I just felt like Liquid played a lot more things like Metallica, and a lot more older metal like Iron Maiden. I don't remember ever hearing any hardcore after they merged, either. Hard Attack didn't play a ton of hardcore, but at least they played some.
Still, either is better than the metal you'll hear on terrestrial radio, that's for sure. (most of the time, one local station has a metal show on every Sat. midnight to 6am that plays great music, uncensored.)
I got rid of my Sirius a few months ago due to the channel changes from the XM merger, actually. I loved the Sirius metal station. When they merged, they started playing more music from the XM metal station, and it just wasn't as good. The Sirius station played a lot more black and death metal, and a lot less mainstream. There was also an excellent punk station, and (even before the merger) they turned it into some 24/7 AC/DC station. It never came back. I did enjoy Howard Stern, but losing the two music stations I listened to the most was enough to cancel. I'm back to listening to CDs in the car again.
I used to have pet rats and my old roommate had a cat. The cat and the rats got along great. One of the rats would pounce on the cat, which was a great party trick. I know other people that also have the rat/cat combination of pets, and the cats normally ignore the rats or purr and rub against them.
I have the most basic package, though. It's $7.55 a month, and gives me 2-13 (something like that) and a couple random higher channels like Spike (which comes through even if you have no TV service and just RR, though.) It also knocks $5 off of my RR bill, so I think it's worth the $2.55 + tax so I can get some stations in (reception at my place sucks, and over the air HD gives you a black screen most of the time.)
My 81 year old grandmother complains when things aren't in HD on the actual HD channels, and pretty much refuses to match the SD channels because of the quality difference. Age may matter some, but I think it really is more of an education thing. She understands the difference better than many 20 and 30 somethings I've talked to.
I have Time Warner. The cheapest package up from mine that has HD is around $50-$60 more, after the upgrade to the plan and the cost of the box rental.
Phantasy Star 2 is the one that I have the fondest memories of. But I didn't get to play the original until many years later on an emulator, as we had a NES and not a SMS. I enjoyed the entire series on the Genesis, but for some reason I would always go back and replay 2.
I used to work at EB Games when they accepted games back within a 10 day period, around 10 years ago or so. We used to get people come up to the counter with a pile of games and a spindle of blank CDs. The blank CDs didn't get returned 3 days later. This was more common than people returning games they didn't like or that didn't run properly. Unfortunately this kind of person ruins it for everyone, and it was way too common of a practice. It wasn't just coincidence, they'd be more than open about it, but if you attempted to stop them they'd just go to another store or call the GM (who didn't even understand. He started working for the company when they were more like a Radio Shack.)
What I like about Steam is the fact that even if you lose/damage your discs, you can still play at a later time. I purchased Half-Life 2 boxed when it first came out (because I received a nice discount on it) and never got around to playing it much. So a few weeks ago, I fired the installer up for Steam (using Wine in fact) and logged into my account. Downloaded the game, and finally got around to beating it.
I know I am a new player, just hit level 30. A friend of mine who does have a level 70 raid character got me into it. In turn, a friend of mine came over, made a character on my account, and now he also plays and was level 17 as of last night. I've been helping him out so he gets closer to my level, and then we can play together more.
I used to have work meetings at an old job within EverQuest. I enjoy MMORPGs, but I prefer to play them with people I know on the outside.
But back to the original point, maybe they don't have the rush of new players they did when it was new, but new people are playing. I didn't have time to dedicate, even to play casually (which I do) when it first came out, but now I have a bit of extra free time to waste. Even if I'm doing it the nerdy way, I'm still hanging out with friends. It makes staying in contact easier, if anything, as we're now a bit older and have real jobs, families, all that fun stuff.
Don't forget that reviews, no matter what the system, are still based on the reviewers tastes. Shenmue would be 0 or 1 star for me and Halo would be 5 (the multiplayer gave us many hours of enjoyment.) 4 to 5 isn't much of a difference, but I found Shenmue horribly boring.
I have a few working 1541 drives yet for my C64. I don't pull it out much, but I still love the old Bard's Tale games (1 and 2) and an emulator just doesn't do it for me.
I remember the first time one of my drives went out of alignment because of some game (I don't remember what game, I was a kid) and my mom blamed me at first until someone told her what actually happened at the computer shop.
I use Gnome on my main desktop, but I really like xfce on pretty much every other machine. It's not very flashy, but I always found it an easy to use desktop. I still do most things with the CLI, and a GUI that doesn't get in the way is nice. Most of the time I just have a ton of ssh sessions going into other machines, and the GUI just makes hopping between them easier (normally about 3-4 shells, and I usually have screen running on the machines I'm ssh'd into.)
Every Thinkpad (besides the 386sx/16 I insist on keeping alive at home running IBM DOS 6) I've re-installed XP on does that until I install whatever awful power management software they have for that model. And if the battery isn't any good, it'll still complain unless I take it out (I have a p3 Thinkpad that won't even boot with it's "hold a 5 minute charge" battery in it.) I've seen this behavior on everything from a Pentium 2 up to a nice new Dual Core 2 system, though.
I'm 25 now, I still play video games, and I played the original Duke Nukem 3D, along with other classics such as Doom I & II, zork, and all those old Sierra adventure games. I'm also engaged right now with a wedding date set for November, and I have a rather nice full time job that pays the bills. Saying or implying anyone over the age of 24 that plays video games has something wrong with them is rather narrow minded. Admittedly I don't play as much as I once did, but I do get a few hours a week in on average.
I'm 29 and still game. I have the whole family, house, and job thing going on, but still find some time to game (not as much as 20 years ago, obviously.) My better half has actually started gaming again, too, which she hasn't done since she was a little girl (she still had her original NES, which works amazing.) We tend to mostly play Wii games together, but she has a DS and I have a ton of other systems (360, PS2, DC, whatever else is in the cellar I haven't dug out since our move.) All the gamers I grew up with still game, and my mother is even still a gamer (and obviously much older than either of us.) I don't think age has a thing to do with it.
I used to play a game like this with a group of friends at a local coffee shop back in high school. We called it S&M (Spite and Malice,) not sure if that's the real name for the game we played or not. We had two shared stacks for each player (so 4 aces on up for 2 players, 6 for 3, and so on.) Suit didn't matter when building the stacks. Each player had 5 or 7 cards in their hand (depending on how fast we wanted the game to go,) four "garbage" piles that you can only use the last card on (so if a 3 was covering a 2 you needed, you were SOL until you used that 3 first) and then a stack of cards with the top showing that had to be gotten rid of (and whoever cleaned their pile out first won.) If you used all the cards in your hand during your turn, you took more and kept playing until you had no moves left, and then you discarded one card into any of your four garbage piles.
The thing about this game was I wrote up a computer version we played through terminals on one of the schools servers, and it was basically multiplayer solitaire. Too bad I don't have a copy anymore (it would probably compile on my Linux server at home with little modification.)
That's sort of sad that they won't work. My MS Keyboard is one of their multimedia ones, and all the buttons work in Linux without any extra configuration, but the only one I use with any regularity is the volume control. Do the buttons not function at all (can't even map them) or do they just not make Linux software to configure them? I know with my keyboard I didn't have to do anything, they just worked. I didn't care too much if they worked or not, I just really like the keyboard.
What's even more ridiculous is that it's a backronym, where the definition is invented after the word is made up. "We owned the other team?" That's the definition. I always thought it to more of a general saying of approval or celebration.
I remember using 'w00t' in IRC something like 15 or more years ago. I'm sure I wasn't the first. I don't even remember the last time I used it, but when I did, it was definitely being used as a way of saying 'woo!' or 'yay!' and had nothing to do with "We owned the other team."
Update - 7:12 AM EST: Jeff has confirmed his firing to us via e-mail, but says he's "not really able to comment on the specifics of my termination." He added that he's "looking forward to getting back out there and figuring out what's next." We're still digging.
I haven't given Gamespot reviews any real thought in a long time, due to the massive amount of advertising games would get on the main page at the same time the review was out.
But that's the great benefit of using a free (as in freedom) OS.
I used Ubuntu for a while (on my home computer), decided that while it was nice, it wasn't what I wanted. I switched to Sabayon, and I'm happier with that. The switch was painless - all the apps I used on Ubuntu were there in Sabayon, my data was all as usable with the new OS as it had been with the old, and all my hardware still works fine.
The cost of switching between Linux distros is so low that users can abandon any distro that's lagging, then switch back if the vendors improve. It's where real competition is driving real improvements.
I've been using the same home directory for close to 10 years on different incarnations of my main desktop. It's been moved to different drives, restored from backups, moved across quite a few different distros, but it's still the same one. The last time I touched some of the files is sort of scary, actually. I wish I had a copy of all my files from my original Slackware install in 93, actually. I know I can move my files from copy of Windows to Windows, sure, but it is damn nice having all my settings come across without actually doing anything. And I don't believe there is an easy way to do that without 3rd party software (I may be wrong and Vista may do that, I'm not a Windows user.)
My cars speedometer (old Accord, and it wasn't the speed sensor this time) went, so I've become used to figuring my speed with the tachometer. The odometer wouldn't really work. I've getting a slightly newer Pontiac Bonneville (aka, still old, but it's an SSEi in great shape) with a working speedometer and a HUD right on the windshield, yet I still find myself looking at the tachometer.
It sounds like it should have been all hardware that works. I've had machines with the "Intel High Definition Audio" setup with Ubuntu and Slackware before without an issue, but never a Dell branded machine. I just tossed Windows XP back on the last Dell I had been using (Inspiron 600M,) installed Quickbooks, and use it as my POS at work. It never functioned properly, wireless was completely flaky under Ubuntu (7.04) yet the same exact card works fine in my Acer (and I mean the same card, it was a better one than the Acer had so I swapped. It did work fine under Windows XP, though.) I've never had good luck with Dell laptops running Linux. I run Ubuntu 7.10 on 3 machines right now, a homebrew desktop and two Acer Aspires (one is a 3620, not sure about the other one at home) and Slackware or some variation on a few older IBM Thinkpads I have, and none have ever given me a problem like that Dell did.
I'm using an Intel WLAN card, too, and the last few versions of Ubuntu worked more or less out of the box with it (had to tell it to allow the restricted driver and I was off to the races.) I can't even compare my current experience with Linux to what it was 12 or so years ago with Slack or RH.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of sound card is it? I haven't had an issue in years with Linux when it comes to sound card support, so I'm just curious what type or if it's maybe a higher end card meant for editing or whatever? I'm not here to bash, I'm seriously curious because it's one problem I haven't seen on anyone's system in quite some time (in Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Linux.)
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I just felt like Liquid played a lot more things like Metallica, and a lot more older metal like Iron Maiden. I don't remember ever hearing any hardcore after they merged, either. Hard Attack didn't play a ton of hardcore, but at least they played some. Still, either is better than the metal you'll hear on terrestrial radio, that's for sure. (most of the time, one local station has a metal show on every Sat. midnight to 6am that plays great music, uncensored.)
I got rid of my Sirius a few months ago due to the channel changes from the XM merger, actually. I loved the Sirius metal station. When they merged, they started playing more music from the XM metal station, and it just wasn't as good. The Sirius station played a lot more black and death metal, and a lot less mainstream. There was also an excellent punk station, and (even before the merger) they turned it into some 24/7 AC/DC station. It never came back. I did enjoy Howard Stern, but losing the two music stations I listened to the most was enough to cancel. I'm back to listening to CDs in the car again.
I used to have pet rats and my old roommate had a cat. The cat and the rats got along great. One of the rats would pounce on the cat, which was a great party trick. I know other people that also have the rat/cat combination of pets, and the cats normally ignore the rats or purr and rub against them.
I have the most basic package, though. It's $7.55 a month, and gives me 2-13 (something like that) and a couple random higher channels like Spike (which comes through even if you have no TV service and just RR, though.) It also knocks $5 off of my RR bill, so I think it's worth the $2.55 + tax so I can get some stations in (reception at my place sucks, and over the air HD gives you a black screen most of the time.)
My 81 year old grandmother complains when things aren't in HD on the actual HD channels, and pretty much refuses to match the SD channels because of the quality difference. Age may matter some, but I think it really is more of an education thing. She understands the difference better than many 20 and 30 somethings I've talked to.
I have Time Warner. The cheapest package up from mine that has HD is around $50-$60 more, after the upgrade to the plan and the cost of the box rental.
Phantasy Star 2 is the one that I have the fondest memories of. But I didn't get to play the original until many years later on an emulator, as we had a NES and not a SMS. I enjoyed the entire series on the Genesis, but for some reason I would always go back and replay 2.
I used to work at EB Games when they accepted games back within a 10 day period, around 10 years ago or so. We used to get people come up to the counter with a pile of games and a spindle of blank CDs. The blank CDs didn't get returned 3 days later. This was more common than people returning games they didn't like or that didn't run properly. Unfortunately this kind of person ruins it for everyone, and it was way too common of a practice. It wasn't just coincidence, they'd be more than open about it, but if you attempted to stop them they'd just go to another store or call the GM (who didn't even understand. He started working for the company when they were more like a Radio Shack.)
What I like about Steam is the fact that even if you lose/damage your discs, you can still play at a later time. I purchased Half-Life 2 boxed when it first came out (because I received a nice discount on it) and never got around to playing it much. So a few weeks ago, I fired the installer up for Steam (using Wine in fact) and logged into my account. Downloaded the game, and finally got around to beating it.
I know I am a new player, just hit level 30. A friend of mine who does have a level 70 raid character got me into it. In turn, a friend of mine came over, made a character on my account, and now he also plays and was level 17 as of last night. I've been helping him out so he gets closer to my level, and then we can play together more.
I used to have work meetings at an old job within EverQuest. I enjoy MMORPGs, but I prefer to play them with people I know on the outside.
But back to the original point, maybe they don't have the rush of new players they did when it was new, but new people are playing. I didn't have time to dedicate, even to play casually (which I do) when it first came out, but now I have a bit of extra free time to waste. Even if I'm doing it the nerdy way, I'm still hanging out with friends. It makes staying in contact easier, if anything, as we're now a bit older and have real jobs, families, all that fun stuff.
The background icon issue will be resolved as soon as we can all easily arrange by penis.
THE CAPSLOCK KEY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT KEY FOR THE INTARWEB.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
That makes my response a little less to the point, but eh.
Don't forget that reviews, no matter what the system, are still based on the reviewers tastes. Shenmue would be 0 or 1 star for me and Halo would be 5 (the multiplayer gave us many hours of enjoyment.) 4 to 5 isn't much of a difference, but I found Shenmue horribly boring.
I have a few working 1541 drives yet for my C64. I don't pull it out much, but I still love the old Bard's Tale games (1 and 2) and an emulator just doesn't do it for me. I remember the first time one of my drives went out of alignment because of some game (I don't remember what game, I was a kid) and my mom blamed me at first until someone told her what actually happened at the computer shop.
I use Gnome on my main desktop, but I really like xfce on pretty much every other machine. It's not very flashy, but I always found it an easy to use desktop. I still do most things with the CLI, and a GUI that doesn't get in the way is nice. Most of the time I just have a ton of ssh sessions going into other machines, and the GUI just makes hopping between them easier (normally about 3-4 shells, and I usually have screen running on the machines I'm ssh'd into.)
Every Thinkpad (besides the 386sx/16 I insist on keeping alive at home running IBM DOS 6) I've re-installed XP on does that until I install whatever awful power management software they have for that model. And if the battery isn't any good, it'll still complain unless I take it out (I have a p3 Thinkpad that won't even boot with it's "hold a 5 minute charge" battery in it.) I've seen this behavior on everything from a Pentium 2 up to a nice new Dual Core 2 system, though.
I'm 25 now, I still play video games, and I played the original Duke Nukem 3D, along with other classics such as Doom I & II, zork, and all those old Sierra adventure games. I'm also engaged right now with a wedding date set for November, and I have a rather nice full time job that pays the bills. Saying or implying anyone over the age of 24 that plays video games has something wrong with them is rather narrow minded. Admittedly I don't play as much as I once did, but I do get a few hours a week in on average.
I'm 29 and still game. I have the whole family, house, and job thing going on, but still find some time to game (not as much as 20 years ago, obviously.) My better half has actually started gaming again, too, which she hasn't done since she was a little girl (she still had her original NES, which works amazing.) We tend to mostly play Wii games together, but she has a DS and I have a ton of other systems (360, PS2, DC, whatever else is in the cellar I haven't dug out since our move.) All the gamers I grew up with still game, and my mother is even still a gamer (and obviously much older than either of us.) I don't think age has a thing to do with it.
I used to play a game like this with a group of friends at a local coffee shop back in high school. We called it S&M (Spite and Malice,) not sure if that's the real name for the game we played or not. We had two shared stacks for each player (so 4 aces on up for 2 players, 6 for 3, and so on.) Suit didn't matter when building the stacks. Each player had 5 or 7 cards in their hand (depending on how fast we wanted the game to go,) four "garbage" piles that you can only use the last card on (so if a 3 was covering a 2 you needed, you were SOL until you used that 3 first) and then a stack of cards with the top showing that had to be gotten rid of (and whoever cleaned their pile out first won.) If you used all the cards in your hand during your turn, you took more and kept playing until you had no moves left, and then you discarded one card into any of your four garbage piles.
The thing about this game was I wrote up a computer version we played through terminals on one of the schools servers, and it was basically multiplayer solitaire. Too bad I don't have a copy anymore (it would probably compile on my Linux server at home with little modification.)
That's sort of sad that they won't work. My MS Keyboard is one of their multimedia ones, and all the buttons work in Linux without any extra configuration, but the only one I use with any regularity is the volume control. Do the buttons not function at all (can't even map them) or do they just not make Linux software to configure them? I know with my keyboard I didn't have to do anything, they just worked. I didn't care too much if they worked or not, I just really like the keyboard.
What's even more ridiculous is that it's a backronym, where the definition is invented after the word is made up. "We owned the other team?" That's the definition. I always thought it to more of a general saying of approval or celebration.
I remember using 'w00t' in IRC something like 15 or more years ago. I'm sure I wasn't the first. I don't even remember the last time I used it, but when I did, it was definitely being used as a way of saying 'woo!' or 'yay!' and had nothing to do with "We owned the other team."
From Joystiq:
Update - 7:12 AM EST: Jeff has confirmed his firing to us via e-mail, but says he's "not really able to comment on the specifics of my termination." He added that he's "looking forward to getting back out there and figuring out what's next." We're still digging.
I haven't given Gamespot reviews any real thought in a long time, due to the massive amount of advertising games would get on the main page at the same time the review was out.
But that's the great benefit of using a free (as in freedom) OS.
I used Ubuntu for a while (on my home computer), decided that while it was nice, it wasn't what I wanted. I switched to Sabayon, and I'm happier with that. The switch was painless - all the apps I used on Ubuntu were there in Sabayon, my data was all as usable with the new OS as it had been with the old, and all my hardware still works fine.
The cost of switching between Linux distros is so low that users can abandon any distro that's lagging, then switch back if the vendors improve. It's where real competition is driving real improvements.
I've been using the same home directory for close to 10 years on different incarnations of my main desktop. It's been moved to different drives, restored from backups, moved across quite a few different distros, but it's still the same one. The last time I touched some of the files is sort of scary, actually. I wish I had a copy of all my files from my original Slackware install in 93, actually. I know I can move my files from copy of Windows to Windows, sure, but it is damn nice having all my settings come across without actually doing anything. And I don't believe there is an easy way to do that without 3rd party software (I may be wrong and Vista may do that, I'm not a Windows user.)
My cars speedometer (old Accord, and it wasn't the speed sensor this time) went, so I've become used to figuring my speed with the tachometer. The odometer wouldn't really work. I've getting a slightly newer Pontiac Bonneville (aka, still old, but it's an SSEi in great shape) with a working speedometer and a HUD right on the windshield, yet I still find myself looking at the tachometer.
It sounds like it should have been all hardware that works. I've had machines with the "Intel High Definition Audio" setup with Ubuntu and Slackware before without an issue, but never a Dell branded machine. I just tossed Windows XP back on the last Dell I had been using (Inspiron 600M,) installed Quickbooks, and use it as my POS at work. It never functioned properly, wireless was completely flaky under Ubuntu (7.04) yet the same exact card works fine in my Acer (and I mean the same card, it was a better one than the Acer had so I swapped. It did work fine under Windows XP, though.) I've never had good luck with Dell laptops running Linux. I run Ubuntu 7.10 on 3 machines right now, a homebrew desktop and two Acer Aspires (one is a 3620, not sure about the other one at home) and Slackware or some variation on a few older IBM Thinkpads I have, and none have ever given me a problem like that Dell did.
I'm using an Intel WLAN card, too, and the last few versions of Ubuntu worked more or less out of the box with it (had to tell it to allow the restricted driver and I was off to the races.) I can't even compare my current experience with Linux to what it was 12 or so years ago with Slack or RH.
Off Topic
Just out of curiosity, what kind of sound card is it? I haven't had an issue in years with Linux when it comes to sound card support, so I'm just curious what type or if it's maybe a higher end card meant for editing or whatever? I'm not here to bash, I'm seriously curious because it's one problem I haven't seen on anyone's system in quite some time (in Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Linux.)