What you ask for is not information easily known to the public, or even to someone who works in the industry (such as myself). But from my educated guess/estimates, the actual factory building is probably a few $100M. It's the equipment that is expensive. Many modern fabs have "billion dollar aisles", literally aisles of equipment that sum to >$1B and more than the factory itself. The most expensive tools are the lithography scanners; a single immersion scanner costs something like $30-$70M, and EUV scanners can be in the $200M+ range, and you need a bunch of these to support a manufacturing line. The complexity and precision of these scanners are mind-boggling, literally some of the most advanced tech in the world; only one company (ASML) makes it and they charge a pretty penny for it. And then add to that are all the other tools needed to run a fab, which all typically cost >$1M a piece. There probably >30 different types of tools, from various deposition tools, many flavors of etch tools, metrology tools, even washing machines and other utility tools for wafers. There also are fleets of these tools too, not just one or two in the factory.

Also, funny you bring up concrete, I hear that they use an absurd amount of it just for the foundation for seismic stability.

I'm not optimistic about VR and, considered Apple's (seemingly) late entry, I suspect aren't either. If I had to guess, they need tech/patents/engineers for AR or they just want to make sure they have developed this VR thing and have the patents in hand in case it, by some miracle, takes off.

I think VR will take off when it works without strapping something on your face. Eventually it will get to the point where it directly connects to our neural networks and can simulate sensations (as it does in pretty much any sci-fi fiction since Neuromancer.

The best way of thinking about VR is this: When it can improve pornography, then it will take off. As of now, I can't imagine that watching porn on VR provides any more stimulation than watching porn on conventional screen. There's some novelty with the looking around bit, but the immersion is still visually focused. When watching something on a regular monitor we allow ourselves to fall into the illusion of a 3D space—VR just amplifies the illusion. VR needs to do more to be worth the inconvenience of strapping something on your face.

It's not just that, it's also good regulations (fairness on no-competes, for example) and funding, funding which is there because top colleges (like Stanford) are there. If you are a Stanford CS grad, it's automatic funding for any idea you have (because so many good ideas have come from there).

Also, being in Silicon Valley isn't necessarily good enough: it's common for companies to pay extra to be on Sand Hill Road (right next door to the source of funding) or next to the company they want to buy them.

So there are good reasons besides just networking, although that matters too.

We always hear about these amazing improvements in batteries, yet it seems like we never see them...

It makes a lot of sense to see this happen in a car first - there's a lot more cost per battery already, so dropping new technologies on an improved version is easier to deliver than small consumer batteries.

Not to mention it's more directly replacableby Tesla if some longer term problems comes to light, where you have to have years of testing before you can replace something like a AA battery with totally new and unproven chemistry.

Tesla's research and willingness to expand use of car batteries has always been why fundamentally I think Tesla is just at the start of a massive rise...

With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing people worldwide into various degrees of separation, from tape measure distancing to more extreme forms of forced or voluntary quarantine, getting into virtual reality right now is no-brainer for a company that intends to ride out the current economic slump. If there's a time that future tech historians could point to as the Event that finally brought VR or augmented reality (or their supercategory of XR or extended reality) to the mainstream, the 2020 pandemic is going to be it. If the pandemic doesn't bring about the flowering of VR, then I highly doubt VR is ever going to be a thing.

Eh, the demo seems to be a bit more tame. It guesses short trivial logic and nothing more. That's the way it goes with tech press releases, whoever exaggerates their approach to the most unbelievable levels without *quite* lying (and sometimes lying) wins.

The majority of the Senate wanted an amendment protecting web browsing history from warrantless searches. But it failed with just 59 yes votes. It needed 60 yes votes to move from the debate phase to the approval phase. The voting wasn't particularly partisan either. 24 Republicans and 35 Democrats (and Independent) voted in favor of the amendment.

Four senators missed the vote - Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). The amendment would've passed the vote and (since it had majority support) become a part of the bill if any one of them had bothered to vote yes.

Because the Bay Area has the most tech people than anywhere else on the planet. You don't startup a tech company in Oklahoma.

Why do you think no one does that?

I think you and I agree about the facts of what was presented. Where we differ is in how we interpret those facts.

Agreed, and I think this speaks to a misunderstanding between us. When I said "the most revolutionary things they were talking about were workflow improvements", I was getting at the idea that they removed the costly grunt work that has been necessary until to now to implement these technologies, thus putting them within reach of all developers. I was not suggesting the "workflow improvements" weren't backed by supporting improvements to runtime technology, nor was I suggesting they necessarily lived prior to runtime. "Workflow improvements" might be a poor choice of words on my part, since I was really talking about anything that made producing a game simpler, so if the term is muddying the waters, I'm fine calling it something else.

Agreed, but that's an incremental improvement over what we've had for decades. LOD techniques have been in use since at least as far back as the PS1. Spyro the Dragon was an early example of LOD in video games, for instance. Even continuous LOD like what they demonstrated here has been well understood and put into use for decades with things like progressive meshes.

On the other hand, the thing that is revolutionary is how any developer can now use that technology with very little work. That's the game changer. Bringing that to market obviously required some significant technology upgrades, which is no small feat, but it's also something that's already been available to anyone...with deep pockets and sufficient technical expertise. The revolution is in making it available to everyone, no strings attached.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, but that's table stakes for a new engine. I'm glad they did it, of course, and I don't want to diminish the work that went into it, but it's an expected evolutionary improvement, not a revolutionary leap forward.

The whole point of a demo is to show how high the ceiling goes, so I'd certainly hope it pushed the ceiling up a bit! But that doesn't mean that it did so to a significant degree, whereas it did significantly raise the floor. High framerates? High polygon counts? CLOD techniques? Global illumination? You can find any of those technologies being used in AAA titles available today, and by the time UE5 debuts (which is presumably sometime after developers get access to it in early 2021), you may even see games available on the market that surpass what we saw in the demo. But do you know where you don't tend to find those technologies? In games outside the AAA sphere. Bringing those technologies to the 99% of developers that couldn't afford them before raises the floor, and it does so in a major way, hence why I asserted that they raised the floor more than the ceiling.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're basically saying that implementing raytracing is easy (as with pretty much every other Computer Science student ever, I too built a ray tracer in a single sitting a few decades ago, so I would agree) and they already have to deal with the annoyance of producing lightmaps, so adding raytracing for free doesn't really do much to raise the floor because developers who wanted to do so could already add raytracing. Is that a fair restatement of your point?

If so, I get where you're coming from and it's a fair point, but I'll mention these two things:
A) Lightmaps aren't as onerous to produce as you might think. There are build-time raytracers and other tools that can automate the process of producing most of them. But really, their cost doesn't matter much because...
B) Lightmaps will remain necessary for the next few years on hardware where raytracing isn't possible (i.e. the bulk of the market), so producing them is a necessary part of the cost of doing business. As such, companies both big and small will bite that bullet. In contrast, raytracing is a nice-to-have that isn't widely supported, so any cost above zero is more than most small companies will be willing to pay. Their time would almost certainly be better spent doing other things.

Years ago the place I worked was going to move our server farms to California because they had more engineers. Really they didn’t, we have one of the highest concentration of engineers outside of Silicon Valley, you know, one of two places that developed the IC, but whatever. What made it stupid was this was the time when all the greedy idiot in NY and California had been taken in by Enron, and so the electricity grid had become unstable.

Very often I location is not a business decision. Very often it is a prestige or personal desire, like Amazon moving to NY. Or all the tech companies In a Texas setting up in Austin where everything is twice the cost, when all the tech development in the state has been traditionally been done between Houston and Dallas.

Here's a fun tip for you tech company owners out there. Most of your services are digital or made in China. You can operate from anywhere. Don't pick the state with the highest taxes, highest cost of living, and most ridiculous laws. There is zero reason to open any kind of business in California right now past "other people do it and we want to be near them to seem cool."

Because having extra capacity on grid is free

Just like drilling, producing, transporting natural gas is free along with the plants that burn it with no environmental costs whatsoever? Didn't take much to get you from making an argument to derp derp derpity derp.

But at the end of the day, the canards thrown at wind and solar can easily be addressed with tech that has long been used for coal and nuclear. Sorry.

Is there much hydro capacity left to be tapped?

I've heard of some small systems being looked at in small fast waterways, but hydro being an old tech has likely been pretty well tapped out I'd think.

I am saying that, I am saying that these big tech companies could just threaten to pull out of France, and France may well just blink.

While I would agree that nuclear power has no CO2 / greenhouse gas emissions, it has a different kind of "emissions."

You know what I'm talking about. Nuclear waste.

While CO2 does get broken down (eventually, assuming we don't overwhelm our mechanism for same), nuclear waste ... isn't getting broken down. It's a much smaller quantity (granted) but it's toxic for MILLENNIA (plural). The United States hasn't had a significant pale-face population for a millennium (singular).

Until such time as we come up with nuclear energy tech which makes it practical to reprocess the fuel, such that the stuff which is toxic for millennia gets "burned" in the process and the toxicity and toxic lifetimes are reduced ... nuclear power is worse than coal.

I'm not saying it will always be so. Back in the Clinton administration, they were playing with a design known as the Integral Fast Reactor. The waste from it could be reprocessed, turning the still-fissile parts of the waste into more fuel and reducing the toxic lifetime of the stuff they couldn't use. It was pointedly designed such that, if there was a loss of coolant, the structures expanded from the heat, pulling the fissile materials out of "critical" status and the reactor shut down. So, it is possible to "do nuclear right" and come up with something which would make a useful contribution.

Keep in mind that, if a coal-burning powerplant catches fire or explodes, the pollution is terrible but it doesn't take millennia for the pollutants to work out of the environment. As Chernobyl and Fukushima have pointed out, the pollution IS terrible and it lasts for a large chunk of "forever." Consider also that, so long as costs and profit motive are involved, corners WILL be cut, whether you're dealing with Capitalism (Fukushima), Communism (Chernobyl) or something else.

In light of that last fact, I'm not entirely certain that mankind will ever "do nuclear right."

This already happened, the insourcing started with Trump's tariffs and offshoring restrictions and has been going strong to move jobs back to the US over the last several years, especially within the tech sector. Just keeping the policies we have now is enough to make it a non-issue (incidentally, why all the major tech leaders hate him so much.)

Nah, doesn't work that way. They base salaries on cost of living where they are located, and remote workers don't result in a productivity hit if someone is self-motivated. More than that though, taking things from people is really hard. In the extremes of the bay area you might end up seeing mass replacements of staff as the companies hire remote workers bidding low, driving down the prices, but that will balance out for an overall higher pay for the overall tech sector and the cost of living for the people who hang on to silicon valley jobs will generally work to keep the prices up.

Yeah, I think after this blows over, there may be some significant employee push-back to coming back in to the office. Hard to know how it plays out after that ... do tech workers go to Hawaii for the pretty, to Harlingen for the cost of living. Will there be big enough enclaves of the nouveau privileged to justify fancy restaurants' springing up nearby, or is it one-to-a-ranch? Gated island communities with private security? Just how balkanized will we be? And how will we properly milk the techies of their wealth without Si-valley rents and food delivery from "L'Idiot" restaurant?

And so Silicon Valley advances further toward its inevitable fate.

It is a self-perpetuating nexus; The best tech employees move there because that's where the best business are and the best tech businesses are founded there because that's where the best employees are. It's also a system of informal social and professional networks, an established business culture. You need someone for that? Well, people there know people, they know who's good and who to trust and how to get them. The founders at the place I am working now pulled in some of the best people they knew from places they had worked previously in Silicon Valley.

You know what else was a wealthy self-perpetuating engineering business nexus? Detroit. When mechanical systems dominated engineering, Detroit was a golden global engineering capitol. That is is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland should serve as a warning to Silicon Valley.

Self-perpetuating feedback and network effects for business are large. They overwhelm the hostile business climate in California, the extremely high cost of housing and threats to personal safety and security posed by the advancing anarcho-tyranny state.

The crucial thing to realize is that Silicon Valley remains because of network effects and decay of network effects is non-linear. It will seem like one day, high-tech in California just got up and walked away. It will be abrupt, not gradual, not only because of accelerating decay of network effects, but also because the economics of remaining hit a tipping point where the weighted sum of costs and benefits of doing business outside of California is a better proposition than starting or remaining in the state. It is not a straight line, it is a step function. Though ok, a bit rounded at the corner because the economic impacts are somewhat different for each enterprise.

What does this have to do with tech workers escaping Silicon Valley's sky-high rents by telecommuting after Covid-19? If you are already telecommuting to Silicon Valley then you can just as well telecommute to anywhere else in the United States. In fact, this might be end of any geographical business nexuses and the start of a purely virtual business nexus geographically distributed. Or maybe they will move to Austin.

For Tech workers the ability to now work remotely is a Godsend for some. Traditionally we have been told that in order to work for the big companies we have to live in the big cities. Big companies have traditionally built their headquarters in big cities in order to access a larger skilled labor pool.

With Covid-19 and work from home/remote work rules all of that has gotten turned on its head. If you are working from home there is no need to live in a big city, unless you desire the big city amenities. The only real requirement is a fast and stable internet connection. Beyond that it comes down to personal preference. Some people desire the convenience, variety and energy of a big city. Others might prefer a quieter lifestyle with less expensive housing, more room and less crime.

Many rural areas don't have great options for fast internet but with Amazon/Space-X satellites that will change. At that point it really does become a viable choice. I just wonder what these companies are going to do with these half empty buildings.

Oh how I yearn for the days when /. wasn't pushing right-wing rubbish and just let the tech talk.

That hasn't been true since the first xbox. For the past 15 years consoles have very much been "current gen" tech, just highly customised and built down to a price. Going forward is not going to change much. As I said the numbers look impressive for something that hasn't launched, but then we're expecting another generation of graphics card announcements as well as another CPU generation to be released before these consoles hit the market. This is really no different to the state of the Xbox 360 or PS3 a year before they both launched.

You got that precisely backwards. Console technology gets driven by what happens on PC, and engine tech is driven by PC hardware capabilities and then filtered down to consoles. This demo here is no different and the new features in the Unreal Engine which have been displayed here boil down to:
a) things that are capable without special purpose hardware but rather very powerful hardware on PCs already.
b) things that require special purpose hardware which PCs already have but the PS5 and Xbox Series X are only just getting (namely Raytracing).

This demo was run with the target of a PS5, but the reality is development of Nanite and Lumen started in 2017, long before any details of future consoles were even known. Even the dynamic lighting they are showing off is not so impressive considering that was capable with UE4 providing you had the right PC hardware of course, and those features were added to UE4 because of the PC, not because the Xbox One suddenly got any better since its release in 2013.

Running a VM is a pain in the ass for non-techies. It's one thing to ask your sysadmins to perform functions on a VM. It's quite another to have non-tech staffers go "Look, you'll just have to fire up a VM and run it on an old OS there".

Basically, companies with legacy 16 bit software are going to be forced to find a replacement. I myself run some old 16 bit software in a VM environment (Thanks, VirtualBox!), but that's as a hobbyist. Microsoft (and to an extent, Intel as well) is forcing the hand of business here. Maybe if there were new-build X86 chips being made, Microsoft would have to think twice. But there aren't, at least not for desktop/laptop machines.

You watched a different demo than we did. The demo was showing changes dynamically occurring in the game, not simply optimising the workflow of some developer pre-compile time decision. The demo also specifically pointed out the ability to render shittonnes more polygons in real time than in the past while providing dynamic GI to them as well. They specifically pointed out that level of detail was being rendered on the screen in realtime, not that it was some optimisation workflow.

And that's a strange comment given the high ceiling the tech demo displays over any other game on the market regardless of studio size.

Raytracing can already be delivered to the masses. The implementation of it is trivial to the point of modders simply adding it to classical open source games. Remember "it just works". The problem is the lack of ray tracing hardware means that raytracing becomes an optional extra over standard lighting so you're still reliant on developers creating proper light maps for any game that is intended to look somewhat decent.

Even if you didn't need to come in, some of the amenities that many California based hi tech companies offer would seem to be compelling to stay close at hand...

But if you worked for somewhere that decided to eliminate many amenities, and you could work from home full time - there's no way you could justify paying $1-$2k more a month in rent just to be near an office you never see.

Corporations pay no taxes but they get bailed out with wild abandon every time they manage to make bad investments and get hosed during an economic downturn. US corporations just got bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. If the French are going to make the corpocrats bleed a bit of money in the form of taxes I won't be crying any rivers over it. Here's a list of corps that paid $0.00 in US federal income tax in 2018 according to tax filings provided by the SEC:

Activision Blizzard
2018 US income: $447 million
Federal income tax after rebates: -$228 million
Effective federal income tax rate: -51%

Amazon
2018 US income: $10.8 billion
Federal tax after rebates: -$129 million
Effective tax rate: -1%

Delta Airlines
2018 US income: $5 billion
Federal tax after rebates: -$187 million
Effective tax rate: -4%

General Motors
2018 US income: $4.32 billion
Federal tax after rebates: -$104 million
Effective tax rate: -2%

Goodyear
2018 US income: $440 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$15 million
Effective tax rate: -3%

IBM
2018 US income: $500 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$342 million
Effective tax rate: -68%

JetBlue
2018 US income: $219 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$60 million
Effective tax rate: -27%

Netflix
2018 US income: $856 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$22 million
Effective tax rate: -3%

Pitney Bowes
2018 US income: $125 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$50 million
Effective tax rate: -40%

Tech Data
2018 US income: $210 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$10 million
Effective tax rate: -5%
.

Likewise, the model in this demo looks weird, not because they failed at a technological level, but rather because they wanted to put the focus on other aspects of the demo.

The tech demos are probably cross-platform, so there's a good chance that the character is exaggerated so that it's easier to visually identify on phone-sized screensâ" Much like the way websites adapted gigantic font sizes so their designs work on screens large and small. A lot of video game design is about artistically solving problems like drawing the player's focus and making things easy to visually read.

If that's what you got out that, I can't help you much.

The argument I made, is that Epic isn't serious about this. They're just throwing a grenade into the market. That people who bought into Epic will end up with a scattering of games that they can't port anywhere else on a platform that gets zero attention.
And *that* is not good for the poor assholes who bought into their gambit.

I'm not defending Steam, nor did I *ever*.
I'm criticizing the apparent intentions of Epic.

This is asinine thinking right here.
If you can't find a list of ways to combat a monopoly that aren't actually inherently better for *anyone*, then you're just not using that brain of yours- and I know you're not stupid.

To quote Swiney himself:

He acts like he's in this to make an alternative to Steam- but he isn't. He's just out to attack Steam. He's got a fucking grudge. He's another dipshit tech CEO with a cock size problem. His own store doesn't even offer the things he demands of Steam.
So ya, I will continue to back the devil I know, who at least tries to make their software not fucking suck.
As for getting screwed on CS- I did too. It sucked. I hear you. Valve's monopoly sucks balls. Swiney's tantrum sucks more.

Just triggered a supply chain emergency measure in China. China is just too large for China not to have skin in the game. So they will now make everything from the ground up, and USA will get nothing. And China can do this because there is no specific identified claim. Huawei has NOT released open source and open hardware firmware yet, because Google Android blackballs any manufactuerer that does. If one lost market share that quick, I would spin off a new brand, selling the tech to defray trade restriction costs.India or Israel would be good choices. Trump bans Israeili made phones would be a headline maker.