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'The Playstation Job' Heisters Arrested

Posted by simoniker on from the do-17,000-playstations-fit-in-a-mini? dept.

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?

8 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. easy by sporty · · Score: 4, Funny

    Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?


    Ok guys.. you are making this too easy.

    /beowulf

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    ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

    1. Re:easy by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Okay, since this is obviously going to turn into one big beowulf love fest, can anybody do the back of the envelope calculation to find out just how powerful a beowulf cluster of 17,000 PlayStations would be?

      For extra credit you can express the answer in terms of Lord of the Rings:Fellowship of the Ring movies rendered per week.

    2. Re:easy by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. The obvious one..... by hawkstone · · Score: 3, Informative

    This would be redundant as others have suggested it, but I've got a link:

    Build a beowulf cluster of PS2 machines.

  3. what about eBay? by Numeric · · Score: 3, Funny

    i think they got caught when they tried to sell the PS2s with a quantity of 17000.

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    -- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
  4. I don't know about the playstations by rw2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't know what I'd do with the playstations, but I learned yesterday that I could use the shipping container as a way to transport about 30EB of data more quickly than over the internet.

    So I might just keep the container and use it to backup all the, er, images in the Chicago area.

  5. $75 - NEW PS2 IN BOX - No Reserve! by TheLASTjay · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can you say eBay?

    =) jay

  6. Must be modeling themselves after a game... by KU_Fletch · · Score: 3, Funny

    Kids today with their robberies and such. Must of been too much of that Grand Theft Train or Railroad Tycoon.

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    It's not stupid. It's advanced.