I am referring to UK Fruit Machines that you get in bars, cafe's etc. They do (or did when I last played them) cycle. You don't have to believe me, but it is true.
The article you point to is for slot machines. We're talking "fruit machines" here, and there is a difference.
They are not truely random. I should know, I was addicted to them long enough:). Search on google for UK fruit machine sites to read up on particular quirks of various machines.
This is common knowledge and not a surprise. These things work on cycles, but the cycles are spiked with extremely baron periods and extremely genorous ones.
Ten years ago the cycles were a lot more reliable. I used to hang out in an arcade on Leeds railway station during rush hour.
The way to play was to pay attention to how much other players were dumping in machines. If a machine had received 75% of the jackpot without paying out, as soon as the current player left, go over and put in up to 50% of the jackpot value. Play until you win a jackpot (ignore/gamble smaller wins). 80% of the time, you'd get it. The hard part was to walk away if it hadn't paid by then:) But if you stuck to that, you were pretty much guaranteed to come out up overall. I used to make around 20 quid ($30) a night when I played - over a couple of hours, so the payback wasn't that great:)
But then the cycles gradually got longer, with longer baron patches followed by an occasional triple jackpot (paid over three pays to avoid breaking the law!). At that point it was no longer statistically worth while playing.
The manufacturers though are experts at intermittant reinforcement. It took me a while to quit while losing.
Now I live in California so I don't have to worry about being able to do anything dangerous, addictive or interesting because the State very kindly makes all my bad habits illegal:) To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "We all go down the library for a wild time":)
I've used the crystal theme KDE icons all over the web app we're working on (and apparently we employed the icon designer to do other stuff for us, but I don't know what he did).
Many Open Source apps have large image libraries that you can freely use. Just use Kuickshow to find the relevant directory..02
cLive;-)
ps - apologies if you're not using Linux - I'm not sorry that you can't access these, I'm just sorry you don't use Linux (to paraphrase Bill Hicks:)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I guess you're not blind then. To be honest, I don't know if there are disability mark-ups in flash (never used it, never will:), but I'm pretty sure that 99% of flash designers don't think about this.
I'm currently working on an web hosting admin system for my employer, and I've brought up the issue of accessability. With over 1 million people in the US either blind, or with severe sight problems, we don't want to alienate potential customers through bad design.
And then there are the people (like me) that do not want to install flash because of all the bad eye candy out there (combined with disabling animations, my browsing experience is now bearable). Yesterday, I visited a barebones PC site, looking for a new box. Their homepage was a useless flash file, therefore they lose out on my custom.
With your heart beating heavily, you grab the capsule and head off to the college.
The library is busy, with both microfiche machines in use. You pace impatiently, waiting for one machine to become free. After the longest five minutes that you can remember, the student at the right hand machine gathers up his papers, pushes the chair back, stands up and leaves.
Quickly, you grab the chair and sit, tense with anticipation of what you might find. Opening the capsule hastily, the film flutters out onto the desk. Carefully, you place the film in the viewer.
Blurry lines come into view. A few seconds play with the controls and you start to see a photograph of a document. It looks like an internal memo for some organisation. At the top of the page, a small logo that look like an eye in an equilateral triangle stares blurrily at you from the screen. Underneath the logo, two succinct sentences explain:
"Le Méridien Heliopolis, Cairo. March 1st, 4pm Main Bar.
"1-555-648-9777"
Why would this need to be on microfiche? What was the eye in the triangle? Why was there a phone number?
You quickly copy the details and, pausing only to see if your activities have attracted attention (they haven't), you grab the film and head to a nearby phone booth. You stare at the phone for a long time before deciding to call the number. I mean, what harm could it do? A public phone. Whatever the number was, you could call it and hang up if things got weird.
You dial the number. Within one ring, a women answers, addresses you by name, and tells you that your flight will be leaving this evening and that it would be in your interest to be there on time. Oh, and your ticket, passport and expenses can be picked up from the AirEgypt check-in.
"But, hang..." - the phone is already dead. You redial. This time you get a line disconnected tone.
Your shop is trashed, you're no longer the Wicker Man(tm). Curiosity killed the cat but, after the day you've had, you decide you need to follow this through.
The pickup at the airport is smooth, the passport is a perfect fake. "Dr. Kim Brown, Phd". Apparently you are an Australian importer going to check out some sculptures for your company. Wicker to sculptures? You're sure you can make the transition easily enough.
The flight is long and uneventful. You sleep fitfully with omenous dreams. You awake as the screach of tyres on asphalt announces your arrival. You go straight to the hotel and unpack. Still an hour to go.
AT five minutes to four, you enter the bar and buy a large shot of Bourbon to steady your nerves. As you bring down your glass, you see a man sat opposite you smiling.
"Dr. Brown, welcome. Please come with me. I need your help to move some 'rocks'."
You follow the small stranger down several back alleys until the streets open up and you are in a field. With real rocks. Not rocks.
"Help me push this rock", your guide motions.
Both of you push the rock, but it is stuck solid.
"We need some more help. Go to the street and grab five or six people to give us a hand. Tell them I'll pay them 5 pounds each if they'll help."
Ten minutes later I return with six locals, happy to make some easy money. We all push together, but the stone is still solid. My guide thinks for a second.
"We need more help."
He asks each of the locals to run off and grab some others to help.
Suddenly, realisation dawns on you and you run, run for your life. What a fool you have been. You travel halfway around the world under mysterious circumstance, only to find out it's a damn Pyramid Scheme.
And just for your own education, why don't you check out all the application specific non-network related exploits that are posted in droves on bugtraq. All these become network exploitable when you have a shell.
Perhaps I should have expanded on what I meant. Why let users have a shell? If you haven't looked already, check out Lincoln Stein's sbox.
Also, with the User directive available in Apache/suexec, there is no reason to not run CGI's as the script owner, rather than as user 'nobody' or 'www' (or whatever) - another common security issue.
Any exploits that this allows idiots/script kiddies to do are exploits that a Perl programmer with half a brain can write in about 6 lines of code:
use CGI; my $q=CGI->new(); my $command = $q->param('command') $command and print $q->header('text/plain').`$command`."\n" and exit; print $q->header.$q->start_html.$q->start_form.$q->textf ield('command').$q->end_form.$q->end_html;
If your web server is so badly configured that this creates security issues for you, you seriously need to read up on security.
Since the president is owned by the corporations, I think a "campaign contribution" of $500,000 is hardly going to sway him away from policy. Make a change from previous administrations.
It would be a bit like going up to Bush and offering him $10 to push through some legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
The article you point to is for slot machines. We're talking "fruit machines" here, and there is a difference.
They are not truely random. I should know, I was addicted to them long enough :). Search on google for UK fruit machine sites to read up on particular quirks of various machines.
cLive ;-)
Ten years ago the cycles were a lot more reliable. I used to hang out in an arcade on Leeds railway station during rush hour.
The way to play was to pay attention to how much other players were dumping in machines. If a machine had received 75% of the jackpot without paying out, as soon as the current player left, go over and put in up to 50% of the jackpot value. Play until you win a jackpot (ignore/gamble smaller wins). 80% of the time, you'd get it. The hard part was to walk away if it hadn't paid by then :) But if you stuck to that, you were pretty much guaranteed to come out up overall. I used to make around 20 quid ($30) a night when I played - over a couple of hours, so the payback wasn't that great :)
But then the cycles gradually got longer, with longer baron patches followed by an occasional triple jackpot (paid over three pays to avoid breaking the law!). At that point it was no longer statistically worth while playing.
The manufacturers though are experts at intermittant reinforcement. It took me a while to quit while losing.
Now I live in California so I don't have to worry about being able to do anything dangerous, addictive or interesting because the State very kindly makes all my bad habits illegal :) To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "We all go down the library for a wild time" :)
.02
cLive ;-)
- how long has google been 'geocaching'
- I wonder what the API looks like
- Can I use it to order pizza?
oh dear...cLive ;-)
I guess multiple undo just ain't that useful for ya...
.02
cLive ;-)
I've used the crystal theme KDE icons all over the web app we're working on (and apparently we employed the icon designer to do other stuff for us, but I don't know what he did).
.02
;-)
:)
Many Open Source apps have large image libraries that you can freely use. Just use Kuickshow to find the relevant directory.
cLive
ps - apologies if you're not using Linux - I'm not sorry that you can't access these, I'm just sorry you don't use Linux (to paraphrase Bill Hicks
--
Trinity in high heels carrying a whip:
The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
.02
cLive ;-)
--
Trinity in high heels, carrying a whip
The Donimatrix - there is no spoonerism.
Probably. But Me? I got no idea, just wanted to show off my vocabulary whilst slightly drunk...
"And what do you mean by demagoguery?"
"By demagoguery, I mean demagoguery"
- Fry & Laurie
cLive ;-)
.02
cLive ;-)
In KDE anyway:
(you may need to move the status bar - if that's an issue for you...)
As to spyware - not an issue with Opera - they know their market :)
One day I'll learn how to script this (yeah, right).
.02
cLive ;-)
cLive
.02
cLive ;_)
? Don't you mean:
5. IN SOVIET RUSSIA, YOU OWN WINDOWS 2003!
.02 :)
cLive ;-)
My fave was the BBC graphics early on in 9/11:
T he
W ar
A gainst
T error
They kept it up for a good few hours before anyone noticed.
cLive ;-)
cLive
I'm currently working on an web hosting admin system for my employer, and I've brought up the issue of accessability. With over 1 million people in the US either blind, or with severe sight problems, we don't want to alienate potential customers through bad design.
And then there are the people (like me) that do not want to install flash because of all the bad eye candy out there (combined with disabling animations, my browsing experience is now bearable). Yesterday, I visited a barebones PC site, looking for a new box. Their homepage was a useless flash file, therefore they lose out on my custom.
Oh, and the site you were looking for is web pages that suck, and the term you are looking for is mystery meat navigation.
.02
cLive ;-)
When I remember how excited everybody got with the introducion of the <CENTER> tag
Every damn page became centered overnight.
And the day the <BLINK> tag first made an entry, I wanted to go shoot a large hoarde of web "designers".
Each time a new advance was made, there was always a bunch of people who never learnt the rule - "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".
I think they design Flash web sites now.
My prediction is that they'll still be doing whatever the equivalent is in 2013 :)
.02
cLive ;-)
I chose Kim because the sex is ambiguous and it was the first gender neutral name I thought of. I added Phd so I could prefix with Dr (again...).
;-)
No idea where brown came from.
Weird psycho shit coincidence or what?
cLive
With your heart beating heavily, you grab the capsule and head off to the college.
;-)
:)
The library is busy, with both microfiche machines in use. You pace impatiently, waiting for one machine to become free. After the longest five minutes that you can remember, the student at the right hand machine gathers up his papers, pushes the chair back, stands up and leaves.
Quickly, you grab the chair and sit, tense with anticipation of what you might find. Opening the capsule hastily, the film flutters out onto the desk. Carefully, you place the film in the viewer.
Blurry lines come into view. A few seconds play with the controls and you start to see a photograph of a document. It looks like an internal memo for some organisation. At the top of the page, a small logo that look like an eye in an equilateral triangle stares blurrily at you from the screen. Underneath the logo, two succinct sentences explain:
"Le Méridien Heliopolis, Cairo. March 1st, 4pm Main Bar.
"1-555-648-9777"
Why would this need to be on microfiche? What was the eye in the triangle? Why was there a phone number?
You quickly copy the details and, pausing only to see if your activities have attracted attention (they haven't), you grab the film and head to a nearby phone booth. You stare at the phone for a long time before deciding to call the number. I mean, what harm could it do? A public phone. Whatever the number was, you could call it and hang up if things got weird.
You dial the number. Within one ring, a women answers, addresses you by name, and tells you that your flight will be leaving this evening and that it would be in your interest to be there on time. Oh, and your ticket, passport and expenses can be picked up from the AirEgypt check-in.
"But, hang..." - the phone is already dead. You redial. This time you get a line disconnected tone.
Your shop is trashed, you're no longer the Wicker Man(tm). Curiosity killed the cat but, after the day you've had, you decide you need to follow this through.
The pickup at the airport is smooth, the passport is a perfect fake. "Dr. Kim Brown, Phd". Apparently you are an Australian importer going to check out some sculptures for your company. Wicker to sculptures? You're sure you can make the transition easily enough.
The flight is long and uneventful. You sleep fitfully with omenous dreams. You awake as the screach of tyres on asphalt announces your arrival. You go straight to the hotel and unpack. Still an hour to go.
AT five minutes to four, you enter the bar and buy a large shot of Bourbon to steady your nerves. As you bring down your glass, you see a man sat opposite you smiling.
"Dr. Brown, welcome. Please come with me. I need your help to move some 'rocks'."
You follow the small stranger down several back alleys until the streets open up and you are in a field. With real rocks. Not rocks.
"Help me push this rock", your guide motions.
Both of you push the rock, but it is stuck solid.
"We need some more help. Go to the street and grab five or six people to give us a hand. Tell them I'll pay them 5 pounds each if they'll help."
Ten minutes later I return with six locals, happy to make some easy money. We all push together, but the stone is still solid. My guide thinks for a second.
"We need more help."
He asks each of the locals to run off and grab some others to help.
Suddenly, realisation dawns on you and you run, run for your life. What a fool you have been. You travel halfway around the world under mysterious circumstance, only to find out it's a damn Pyramid Scheme.
Better luck next time, eh?
cLive
ps - if you made it here, well done
I dunno, they still had to pick up large sheets of plastic to "load" reports. Great leaps in storage technology there, eh :)
cLive ;-)
Perhaps I should have expanded on what I meant. Why let users have a shell? If you haven't looked already, check out Lincoln Stein's sbox.
Also, with the User directive available in Apache/suexec, there is no reason to not run CGI's as the script owner, rather than as user 'nobody' or 'www' (or whatever) - another common security issue.
.02
cLive ;-)
I did try to indent it though, but the code was a trivial example, and slashdot's code markup doesn't seem to like indentation.
Bluddy trolls...
clive ;-)
Any exploits that this allows idiots/script kiddies to do are exploits that a Perl programmer with half a brain can write in about 6 lines of code:
If your web server is so badly configured that this creates security issues for you, you seriously need to read up on security.
.02
cLive ;-)
It would be a bit like going up to Bush and offering him $10 to push through some legislation.
.02
cLive ;-)
cLive ;-)