Slashdot Mirror
'The Playstation Job' Heisters Arrested
Thanks to the New Jersey Star-Ledger for their news that a gang who stole $5 million worth of PlayStation consoles in a high-tech train heist have been arrested and indicted. According to the article, the theft ring, known as the 'Conrail Boyz', stole more than $20 million of merchandise from freight trains, and their "..largest single take was 17,496 Sony PlayStation electronic game systems worth more than $5 million and involved members driving off with a cargo container, authorities charged." Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?
Sell them in 3rd world countries. I've personally seen consoles being sold for 3x times their retail price, just because of the shipping and custom overhead.
If you manage to take them abroad and find a partner that can help you out with the customs burden, you can make all the profit just on the console cost (which was Free as in Beer)
These were Playstations. Remember, the little grey box that didn't do anything special except play games that appeal to the lowest common denominator and software copyright violators?
You guys are all talking about Playstation 2's. The slightly larger black box that is pretty much the same except it can also stand on its end.
Though link up all 17,000 Playstations if you want. You could do some serious text editing with all that power.
Well, quoted from here, a ps2 has 6.2 gflops of CPU power in its FPU. There are 17,496 of these units. So that is roughly 108475 gflops of CPU power.
Quoted from a slashdot article here, there are "over 2000" Xeon 2.8 GHz in the render farm for ROTK. Pulled from google cache as intel's website is crap, here, I learned that a pair of 2.8 ghz xeons has 5.6 gflops of FPU power. Thus, 5.6 * 2000 is 11200 gflops of power for the render farm of ROTK.
Thus, take 108475 and divide by 11200 and those playstations equal roughly 9.68 ROTK rendering farms.