Wine is capable of translating DirectX to OpenGL in realtime, which is how you're able to play that in Linux.
You (and our omniscient mods) seem to have grossly misinterpreted my statement. I am well-aware of how Wine works.
Back when HL2 was released, Wine had horrid/non-existent support for Direct3D 8. So the two options to play HL2 via Wine was either play it in Dx7 mode (-dxlevel 70), or GL mode (-gl). I played it in GL mode since dxlevel 70 caused a crasher in Wine.
The source leak for HL2 also had a GL renderer in it, so they probably had it from the very beginning. However, it seems that Valve has since removed that command line option, since I can no longer find any references to it (only hints in old google caches of pages).
Human water demand per capita is 200-300 liters per day. You need water for more than just drinking.
You must be thinking "That's still pretty cheap". And you're absolutely right. Except, people don't want to pay even that. If they were willing, we'd just recycle waste-water, reducing our water consumption drastically. It only costs $0.2/m^3 to do so.
But we don't. Partly because idiots go "eewww" when you tell them what is intended, but mostly because they don't want to pay the extra "Water tax" which will result.
PS: I meant m^3 in the original comment, and I used unicode for that, but slashdot's comment system ate that up nicely
De-salination is also quite costly. It costs around $0.5/m to de-salinate in Israel, Saudi Arabia etc. On the other hand, as I learnt (and calculated) in my water treatment course last year, fresh water treatment costs Rs.~5/m which is around $0.1/m.
So, it currently costs 3-5 times as much to de-salinate than to just treat underground/river water for human consumption. Of course, it'll get cheaper as the demand increases, but that will take time.
You can easily test it yourself. Theora and x264 binaries are easy to find if you just google them.
I was talking about VP8 vs H.264. The technical limitations of Theora are moot if VP8 is released and turns out to be better than (or equivalent to) h.264. Also, you misrepresented my position and ignored 2/3rds of my post. In total you did a classical strawman attack on my reply.
To be honest, I hate Theora because it is a shitty video codec (in comparison to h.264). My entire post was about making it better or finding a replacement + making it wide-spread before 2016
This would be the same disaster that only last year people said was inevitable in 2011. Given the MPEG-LAs history it's more likely that nothing will change in 2016.
Don't forget that the last h.264 codec expires in 2028, and there will probably be MPEG-5 and MPEG-6 to counter too. I don't know about you, but I'm not comfortable being held hostage by a consortium of corporations.
I think this is the best time for Google/Mozilla/Opera/etc to fund work on VP8 or Theora-based video codecs (which don't infringe on MPEG-LA's patents) so we can be rid of all this software-patent-sponsored monopoly nonsense.
In other words, the amount of reading between the lines and such required to reach your interpretation is rather excessive.
Things read the same with and without emphasis.
For example, what difference does it make that VP8 is going to be Open Source? And how does VP8 threaten Apple in the first place? If it becomes popular, and if it's superior to H.264, Apple will license it (and if it's fully Open Source in the way people are thinking, Apple won't even *have* to license it).
Who said anything about Apple being threatened? It's the MPEG-LA and their revenue stream that is being threatened; and probably them who are assembling the patent pool. Or are trying to see which of the patents apply to VP8 and Theora
Oh, btw Apple is a part of MPEG-LA as a licensor of patents(they hold one patent) so I guess part of their revenue is threatened too.
It does not take any stretch of imagination at all to see why MPEG-LA would want to try and prevent any MPEG-LA-patent-free video codecs from being released for royalty-free use. The fight is not for a wide-spread free video codec right now. The fight is for 2016.
Apple's objections to Theora aren't strictly financial (outside of the uncertainty of the codec's legal status),
Financial objections? What, the price is too low?
they're practical. In terms of quality, level of adoption and hardware support (specifically as it affects battery and heat)
I wonder how valid that objection is... It turns out that most of the savings are done by using the generic DSP hardware available. So VP8 would also benefit in the same way.
Theora is vastly inferior to H.264.
"Vastly"? How can you just make a sweeping claim like that without anything to back it up? I would say MPEG-2 is vastly inferior to MPEG-4; but Theora is somewhere in the middle. On the other hand, VP8 is supposed to be better than h.264. But I won't pass that judgment until I can see for myself.
The only real advantage of Theora is that it's (presently) free and open.
And that isn't enough? Of course, we still have till 2016 to avert this disaster.
All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now
(emphasis mine)
Google recently acquired On2 and plans to Open Source the VP8 codec.
What they call "layers" (which is what they wrote for this hardware acceleration) does support OpenGL as well as DirectX.
They've explained (sorry, can't find the link) that the Intel drivers for a lot of cards don't ship OpenGL 2.0 drivers. So they need to use DirectX for Windows. They also explained that they're using Direct2D for the layers backend, which needs DirectX 10.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
