Students at dozens of colleges, such as Syracuse, American University and Marist College, can check online whether a vacant machine is waiting downstairs and how much time remains oneach machine's cycle.
Instead of backing up data to an external hard drive, a chore as popular in our home as taking out the trash, we staked out disk space oneachmachine and opened it to the other computers on the home front.
While IGT may have fallen behind in coming up with flashy new games, the company manages to keep its customers in line by dominating the back room with accounting software that keeps a real-time record of the money that's being won and lost oneach slot machine.