mean that the Pac Man machines were "dangerous weapons" it just meant that the Russians were really badly behind, technology-wise. The PS2 might be more powerful than, say, the stuff they have in Afganistan, but then so is the average laptop. It is certainly not more powerful than what we have in the US... scary to see marketing hype accepted as fact by the government of Japan.
So, Sony goes to the Japanese government and tells them, "We don't want any Sony Playstation 2s to be exported out of the country before they are released in other countries. Say it is because they might be used for dangerous weapons." The government of Japan says, "Yes sir, may we clean your shoes while we're at it?"
Sony gets free publicity, and maximum level security to prevent their valuable toys from getting out of the country.
Oh, and not to pick on Japan, because Sony is part of the Entertainment Trust, which, in this country, has managed to successfully equate content control with "anti-piracy" and has judges going along with it. Compared to Sony, Micros~1 are just amateurs.
It amazes me that people are still probably going to buy from a company that is this despicable and has had such a corrupting influence on the government of its own country and our country. Sigh... the power of advertising, I guess.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
The linked article has an example about how the graphics processing capability is so great that it would be suitable in the head of a tomahawk missile that needs to 'see' where it's going. While everyone in /. is going to be cracking jokes about this (speak softly and carry a palm pilot with missile guidance), someone tell me, please, how feasible is this?
No really, I'm asking. I'm not technically proficient enough to dissassemble a PS2, nor do I know how its innards work. I am no circuitry expert, just a Geek who's not afraid to take a peek.
I'll tell you why I think this is wrong, so you guys tell me where it is I'm screwing up. Japan woke up and noticed that, well gee, consoles are getting damn powerful. They're (once again) just about on par with PC's. Apparently, they're also just about on par with the tech inside of a tomahawk missile's guidance system. The tomahawk needs to be able to quickly process where it's at, so it's gotta do image recognition, which is no easy feat. Well, it wasn't anyway.
Now all of a sudden a playstation's circuitry could supposedly in some half-ass way be re-wired to do this task. So all the terrorist needs now is.. all the rest... casing, explosives, triggers, fuel, launchers.
Gee ya know, I'd think if someone had access to those resources they'd have access to a CPU. Actually.. aren't CPU's right now about the same in terms of raw computing power as the next-gen consoles? Hey, ya know, those things cost just slightly more too. Hey and they don't have customn circuitry to futz with either, they're general purpose things. Wouldn't be too hard to get a little CPU/Mobo/Linux missile guidance system (heh), at least no less than it would to rip out the innards of a customn designed system.
It's a given that this is FUBAR, but the question is are we going to start seeing more of this? Wouldn't surprise me. PC's have a huge consumer market and a ton of people like us to drive software and hardware development forward. Military? Once it works, it works, why bother upgrading?
So... talk amongst yourselves
How many (other) people thought "PS/2? A weapons platform? I can't even get the microchannel support working!"
Please, call it something else, or I'll be confused forever!
(even "Sony PS2", as opposed to "IBM PS/2"...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
this is an agreement between the japanese government and sony to restrict distribution of the ps2 worldwide before sony are ready to do so, plain and simple. it has nothing to do with the potential weapons abuse.
the key is the last sentence in the telegraph article:
"Sony said it did not expect the restrictions to affect PlayStation 2's release in other countries."
So, the technology inside is the same, still could be misused as they claim but soon it will be legal to be exported for the sole reason that it will be distributed by sony and not some third party. if this were truly a weapons concern, wouldn't you think that they would restrict sony from releasing it in other countries as the US once did for crypto?
Using my own experiences playing Swat 3 and Half Life, not to mention Super Tecmo Bowl on the original Ninetendo, I can safely say that the potential for the Playstation to be used as a passive weapon is quite real.
Think of it: I spent countless hours playing computer games when I should have been doing Calc II. The potential for a rouge nation to dump millions of playstation 2 systems into the US threatens the very viability of the US GDP.
Look at the recent declines in the stock market. They come very close on the heels of the Playstation 2's introduction. A coincidence..hardly.
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