MOSI - Tampa, FL Great Explorations - Saint Petersburg, FL Sunken Gardens - Saint Petersburg, FL
Growing up in Florida, I used to go to MOSI (http://www.mosi.org/index.html) and Great Explorations (http://www.greatexplorations.org/index.php) all the time.
I've heard that MOSI has gone downhill a bit, though I haven't been in a while (not since they first got their IMAX theater about 15 years ago).
Great Explorations is a kid's museum, but *any* geek would have a good time there, regardless of age. They used to do summer camps, bringing in all kinds of animals, field trips out to the beaches, random activities like learning ASL. If you've got kids, they'll love it.
Sunken Gardens is a botanical museum. It has kind of an interesting history to it as well. It is right next to Great Explorations, too (the new Great Explorations building is the old Sunken Gardens gift shop, which was originally a Coca-Cola bottling plant). Not very impressive during the winter, but late spring to late autumn it is gorgeous.
Much as I hate to say it, I gotta agree with a previous poster about Kennedy Space Center. Growing up in Florida, having friends at NASA and working for a retired astronaut, I've been to that place more times than I care to count. Even in the off-season, it's still way too crowded for my tastes.
I suppose it has a few pluses: --It isn't a memory hog like VMWare. --Guest tool installation is noticeably easier for non-MS guests.
But I still have issues: --Installing guest tools completely breaks my OpenSolaris guest display. --My shiny 1 GB graphics card becomes a 128 MB POS in the guests. --No USB support in the Open version. --Running my OpenSolaris guest in NAT mode totally gimps the connection.
VirtualBox isn't bad, but I can't see it being a VMWare killer anytime soon.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've noticed the same with Kubuntu. I was constantly struggling to get things working right. Then I tried KDE in openSUSE when setting up a box at work. It was remarkable how much better everything worked. I'm not a big SUSE fan (or Ubuntu for that matter), but I definitely saw fewer issues on the openSUSE box.
I see lots of odd quirks like that in Ubuntu. One of my annoyances is how the VLC package displays. The video displays in a separate window, whereas in openSUSE it is one window with an autohide mini-panel in fullscreen mode. I've never been able to get that in Ubuntu, and I'm not sure *why*.
I'd have to go back into journals to find exact articles, but here is what I remember from my Primatology courses:
(1) Human/Chimp hybrid experiments have been done, by a Soviet researcher in the early 20th Century. No offspring were ever produced.
(2) Recent research (2000+) suggests that we did breed with chimps regularly in the period following the initial divergence. As time goes on and we continue to diverge, it becomes less feasible.
Not very specific, but it wasn't a topic we covered in any real depth.
Yup, I've tried doing the stripped down install myself (being an old-time Gentoo man). By the time I pull in all of the dependencies (only half of which make sense), my system is probably 90-95% as bloated as a vanilla LiveCD install would have been.
I miss the old Gentoo days. They and Slackware were by far the two best options for stripped-down installs. Sadly, slack is too far behind the tech curve for my needs. If Gentoo could ever get their shit together, I'd go back in a heartbeat. They need to stop trying to become a mainstream distro and return to the days of being a specialized setup.
#1 is definitely my biggest rub. Especially when playing FPS shooter, I often turn the graphics way down. The less-complicated the textures are, the quicker I can get my reticle on the enemy and frag him. Beautiful, complex textures are great until I'm trying to spot something.
I think Mirror's Edge did a great job with this. Granted, I'm the only person on Earth who actually bought it, but they made everything simple. On the rooftops, probably a good 3/4 of the textures are just plain old white with some black thrown in, and the zip line I need to jump to is bright red, as are all the "important" world objects.
And Mirror's Edge doesn't require the CD. I guess that's the one game a year that doesn't follow that archaic practice. Legit buyers have the CD, illegal copies have NoCD cracks. Meanwhile, I have a stack of real games that I have to install NoCD cracks on because the retarded copy-protection schemes won't recognize that my discs are legit. Remind me again why I *shouldn't* pirate this stuff?
Early on, you could do that in SWG. When I leveled a Ranger, I got Survival XP by dropping a camp and sitting in it for 15 minutes. If someone else came along, I'd get even more XP.
Eventually I learned that in certain spots, I could drop a camp underwater by exploiting the terrain and get double XP by fishing from inside my camp. Throw in an AFK fishing macro, and I could burn through that entire sequence of skill boxes.
Medics had the whole tumbling craze during the hologrind era, which was another way to automate leveling a particular type of XP via a skill.
Whether global XP or skill XP, someone will figure out how to grind it.
I would presume they would be less bright. They burn brightly because of all the air in our atmosphere (glowing from the heat caused by all that friction). A thinner atmosphere would result in less heat and therefore a dimmer meteor. Still, they would probably be bright enough to be recorded by the camera, since there is no ambient light on mars to interfere with sighting them.
They really weren't. If my Anthropology degree did anything, it made me realize how absurd the portrayal of our ancestors really is. They weren't really like Captain Caveman or the Flintstones.
But, this is what happens when we let media shape our view. Jump forward to more modern times. I remember a survey taken as part of a study by one of my college professors. When approx. 600 native Floridians were asked to estimate how long Florida had been occupied, less than 5% were within 1,000 years of the currently accepted estimate. Hell, I remember one of my history books from middle school claimed Neanderthals had the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.
As far as.config stuff goes, I don't sync anything. I run multiple distros, so it's nontrivial to share config files between them. I store backup copies of all my configs on the NFS drive, but apart from that, each distro has it's own set of configs.
When dealing with source code for the software projects I work on, I store everything on SVN repos hosted on my quasi-server box (SVN, CUPS, assorted DB's, Trac, etc). Whatever machine I need to be on (dev machine, XP build machine, etc), I just sync the checkout.
For regular files, I keep most of my stuff on a 1TB drive that is NFS'ed to all my machines. If I need to do a lot of work on a big file, I pull down a copy, edit it locally, then push it back to the share. This handles all of my needs for the most part. My Linux, BSD and OSX machines are good to go, my two XP machines aren't. One is only for playing games that choke in Wine, the other is an old box that just runs a build script for my apps, so I've never bothered to try to get them configured to handle NFS shares.
Both methods are cheap, simple, and fairly pain-free if you keep Windows out of the mixed-mode environment.
By conveniences, I mean things like not having to drive an hour to another town to get to a store that doesn't in "Mart" like most of my family (they live in small towns of under 50K). Having real medical facilities, and maybe even some culture (museums, theater, etc).
As populations go, if you look at counties, yes, we are very high. If you look at the area, we actually aren't that bad. The Tampa Bay area has a population density that's well below the SFL region.
I can count on one hand the cities in this country that have a public transportation system that doesn't blow.
Nightlife? I thought that's what Ybor was for. Let all the club hoppers stay on that side of the bridge. Other than bars and the godawful theme park spots, what places normally stay open past 10-ish in any but a handful of giant cities? We're not a twenty-something-club-hopping town, and I *like* it that way.
There is a noticeable difference in temperature. Our summer highs are about the same, but TB has lower lows than SFL, and our highs drop more rapidly outside of the summer months. The recent heat index spike is likely an anomaly. It certainly isn't the norm for this time of year.
We're not a big city, but I'm quite happy in Clearwater, FL. We're part of the Tampa Bay area, with about 2.7 million people, but the Clearwater/St. Pete part of the region only has about 350K. I moved here from one of the cities on that list (Orlando), and god willing I'll never set foot in that city again. Tampa Bay is great as long as you stay the hell out of Tampa.
A lot of mid-sized cities in Florida are like this. All the conveniences of a full-fledged city, but still sufficient ruralness in and around us. The peninsula area (St. Pete plus Clearwater) is pretty laid back.
Nothing was worse than when I lived down in Boca Raton. One giant city stretching from Miami up to West Palm Beach. Truly suffocating. I had a 2.5 mile commute that took me 40 minutes, and I didn't even get on I-95. If the heat index wasn't 100+ degrees 3/4 of the year, I could have *walked* to work in less time.
I'll start this long post with a story to illustrate my point:
A few years ago, I was living down in Boca Raton, FL. For those who don't know the area, this is a little north of Miami along the east coast. One weekend, I drove down to Key West to go kayaking (by myself). I'd been out for a few hours, when I stopped off to eat lunch at a little island off the coast (just barely close enough to still see the coastline, probably further out than is really safe with the tidal patterns down there). To my surprise, I found another person there. She had been out kayaking as well, and her kayak sprung a leak. We split my lunch and I looked at her kayak, which was beyond what we could repair out on the island. At this point, it is getting late, and the tide is turning. I was in a single kayak, so there wasn't room for both of us. I didn't want to take off and leave her there, and she refused to leave me there with her kayak. We ended up spending the night out on this little scrub island, and the next morning she took my kayak in (I was picked up later that day when her kayak outfitter sent out a boat). Once back, I paddled down to my outfitter, turned my kayak in and drove back to Boca. Later that night, she shows up at my place. We eventually dated for about 8 months, before she was transferred to Virginia.
She had some very geeky traits, which I loved (what really impressed me at first was that she managed to find my address so quickly). If you want to meet people, just go do things. You can be a geek and still be active. I play sports, I go to local events/museums/etc. Do it long enough, and you'll start seeing the same people over and over, possibly making new friends, or even *friends*.
If you want the education route, take some social science courses at your closest uni. While I'm a sysadmin, and I took a bunch of engineering courses, my actual degree is in anthropology (with a N.A. archaeology focus). Most of my classes, in all social science disciplines, were about 75% female once I got beyond the gen ed cruft (Intro Psych, History I/II, etc). A lot of these types are smart and very geeky, but in a way that you probably don't have much experience with. Which is good. Two geeks with different interests makes for a fun ride, you can really learn a lot from each other.
Summary: If you want to be active, be active. Go to free concerts (a lot of smaller towns have weekly get-togethers like this), go to museums, join some pickup sports leagues (you don't have to be good, most people in these kinda leagues suck). Take art/pottery/etc classes, enroll at your uni. Try exericse. Group hikes/bikes are great, or sign up for yoga courses (flexibility is never bad). Have a poker night with your coworkers, go to a ball game with them, etc. Take a cooking course (ladies love a man who can cook something more complex than chicken and rice). Want something really different? Take the little 1-2 hour workshops at places like Lowes or Home Depot. You'd be amazed how many ladies you find at these, trying to figure out how to do repairs to their houses.
But in all this, don't approach it as a way to meet women. You'll just set yourself up for disappointment. We're nerds, we're supposed to love learning new things. Approach it that way. When you're hiking, try to understand the mechanics of it. If you're at a pottery class, try to learn more about the material, and how the constituents affect the final product. Focus on the geek side of life, learning new things, and let the socializing come along as it will. Once you've started getting comfortable, then you can be more of an active socializer. When you do get into a conversation, don't say a lot. Ask questions that let the other person talk. You know, *learn* about them. Also a great way to gauge interest. If they keep turning the conversation to you, then you can be fairly sure they're interested.
From my experience, it can still hold true. I've been approached by many women over the years specifically because of my hair (at one point, down to my waist, nowadays 1/3 down my back). He's exaggerating a bit in that quote, but I can say that I have had women walk up and start touching my hair before.
The trick is to look at it this way: how many women like long hair versus how many guys have long hair. From my experience, about 1/5 like it, 1/5 don't care, and 3/5 don't like it. Now, probably only 1/50 guys actually have long hair, so you've got a large pool of ladies and only a few guys. It can work in your favor if you're the type who doesn't have any other really remarkable physical characteristics.
I wasn't a casual gamer back in those days, but I had Game Genies for both NES and SNES. I treated them as a last resort, but they were *very* nice to have around for some games. Few games made me curse more times than Contra.
Like you said, some games, without cheats, were more frustrating than fun.
What about the legit uses for cheats? A few examples come to mind:
(1) noclip to bypass terrain bugs (IE, getting stuck in the big freight elevator in HL1).
(2) Enemies shooting through walls that I can't shoot back at, or enemies that spawned inside a mountain, underground, etc doing the same. Is it really a big deal to pop on god mode long enough to get past them?
#2 is particularly bad in checkpoint games. I have to go back to a checkpoint thirty fucking minutes back for the twentieth time because the AI ignores the rules (I'm looking at you, GRAW)? Screw that. I'm either gonna (a) god-mode past that one little spot, or (b) get pissed, break the disc, burn the pieces, and bury them ten feet underground in a lead box with a crucifix and garlic on top where that game belongs. The former is much better for my blood pressure.
If you have to win by LUCK, you obviously aren't good enough to win, and you haven't achieved anything in doing so.
And if your e-peen is damaged because someone else noclipped through a bad spot instead of reloading thirty times waiting for the PRNG to be aligned just right, well, my condolences to you.
Games are exactly what they should be: disposable entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
MOSI - Tampa, FL
Great Explorations - Saint Petersburg, FL
Sunken Gardens - Saint Petersburg, FL
Growing up in Florida, I used to go to MOSI (http://www.mosi.org/index.html) and Great Explorations (http://www.greatexplorations.org/index.php) all the time.
I've heard that MOSI has gone downhill a bit, though I haven't been in a while (not since they first got their IMAX theater about 15 years ago).
Great Explorations is a kid's museum, but *any* geek would have a good time there, regardless of age. They used to do summer camps, bringing in all kinds of animals, field trips out to the beaches, random activities like learning ASL. If you've got kids, they'll love it.
Sunken Gardens is a botanical museum. It has kind of an interesting history to it as well. It is right next to Great Explorations, too (the new Great Explorations building is the old Sunken Gardens gift shop, which was originally a Coca-Cola bottling plant). Not very impressive during the winter, but late spring to late autumn it is gorgeous.
Much as I hate to say it, I gotta agree with a previous poster about Kennedy Space Center. Growing up in Florida, having friends at NASA and working for a retired astronaut, I've been to that place more times than I care to count. Even in the off-season, it's still way too crowded for my tastes.
Apparently, it's all in the hips...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/11/
I never claimed the alternatives don't do the same thing. I simply said it was a problem that keeps me from considering it enterprise-ready.
I suppose it has a few pluses:
--It isn't a memory hog like VMWare.
--Guest tool installation is noticeably easier for non-MS guests.
But I still have issues:
--Installing guest tools completely breaks my OpenSolaris guest display.
--My shiny 1 GB graphics card becomes a 128 MB POS in the guests.
--No USB support in the Open version.
--Running my OpenSolaris guest in NAT mode totally gimps the connection.
VirtualBox isn't bad, but I can't see it being a VMWare killer anytime soon.
I've noticed the same with Kubuntu. I was constantly struggling to get things working right. Then I tried KDE in openSUSE when setting up a box at work. It was remarkable how much better everything worked. I'm not a big SUSE fan (or Ubuntu for that matter), but I definitely saw fewer issues on the openSUSE box.
I see lots of odd quirks like that in Ubuntu. One of my annoyances is how the VLC package displays. The video displays in a separate window, whereas in openSUSE it is one window with an autohide mini-panel in fullscreen mode. I've never been able to get that in Ubuntu, and I'm not sure *why*.
I mean, aside from being pulled out of thin air that is?
I can think of another place these numbers were pulled out of.........
Dear Dr. Breen:
Why has the Combine seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle?
Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen
I'd have to go back into journals to find exact articles, but here is what I remember from my Primatology courses:
(1) Human/Chimp hybrid experiments have been done, by a Soviet researcher in the early 20th Century. No offspring were ever produced.
(2) Recent research (2000+) suggests that we did breed with chimps regularly in the period following the initial divergence. As time goes on and we continue to diverge, it becomes less feasible.
Not very specific, but it wasn't a topic we covered in any real depth.
Obligatory link
http://xkcd.com/384/
Yup, I've tried doing the stripped down install myself (being an old-time Gentoo man). By the time I pull in all of the dependencies (only half of which make sense), my system is probably 90-95% as bloated as a vanilla LiveCD install would have been.
I miss the old Gentoo days. They and Slackware were by far the two best options for stripped-down installs. Sadly, slack is too far behind the tech curve for my needs. If Gentoo could ever get their shit together, I'd go back in a heartbeat. They need to stop trying to become a mainstream distro and return to the days of being a specialized setup.
#1 is definitely my biggest rub. Especially when playing FPS shooter, I often turn the graphics way down. The less-complicated the textures are, the quicker I can get my reticle on the enemy and frag him. Beautiful, complex textures are great until I'm trying to spot something.
I think Mirror's Edge did a great job with this. Granted, I'm the only person on Earth who actually bought it, but they made everything simple. On the rooftops, probably a good 3/4 of the textures are just plain old white with some black thrown in, and the zip line I need to jump to is bright red, as are all the "important" world objects.
And Mirror's Edge doesn't require the CD. I guess that's the one game a year that doesn't follow that archaic practice. Legit buyers have the CD, illegal copies have NoCD cracks. Meanwhile, I have a stack of real games that I have to install NoCD cracks on because the retarded copy-protection schemes won't recognize that my discs are legit. Remind me again why I *shouldn't* pirate this stuff?
Early on, you could do that in SWG. When I leveled a Ranger, I got Survival XP by dropping a camp and sitting in it for 15 minutes. If someone else came along, I'd get even more XP.
Eventually I learned that in certain spots, I could drop a camp underwater by exploiting the terrain and get double XP by fishing from inside my camp. Throw in an AFK fishing macro, and I could burn through that entire sequence of skill boxes.
Medics had the whole tumbling craze during the hologrind era, which was another way to automate leveling a particular type of XP via a skill.
Whether global XP or skill XP, someone will figure out how to grind it.
This reminds me of the old Carlin skit on prostitution:
"Selling is legal, ****ing is legal. So why isn't selling ****ing legal?"
Not from the Rover, but here's a pic from the old MGS craft:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_from_mars_030522.html
Even more impressive (to me, at least) is this snap from Voyager:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/top10_images_010925-11.html
I would presume they would be less bright. They burn brightly because of all the air in our atmosphere (glowing from the heat caused by all that friction). A thinner atmosphere would result in less heat and therefore a dimmer meteor. Still, they would probably be bright enough to be recorded by the camera, since there is no ambient light on mars to interfere with sighting them.
It sounds like BS to me as well. I have family in NC who used to run a business there, and their taxes were nowhere close to 89%.
They really weren't. If my Anthropology degree did anything, it made me realize how absurd the portrayal of our ancestors really is. They weren't really like Captain Caveman or the Flintstones.
But, this is what happens when we let media shape our view. Jump forward to more modern times. I remember a survey taken as part of a study by one of my college professors. When approx. 600 native Floridians were asked to estimate how long Florida had been occupied, less than 5% were within 1,000 years of the currently accepted estimate. Hell, I remember one of my history books from middle school claimed Neanderthals had the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.
As far as .config stuff goes, I don't sync anything. I run multiple distros, so it's nontrivial to share config files between them. I store backup copies of all my configs on the NFS drive, but apart from that, each distro has it's own set of configs.
When dealing with source code for the software projects I work on, I store everything on SVN repos hosted on my quasi-server box (SVN, CUPS, assorted DB's, Trac, etc). Whatever machine I need to be on (dev machine, XP build machine, etc), I just sync the checkout.
For regular files, I keep most of my stuff on a 1TB drive that is NFS'ed to all my machines. If I need to do a lot of work on a big file, I pull down a copy, edit it locally, then push it back to the share. This handles all of my needs for the most part. My Linux, BSD and OSX machines are good to go, my two XP machines aren't. One is only for playing games that choke in Wine, the other is an old box that just runs a build script for my apps, so I've never bothered to try to get them configured to handle NFS shares.
Both methods are cheap, simple, and fairly pain-free if you keep Windows out of the mixed-mode environment.
By conveniences, I mean things like not having to drive an hour to another town to get to a store that doesn't in "Mart" like most of my family (they live in small towns of under 50K). Having real medical facilities, and maybe even some culture (museums, theater, etc).
As populations go, if you look at counties, yes, we are very high. If you look at the area, we actually aren't that bad. The Tampa Bay area has a population density that's well below the SFL region.
I can count on one hand the cities in this country that have a public transportation system that doesn't blow.
Nightlife? I thought that's what Ybor was for. Let all the club hoppers stay on that side of the bridge. Other than bars and the godawful theme park spots, what places normally stay open past 10-ish in any but a handful of giant cities? We're not a twenty-something-club-hopping town, and I *like* it that way.
There is a noticeable difference in temperature. Our summer highs are about the same, but TB has lower lows than SFL, and our highs drop more rapidly outside of the summer months. The recent heat index spike is likely an anomaly. It certainly isn't the norm for this time of year.
We're not a big city, but I'm quite happy in Clearwater, FL. We're part of the Tampa Bay area, with about 2.7 million people, but the Clearwater/St. Pete part of the region only has about 350K. I moved here from one of the cities on that list (Orlando), and god willing I'll never set foot in that city again. Tampa Bay is great as long as you stay the hell out of Tampa.
A lot of mid-sized cities in Florida are like this. All the conveniences of a full-fledged city, but still sufficient ruralness in and around us. The peninsula area (St. Pete plus Clearwater) is pretty laid back.
Nothing was worse than when I lived down in Boca Raton. One giant city stretching from Miami up to West Palm Beach. Truly suffocating. I had a 2.5 mile commute that took me 40 minutes, and I didn't even get on I-95. If the heat index wasn't 100+ degrees 3/4 of the year, I could have *walked* to work in less time.
I'll start this long post with a story to illustrate my point:
A few years ago, I was living down in Boca Raton, FL. For those who don't know the area, this is a little north of Miami along the east coast. One weekend, I drove down to Key West to go kayaking (by myself). I'd been out for a few hours, when I stopped off to eat lunch at a little island off the coast (just barely close enough to still see the coastline, probably further out than is really safe with the tidal patterns down there). To my surprise, I found another person there. She had been out kayaking as well, and her kayak sprung a leak. We split my lunch and I looked at her kayak, which was beyond what we could repair out on the island. At this point, it is getting late, and the tide is turning. I was in a single kayak, so there wasn't room for both of us. I didn't want to take off and leave her there, and she refused to leave me there with her kayak. We ended up spending the night out on this little scrub island, and the next morning she took my kayak in (I was picked up later that day when her kayak outfitter sent out a boat). Once back, I paddled down to my outfitter, turned my kayak in and drove back to Boca. Later that night, she shows up at my place. We eventually dated for about 8 months, before she was transferred to Virginia.
She had some very geeky traits, which I loved (what really impressed me at first was that she managed to find my address so quickly). If you want to meet people, just go do things. You can be a geek and still be active. I play sports, I go to local events/museums/etc. Do it long enough, and you'll start seeing the same people over and over, possibly making new friends, or even *friends*.
If you want the education route, take some social science courses at your closest uni. While I'm a sysadmin, and I took a bunch of engineering courses, my actual degree is in anthropology (with a N.A. archaeology focus). Most of my classes, in all social science disciplines, were about 75% female once I got beyond the gen ed cruft (Intro Psych, History I/II, etc). A lot of these types are smart and very geeky, but in a way that you probably don't have much experience with. Which is good. Two geeks with different interests makes for a fun ride, you can really learn a lot from each other.
Summary: If you want to be active, be active. Go to free concerts (a lot of smaller towns have weekly get-togethers like this), go to museums, join some pickup sports leagues (you don't have to be good, most people in these kinda leagues suck). Take art/pottery/etc classes, enroll at your uni. Try exericse. Group hikes/bikes are great, or sign up for yoga courses (flexibility is never bad). Have a poker night with your coworkers, go to a ball game with them, etc. Take a cooking course (ladies love a man who can cook something more complex than chicken and rice). Want something really different? Take the little 1-2 hour workshops at places like Lowes or Home Depot. You'd be amazed how many ladies you find at these, trying to figure out how to do repairs to their houses.
But in all this, don't approach it as a way to meet women. You'll just set yourself up for disappointment. We're nerds, we're supposed to love learning new things. Approach it that way. When you're hiking, try to understand the mechanics of it. If you're at a pottery class, try to learn more about the material, and how the constituents affect the final product. Focus on the geek side of life, learning new things, and let the socializing come along as it will. Once you've started getting comfortable, then you can be more of an active socializer. When you do get into a conversation, don't say a lot. Ask questions that let the other person talk. You know, *learn* about them. Also a great way to gauge interest. If they keep turning the conversation to you, then you can be fairly sure they're interested.
From my experience, it can still hold true. I've been approached by many women over the years specifically because of my hair (at one point, down to my waist, nowadays 1/3 down my back). He's exaggerating a bit in that quote, but I can say that I have had women walk up and start touching my hair before.
The trick is to look at it this way: how many women like long hair versus how many guys have long hair. From my experience, about 1/5 like it, 1/5 don't care, and 3/5 don't like it. Now, probably only 1/50 guys actually have long hair, so you've got a large pool of ladies and only a few guys. It can work in your favor if you're the type who doesn't have any other really remarkable physical characteristics.
I wasn't a casual gamer back in those days, but I had Game Genies for both NES and SNES. I treated them as a last resort, but they were *very* nice to have around for some games. Few games made me curse more times than Contra.
Like you said, some games, without cheats, were more frustrating than fun.
What about the legit uses for cheats? A few examples come to mind:
(1) noclip to bypass terrain bugs (IE, getting stuck in the big freight elevator in HL1).
(2) Enemies shooting through walls that I can't shoot back at, or enemies that spawned inside a mountain, underground, etc doing the same. Is it really a big deal to pop on god mode long enough to get past them?
#2 is particularly bad in checkpoint games. I have to go back to a checkpoint thirty fucking minutes back for the twentieth time because the AI ignores the rules (I'm looking at you, GRAW)? Screw that. I'm either gonna (a) god-mode past that one little spot, or (b) get pissed, break the disc, burn the pieces, and bury them ten feet underground in a lead box with a crucifix and garlic on top where that game belongs. The former is much better for my blood pressure.
If you have to win by LUCK, you obviously aren't good enough to win, and you haven't achieved anything in doing so.
And if your e-peen is damaged because someone else noclipped through a bad spot instead of reloading thirty times waiting for the PRNG to be aligned just right, well, my condolences to you.
Games are exactly what they should be: disposable entertainment.