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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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Oops, there went that debt free memo! ;)
No, really--this would never have occurred to me.
I mean, really--the tipping of the bottle I could probably get to, but then to look through the clear plastic--inspired, my friend, inspired. And differentiating between 'again' and a random string of numbers? This guy has to be into hardcore pattern recognition. NSA, are you seeing this?
Yeah.
There exist elegant solutions to truly vexing problems that, once discovered, are striking in their simplicity. There also exist people who try to pass off the painfully obvious as an elegant solution to a truly vexing problem.
A free iTunes code to the person who can guess which category this falls into...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This is a crack? I mean, if you count the cap'n crunch as a crack, sure. But I don't consider tilting a bottle of soda a crack. It seems more like social engineering.
As long as the "crack" can be placed in a secret decoder ring I'll be happy.
The American Dental Association, for the sudden increase in work coming their way. A Mr Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. will be presented with the award - a special enamel yellow I-Pod - at the next 'Fillings Across America' convention.
Cool - a guaranteed way to pick a winner!
Now i'm off to buy many $1.20 bottles of sugar water so I get get a free $0.99 song!!!! I can't lose!
oh wait............
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large numbers.
...Just one iTune, and Pepsi wouldn't give it to me!
I suspect not, but I'm sure it could produce music of the same quality as most of the stuff produced today.
No, people who lack the capacity to detect sarcasm ad absurdium is a truly vexing problem. What part of that post made you think the guy was actually singing the praises of an individual he considers an intellectual giant?
ORiON PROUDLY PRESENTS ...: Team ORiON ....: Team ORiON ...: Team ORiON ...: 02.18.04 .......: Keygen ......: XX/01
/sarcasm
iTunes Sweepstakes (c) Apple
SUPPLIER
CRACKER
PACKAGER
RELEASED
TYPE
DISKS
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".
I tired this in our break room but I had to tip the entire Pepsi machine over to see which bottle I should buy! I hope the boss didn't see me.
Is that why they have that picture of the guy being crushed by the pop machine?
Is it to keep you from checking for iTunes winner bottles?
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Most likely, no.
The majority of Pepsi drinkers probably don't care about the promotion.
Those who do will win. Those who don't care won't win and won't care that they didn't win.
The tunes go to the people who want them, and more or less everyone is happy.
I'd say this would hold true if anywhere under 10% of Pepsi drinkers wanted the iTunes songs. Once you get past that, you wind up having massive inventories of losing bottles nobody wants and things turn ugly fast.
But if that's the case, it's Pepsi that loses, not Apple. Apple has no liability for Pepsi's inventory problems or lack of same.
D
...but unfortunately this bottle cap is too small to hold it. - Fermat
Here is a mirror of the relevant content.
http://www.str8dog.com/macmerc/
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Warning: Too many connections in /home/macmerc/www/www.macmerc.com/mainfile.php on line 47 /home/macmerc/www/www.macmerc.com/mainfile.php on line 47
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
Unable to select database
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I am not sure if this only happens to Coke. Anyway, in one of a similar promotion (i.e. you win something if the cap says "Winner", otherwise "Again"), the message is in some sort of semi-transparent rubbery sheet, which is pushed into the cap, reversed.
So normally you cannot see anything thru this rubbery sheet, and the message is on the other side (i.e. facing the cap).
I wonder why Pepsi didn't use a better solution.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
you're new, right?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
No, it's too hard to print the entire winning number on the bottom of a cork.
I got a winning cap and did some math. Unless the codes are not random, this isn't going to happen.
There are 8 digits in the code, and they appear to use alphas and digits. Presuming they aren't using zero so it's not confused with the letter "O," this means there are 1.0E+35 possibilities. With 100 million winners, that means one in every 1.0E+27 is a winner. Spelt out, that is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
However, given that it is not random, I guess the odds are much better.
I drink Pepsi like water, and friends give me their caps at school, so I'm already over the 200 cap limit. Really.
Maybe Pepsi should be giving away a free diabetes exam instead.
The Four-Color Map theorem.
Kepler's Sphere-Packing problem.
Fermat's Last Theorem.
And now this.
Brilliant.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I think someone should start a business selling CDs full of random numbers.
I've got your company's tagline:
"1 in 2^(# of bits on a CD) chance of getting the software you wanted!"
At last we can finally put to rest the national stereotype of the Germans as humourless.
This didn't work for me.
I took the Pepsi bottle cap, inserted it into my PC CD drive, and could read nothing.
But I forgot to hold down Shift - that may be why.
I just wish people would document these hacks properly before publishing them. I'm pretty computer-savvy, so I don't think it was a mistake on my part.
"Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"
Steve Jobs to that guy from Pepsi. It's on folklore.org somewhere. The Bouncing Pepsis story, I believe.
...that this hard-hitting piece of "journalism" made Slashdot's *front page*. I mean, I understand -- slow news day and all, and, well, Slashdot's front page was never a real "exclusive club" in the first place.... "Try to read the cap and see if you've won before you buy the Pepsi." That's it. THAT made the front page. He even put pictures for the, shall we say, "less intellectually fortunate" among the Mac faithful. What's next, "shake your Christmas present and maybe you can tell what's inside?" How about "Check your fruit for bruises BEFORE you buy it to avoid getting bruised fruit!"? GENIUS, I tell you, SHEER GENIUS. Yes, Bobby, "Genius" as in "Genius Bar". I bet Apple's already looking for this Einstein's number as we speak. But they'll have to beat NASA to him! He's like the guy off Phenomenon, I wonder if he can learn Spanish in a half hour. Frickin' Brilliant. I hope he uses his powers for Good, not Evil. Hey, I'm not kidding. He managed to make Slashdot's FRONT PAGE. The FreeBSD guys could cure cancer with their ass and they wouldn't make the front page.
Why do the Editors even *bother* with apple.slashdot.org when something this fundamentally NON-earth-shakingly important (ie remember that credo "Stuff that Matters"?) makes the front page? SLASHDOT is now apple.slashdot.org. Get it? Slashdot = Apple. Everything NON-Apple seems secondary. Linux stories are tolerated. Books are ignored. YRO is buried. Games are irrelevant.
You know, I used to think the guys who say "the Slashdot Editors are on Apple's payroll" and that "Apple is astroturfing here" were crazy. Now, I'm starting to believe it. Or has the definition of "stuff that matters" changed fundamentally since Apple is involved?
Either the editors are slipping or they have an agenda. Take your pick. I like cheating as much as the next guy, but this doesn't deserve front page coverage. I guess that's why I'm not an editor. I'd be fair, I speak in full sentences, and my spelling is adequate. Hell, right there my chances are shot.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
You might want to look at this another way: They may not mind the cheating at all.
What they want to do is convert Coca-Cola addicts (like me) to Pepsi addicts. This is a back-handed bribe for me to switch from Coke to Pepsi for a month. The economics actually aren't bad, since as well as shifting my brand, they want me to buy more expensive single bottles at over $1 each, as opposed to my usual 6 and 12 packs at under $ 0.50 each.
The actual sugar water component of a soda costs around $ 0.10. The wholesale value of a song on iTunes is probably around $ 0.50. If they have about a 100% markup at retail, the $1.20 pepsi bottle is giving them $0.60, so they are roughly breaking even on my sodas which are a guaranteed win.
What they're counting on, of course, is that I switch to Pepsi and continue drinking it after the promotion. This is surely not impossible, as long as I decide I like the taste better. If they wind up doing that, they may not care that I'm only picking winning bottles, and they might have even made it deliberately trivial to cheat. They won't tell us that; it ruins the fun. But they may well have done it. Of course that's also why there's a 200 song limit for each email address. They'll let me have $100 wholesale, no matter how I get it.
Interesting, no?
D
Just out of high school, I worked for apple as a phone jockey/dope in the thick of the Sculley era. Every single day my job consisted of taking desperate (to the point of suicidal) calls from these poor, pathetic bureaucrats in the purchasing departments at school districts who had sent their entire computer hardware budget to Apple some six, eight, 12, 18 months ago, and they had still not received their orders.
We were told explicitly and with great threat that we were never to reveal this to the customer, and were in fact to continue to feed them the "Real Soon Now" line of bullshit ("Next week, I promise... It's shipping tomorrow... It already shipped..."), when the blunt reality was that they would not be receiving their orders the next week, month, four months, six months, EVER - eventual refunds were assumed, amounting to a zero-interest loan from the school districts to Apple - because Apple had in fact shipped every one of their orders overseas, to be sold at a higher markup in foreign retail. They had sold their standing inventory at least twice, and probably several times more, and only actually delivered it to the highest bidder. It was pathetic.
Mind you, "profitability" of Apple aside, this was the height of the "MacInTrash" era, when every government department in the United States, outside of the toniest school districts, was replacing their entire IT infrastructure of Apples with cheap first-generation beige boxes running some godawful proof-of-concept "Windows." I vividly recall watching newscasts showing dumpsters overflowing with discarded Apple machines and thinking to myself, "this company is fucked."
Sculley made Apple "profitable" for the X many months it took him to ruin its reputation and forever doom it to the statistically irrelevant fringe market.