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Crack the Pepsi iTunes Promo Code
An anonymous reader writes "Someone posted a technique to find a winner in the iTunes Pepsi promo giveaway." Next step: a Pepsi/iTMS winning number generator!
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The link is to a random character generator written in Java. Mods, do you think random characters will make an iTunes code?
Hey guys, someone submitted when we were already at the top of our load. So while the host works things out, here are the images used in the story.
No, I don't have algorithm to generate winning numbers. (I would have to assume that they are randomly generated anyways) But, after my 5th winning pepsi top in a row, I'm pretty confident in my ability to pick a winner by examining the bottle. Assuming that the intial bottles really are only 1 in 3 winners and are evenly distributed (which isn't a given) then 5 in a row is good, but not conclusive.
Anyways, on the bottles I've seen, you can actually see under the cap you down the kneck of the bottle. If the lighting is sufficient, you'll be able to make out at least a couple of letters. If you see a number then you have a winner. You'll look like a fool staring down bottles to find a surefire winner, but being a cheapskate isn't glamorous work.
I don't know any method to win with the 7-11 Big Gulp cups where the code is on the rim of the winning cup. I've gotten 2 of 3 winners using my patented "pick the first cup" algorithm. The only strategy I've heard of to increase your odds is the "double cup". Some people claim that the stores don't mind if you do it, but to me it's crossing over from legitimate "selection optimization" to "theft".
Here is a mirror of the relevant content.
http://www.str8dog.com/macmerc/
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
I tested the "crack" at work when I bought a 20 oz Diet Pepsi at the cafeteria, and accurately predicted that the bottle I had purchased was a winner. However, it has to look fishy to others when you're standing there holding the bottle at a funny angle, so I've refrained from actually trying to capitalize on it.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
Here is a quick and dirty mirror.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Easier still: "try again" caps have 3 lines of printing, centered. Winning caps have 4 lines and fill pretty much the whole space. You don't even have to make out the words, just avoid the caps with a fair bit of whitespace at the edges.
Now stop right here.
Anyone who thinks that the Pepsi/ iTMS 100,000,000 song give-away is charity needs some remediation.
Apple & Pepsi aren't being nice to anyone.
The whole iTMS sweepstakes, just like all sweepstakes, are to entice you ... the consumer ... to drink more Pepsi (or purchase/ consume a product). It just so happens that you're enticement here is a 33% chance of a free song.
And they do have caps on the "Sierra Mist" (sprite/7up-esque) drinks too.
Still, some people will pay $1.10-$1.49 to get a free 99 song... that's just amazing.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Steve's children aren't allowed to drink soda or watch television, if this story is accurate. http://212.100.234.54/content/6/35259.html
It's the simplest of tricks to prevent such knowledge, but suprisingly effecive. The only thing that I think could allow you to view the secret within the cap is to shine a bright light through it, and I'm not sure you'd want to do that with your remaining eye.
There are 10 alpha-numeric digits - i don't know if they avoid zero, but if they do that means:
35^10 = 2758547353515625 possible codes
divide by 100 million and you get 1 chance in 27585473.
that guy from Pepsi. John Sculley, who subsequently joined Apple, kicked out Steve Jobs and let Bill Gates use Mac features in Windows 1.0. Change the world, he did. :(
Actually, it's 10 digits, not 8. And yes, they use both zero (0) and the letter O. The zero's are more elongated vertically, and the O's are actually slightly elongated horizontally. Therefore there's about 10^36 possible codes.
Winning caps look like this (fake number, obviously):
12345
ABCDE
ONE FREE
SONG
Centered. The blank line is actually about half a line.
Losers look like this:
PLAY
AGAIN
Simple enough. If you hold it up so that the yellow cap is facing the light, yes, you can peer down the side and make out enough to tell which is which, especially on the Sierra Mist bottles. The Pepsi bottles are harder, but since that foul stuff is undrinkable anyway, stick to the clear drinks.
Note, I have not tried this in a store. I have, however, won a few songs on Sierra Mist bottles.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Doh! You're right. My mistake.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Dude, thats why you Recycle them...
Sound familar you maybe have read it here.
This way you don't have to use 'suck'y Itunes, and you still get to stick it to the RIAA.
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
Famous Steve Jobs quote on Pepsi guy:
John Sculley ruined Apple, and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place - which was making great computers for people to use.
Luckily for Pepsi, it only costs $0.14 (or some amazingly low amount) to make, distribute and market. So the profit margin is still there.
Most of the other online stores sell for $0.99 a track ($0.88 for Walmart), so it's smarter to assume they pay less than that for licensing than to assume a slashdot AC has some kind of insight.
Yep, Jobs's objection was that Sculley wasn't making "good products". All Sculley did was manage to actually sell Macs. Which is, you know, kinda important to anyone who likes the Mac platform, instead of being merely a fanboy who cheers Apple-the-company like it's a sports team.
Let's look at how well Jobs has been doing selling Macs:
Macintoshes sold annually, starting year of Jobs's return:
1997: 2,874,000
1998: 2,763,000
1999: 3,448,000
2000: 4,558,000
2001: 3,087,000
2002: 3,101,000
2003: 3,012,000
Quite a "turnaround", isn't it? Look, the 2003 number is a whole 5% higher than the 1997 number! And of course, the numbers hide the fact that there were quite a few clones sold in 1997 and 1998, so the total number of Mac-platform computers would be higher those years.
Ah, but the company is selling "cool" products like the iPod and turing a profit, so who cares that the Mac is stagnating, selling only as many units per year under the Jobs revival as it was in Sculley's last year at Apple?
And exactly how many Macs did they sell in Sculley's last year at Apple? You didn't list the figure...
For reference, Sculley's last year at Apple was 1994. After that, Mike Markkula took over. In 1995, Gil Amelio took over. Then The Holy And Praised Return Of The Steve occurred in 1997. Sculley pushed one and only one good product... the Newton. Unfortunately, he didn't last long enough to push it to the unassailable top of the heap.
Then Markkula pushed the Performa, killed Newton for all practical intents and purposes, and diversified the product line into about 35 different models.
Amelio is generally an underrated Apple exec. He killed most of those product lines (which were milking Apple dry), tried to revive the Newton, despite Palm's arrival on the scene, and discovered Jonathan Ive and promptly set him on the task of making the iMac. Amelio made two mistakes: clones (which kept the milking going even after the product line was trimmed) and buying NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs on board.
Steve Jobs threw Amelio off the roof, stole his praise, and fortunately, kept up the good moves Amelio had started. Note that after Amelio's projects were finished, Steve's first pet project bombed. The G4 cube was a market failure.
Lately, they've been focusing less on cool new computer features and focusing more on cool new software (iApps, MacOS X, etc.) and cool new peripherals to help the computer get things done (iPod, iSight, etc.). That might account for the drop in sales. The economy's current shitter-dwelling state also might have something to do with that.
So, a short review: Sculley was not pushing the Mac like he should've been, but he wasn't killing the company like Markkula did. Amelio actually was turning Apple around until Jobs fucked him in the ass and took all the credit. Jobs isn't as wonderful as some people would have you believe, but he is doing the best he can in the current market environment.
Oh, and you need to learn a little Apple history. Consider this your first lesson.
They said the 1 in 3 caps were a winner. You can of course never know if this is true. You could buy a huge amount of bottles and do some statistics calculations and get a pretty good estimate that way, but I really don't think it's that important. They're giving away songs for free!
Martin
128 kilobits a second. (I just checked file details on winamp to make sure).
So your result is short by a factor of 8. Multiply 9.04 by 8 and you get about the right amount.
The bit-byte confusion is nearly as bad as the chem/physics calorie versus the nutritional Calorie. The chem/physics calorie is amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius. The nutritional Calorie (note uppercase C) is amount of energy needed to raise one kilogram one degree. Makes for confusing conversations occasionally.
Oh, and you need to learn a little Apple history. Consider this your first lesson.
Mike Markkula was, of course, the first Apple CEO, pre-Scully. You're thinking of Mike Spindler. Now, time to get back to that history of Apple book.