The blog from hell - Latest Comments

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

A.J. Venter — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:44:36 -0000

Still working for me. Think the problem is on your side. Did you try to right-click|save-as ? It may help. What browser are you using ?

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

spiralofhope — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:16:54 -0000

The download isn't working. =(

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

A.J. Venter — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:30:24 -0000

You're welcome, I had to do it for myself anyway, and will need to replicate it tonight when I setup my brand new machine (old one is going to the SO) - so it made sense to build a deb in the first place, and since nobody else had done one for Oneiric, I figured I would.

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

A.J. Venter — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:28:34 -0000

Run that line it in an exterm. From the menu in graphical mode it will be called something like Vistuall C++ Runtime 2008 or so. You can use that method but I haven't done it myself so I can't even tell you the exact name.

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

A.J. Venter — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:27:22 -0000

Sounds like a download problem, other users have installed it.

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

Island Usurper — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:32:25 -0000

Thank you so much!

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

Jimmy — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:30:40 -0000

I see winetricks I don't see vcrun2008. What is that?

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

ryan — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:49:01 -0000

Cannot get your .deb to work - it says file corrupted or no permissions ? I am running mint 12

Re: LinuxMint 12 – Diablo3 Mini-howto (with patched wine package)

Thomas — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:46:50 -0000

Man, i love you :) I dont want do compile it myself and was about installing it on Windows over VirtualBox, now its installing nativ under Linux. Thanks!

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

Anonymous — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:44:09 -0000

The world has been over-populated with humans since Adam and Eve arrived.

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

John — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:22:40 -0000

"The world is grossly over-populated with farm animals as well as humans."

No it isn't. The human over population is a lie only believed my naive people.

Re: How we make our budget work.

Sally-Jane — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:35:39 -0000

Thanks for sharing. I hope we can move over to something like this once we have a grip of things

Re: Why (I think) DDO cannot really compete with WoW.

jgalt — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:17:57 -0000

If you love to raid and grind gear then nothing beats WOW. And for about a year or two I had fun raiding and enjoyed my time in WOW. But then I hit a wall and raiding felt like a job. I had to schedule 3-4 nights a week minimum to raid or be booted from the guild and your performance is critiqued in a raid so you must have the latest, fanciest gear to keep up with the other 3 raiders who can fill your spot so they don't get 10 dps or hps ahead of you. It was fun at first, but eventually it turns into an unending grind to get Tier I, Tier II, Tier III, Tier IV, Tier V, Tier VI, Tier VII, Tier VIII, and so on. Each new release just ads a few more tiers that require endless raid grinding and if you craft or want to supplement your raid gear with PVP gear, rep gear, or crafted gear you also need to grind endless arenas, dailies and grind materials. WOW turns into a 24x7 grind fest. You cannot play WOW successfully as a casual player or you will not see much of the raid content which is the big draw for WOW.

DDO on the other hand is very casual gamer friendly. You can succeed with PUGs more often than not even in raids and easier epics, and the the majority of the guilds are casual and don't require you to show up 4 times a week (or at all) to grind raid instances from 9PM to 2AM like the middle to top guilds in WOW do. In WOW I had to play 40 or more hours a week just to keep up and eventually it just because exhausting and I quit the game. With DDO, I play a few hours a week and I don't feel like I'm losing out on anything. I'm in reasonably good guilds on all the servers and I don't get pressured level within xx weeks to be raid ready or get booted from the guild (like in WOW guilds), nor does anyone bother me if I don't log in for two weeks. DDO is a game you can enjoy at your own pace, WOW is game you must play at your guild's pace or you'll be booted and miss the raid content.

I disagree with the comment that DDO's free to play model rewards people with cash while WOW rewards skillful play. Skillful play produces better results no matter what MMO you're playing. While it's true spending lots of money in DDO could earn you some slight advantage, in WOW what I found was that people with no friends, no family, no job, and no life (none of these things describes me) do the best. If you're willing to grind hours of PVP arenas, dailies, and/or mats a day, you can have much better gear and lots more money than someone who does not have the time or desire to do that. This had nothing to do with skill, but rather being a slave to WOW. Believe me I saw lots of people have that issue and most people I know who quit WOW including myself quit because it takes up all your time and you ignore work, family, and friends because you're too busy grinding in raids, PVP arenas, dailies, and mat gathering to get more gear so you're ready for the next expansion so you can.....you guessed it....grind for more gear.

I like DDO because it doesn't have anywhere near the level of grinding that WOW does and if you chose to play casually and spend nothing in the game you can play for free and be successful. Many people I know do and unlike WOW they typically enjoy the game casually but don't become obsessed with it.

Just my 2 cents from someone who has played both and quit WOW and has no interest in going back, but plays DDO casually a few hours a week and enjoys it.

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

A.J. Venter — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:26:39 -0000

Yes, you're right, I confused her with Dianne Fossey for a moment. Nevertheless her research is (very) dated. The people doing research now knows that chimps hunt - a lot - they have a particular preference for monkey meat, and they are ESPECIALLY fond of the baby monkeys (because their meat is more tender).

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

Joe — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:15:57 -0000

Uh... Jane Goodall's still alive dude.

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

A.J. Venter — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:47:12 -0000

Oh and I suppose you've never actually seen how Chimps kill baby monkeys for food. I have. STFU.

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

A.J. Venter — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:46:05 -0000

Your sources are Jane Goodall ? She died before Bonobo's were even recognized as a different species. While she was a good scientist - her work is - to put it mildly - decades out of date and entirely discredited now.

I said nothing of the ORIGINS of our teeth - I spoke of the NATURE of our teeth - and that IS verifiable scientific fact.

Even then you are wrong - the origins of mammalian teeth are very well known. Mammals unlike any other group of animals have interlocking teeth that are specialized to various jobs. Such teeth have many advantages but come with one major disadvantage: you can't just keep replacing them since they are so specialized and each one is unique. Crocs and sharks and the like - just keep growing teeth for ever since every tooth is the same as the others. So the problem is- mouths get bigger, the teeth that are perfect in a young-un aren't in an adult. So mammals (all mammals) grow two sets, one as we leave the very early stages of childhood to last through until just before puberty - and a second which we keep for the rest of our lives. We know the origins of this since it's clearly visible in the fossil record. More importantly - this created an evolutionary pressure that did not previously exist. What the hell do you feed the babies before that first set of teeth grow in ?
Result: milk glands. We became mammals BECAUSE of our teeth.

Re: The major lies of vegan/vegetarian pseudoscience.

Daniel — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:36:59 -0000

chimpanzees diet consists of 1-4% of meat and is nutritionally insignificant as are the bugs they eat which makes up 4%. Eatting Meat and bugs are political and cultural tools. They do not eat meat for nutritional reasons. Please read the following if you really are as you claim a man of science

A critique of: A hypothesis to Explain the Role of Meat Eating in Human Evolution by Katharine Milton by Jane Goodall. Scientifically credible information on Vegan and Vegetarian dietshttp://www.ecologos.org/i..., Jane, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1986), p. 233Lehninger, Principles of Biochemistry, Worth Pub., (1982), p. 158.Graph showing primate dietshttp://www.ecologos.org/p...

Nobody knows the truth about the origin of our teeth, stop pretending you do, unless you have conducted an extensive study and can bring new evidencve forward on the subject stop presenting opinion as fact.

Re: The libertarians: Part 4 – Supply and Reprimand

Charles — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:19:06 -0000

Impressive. I love two blogs in this country, yours, regarding economics and hismastersvoice.wordpress.com, regarding geopolitics, RSA politics and literature.

Re: The libertarians part 1: Who are the thieves ?

A.J. Venter — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:45:59 -0000

And that vast majority of historical societies where nobody owned the land, but everybody was free to use it's resources didn't ever exist ? The tribes may have warred each other for resources, but they didn't fight amongst themselves for it. The same system can exist today - just think in terms of a much bigger tribe. In fact cooperation exists in nature where-ever a species can survive better by not competing internally. Packs of herbivores are cooperative, and this even happens interspecies. That's why giraffes usually graze with zebras. Zebras have stronger noses, Giraffes can see further - together they are safer than either alone. Each eating what they need of the veldt, none being left out.
As to humans - well we can see what we are evolved to be by looking at our closest relatives. That would be the Bonobo-chimpanzee. They have so much in common with humans it's scary - they are intelligent, self-aware and problem-solving... and they really, really like sex. More interestingly - scientists have nicknamed them "the hippies of the forest" which is a remarkably accurate description of their lifestyle. They share everything, they have no concept of "mine" or "yours" and they are perfectly peaceful among themselves. They really DO prefer to make love, not war.

Even if you ignore all that, you never answered my core point. There are no examples in the world today of property being in the hands of it's rightful owners. If you truly believe that property rights is the basis of a peaceful society and that taking it by force is never acceptable as you claim - then you should be campaigning for the occupation of unused land just as I am - and as I explained in the text - to restore by justice the property that was stolen to those it was stolen from, and you must then support wealth-redistribution to restore the wealth generated from that stolen property to the people it should have belonged to.

PS. There are 3 more posts in this series. Do read them.

Re: The libertarians part 1: Who are the thieves ?

Perry741 — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:35:06 -0000

Like it or not, , from the cellular level, through ‘organisms’
like grubby little political rats and Mafia goons protecting their turf (by
means never fair and always foul) to macroeconomics and geopolitics, life
itself is a competitive process, not a
cooperative one.

Cooperation, which by definition is consensual (in contrast
to compliance, which can be obtained by coercion) only exists where there is
mutual benefit, where the self interest of both parties is served.

When property rights are not respected, there is conflict…when
demented, wild eyed Vikings go on a rampage of rape and pillage, burning and looting
(in service of their self-interest) people become quite upset, particularly the
ones who are emasculated and impaled before having their screaming women
carried off.

It is only when property rights are respected, or at least
when a particular status quo is conceded, and alteration thereof achieved through
mutually agreed trade to the advantage of both parties, can peace prevail.

Force is force, whether an individual acts directly against
others who he reckons hold ‘his’ property, or gets the ‘state’ which holds the
monopoly upon the use of force to act on his behalf against such others is of
little consequence in that it precludes peaceful co existence.

Re: The libertarians part 1: Who are the thieves ?

A.J. Venter — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:07:40 -0000

Well it's a four-part series, succinct as your comment was - it's nice to know somebody read it :P

Re: The libertarians part 1: Who are the thieves ?

Thedobrev — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:10:13 -0000

Interesting.

Re: Why (I think) DDO cannot really compete with WoW.

Tim Madden — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:41:25 -0000

I've played a bit of WoW, DDO, and ROM.

You're right about DDO's lack of plot, but that's ok with me. I click as fast as I can through the dialogs to get to the action.
Wizards are a tough class for new players. They get very powerful around level 6, but until then you need "Masters Touch" and "Mage Armor". Masters Touch makes you proficient with anything in your hands, so use a two handed battle axe. Instead of using game currency to buy potions, buy access to the warforged race. You'll become a self-healing wizard, because arcane magic repairs constructs. A self healing wizard who can make occasionally make himself proficient with melee for a few minutes is pretty sweet.ROM is by far the worst, and you'll need to cough up $300 - $600 to reach end game, so its not really worth talking about.

Re: Blown away by the fans

A.J. Venter — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:22:08 -0000

Thanks for the vote of confidence :D