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Sci-Fi Media Movies Star Wars Prequels Entertainment

New Lucas Headquarters To Open in San Francisco 271

Posted by timothy from the empire-building dept.
Afroloop writes "This article (with pics) in the SFGate covers the opening of the new Lucas Headquarters in San Francisco's famous Presidio. It will house up to 1,500 employees by next fall. From the article: 'The Presidio will feature 600 miles of fiber-optic cable. 4,000 processors and 150 terabytes of storage -- massive computing power and speed, with the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.'"
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New Lucas Headquarters To Open in San Francisco More

New Lucas Headquarters To Open in San Francisco

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  • How callous and mirror of pics (Score:5, Funny)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @07:58PM (#12561655) Homepage Journal
    Lucasfilm President Micheline Chau says, "We do have to exist after George. He's not going to live forever. The man's in his early 60s."

    Geez! I mean dig a hole and send out the obits already! What's the matter, getting impatient?

    The pics are pretty non-exciting (an aerial shot of the Presidio, wide-angle shot of Presidio, outsdie shot of generic-looking hq bldg, pic of map showing location of Presidio, and a headshot of the man himself), but you can see them here [networkmirror.com] if you want to decide for yourself.

  • That's funny. (Score:4, Funny)

    by xor.pt ( 882444 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @07:59PM (#12561661)
    Presidio means jail in Portuguese(from Brasil).

    • Re:That's funny. (Score:4, Informative)

      by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) * on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:16PM (#12561807) Homepage Journal
      "Presidio" means "military fortification" in Spanish.

      The Presidio used to be a Spanish military base, then a Mexican military base, and then I think it was briefly military base for California when we were briefly a soverign entity, and then finally, it remained an American military base from 1849 until the early 1990s.

      • Re:That's funny. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ortcutt ( 711694 )
        I know that the flag says "California Republic", but there was less than one month between Fremont's declaration of an independent California and Commodore Sloat's capture of Monterey, the capital of Alta California, and his claim of the territory for the US. It's very difficult to say that there was any independent California government in that intervening month or that it was a "California" military base in that intervening month.
      • Later, by the mid-22nd century, it became home to Earth's Starfleet Command, and when the United Federation of Planets was founded, became home to the UFP's Starfleet Command and Starfleet Academy.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • thanks george (Score:5, Funny)

    by misterlump77 ( 794649 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:00PM (#12561670) Homepage
    and it's a half block from my apartment.

    there goes my rent...
    • Lucky you you get to be right next to the magic....Or um.....I mean I think nows the time to start leasing with the option buy. :-)

    • More like... there went your Rent.

      The Presidio borders the San Franciso Marina district, where a condo will set you back a million bucks. And a Studio Aparment rents for $1300-$1600 per/mo.

      Where, pray tell, have you been living in that area that's affordable up to now?

      No, Really. I need to find a new place.

      • Re:thanks george (Score:4, Funny)

        by kesuki ( 321456 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @12:22AM (#12563434) Journal
        No, Really. I need to find a new place.

        If you're looking for living on el-cheapo, outfit a nice, cheap fleet vehicle type van (they usually have a few unfurnished models in the fleet vehicle section that only have the captain's chair for furnishing) get the tinted window option, or just buy some mini-blinds, get a port-a-potty of some type (they sell things just for van owners that will probably work) install a bed, buy an annual membership at the Y (coz that's where you're gonna need to go to shower in the mornings or whenever you need to shower) and then buy/rent some kind of parking space that someone is renting out who dosen't have a clase saying they can kick you out for not leaving your vehicle while it's parked overnights etc.. TCO is probably going to be under $30,000 for 10 years of reliable dual use as house and transportation... the car's alternator can probably be used to keep a spare lead acid battery charged (when you drive) enough to run a low power notebook, or posibly even an imac g5.. you might want to find a shade filled place to park so that you don't die in the summer, and even then it'll still be hot, but you've got that cool ocean breeze, if you can find a shaded parking place near the ocean.

        And if you ever get laid off, you're ready to move anywhere in the us or canada you need to go to to find a job, as long as the town has a Y or similar place whhere members can shower day or night as they please...
        • All sounds very nice, until some bastard steals it. At which point, you've lost not only your means of transportation, but also your house. Bugger.
        • You can also throw footballs just over your camcorder, and dream of getting back to '82.
        • outfit a nice, cheap fleet vehicle type van

          an park it under a bridge, down by the river
        • From what I understand they actually encourage people to park their RV's and camp out overnight. Since most of them are open 24hrs at least you'd have a bathroom indoors. And it'd be easy to find a new one if they kick you out.

          One option other than the Y. Try a state park membership. Usually around $20-30 a year plus you'd have some nice scenery. State parks with camping usually have showers but they probaby wont be open in the winter in most of the country. Maybe then you could find a truck stop for
  • for the first time ever due to the "massive departure."

    Ok, maybe not.
  • 'The Presidio will feature 600 miles of fiber-optic cable. 4,000 processors and 150 terabytes of storage -- massive computing power and speed, with the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.'

    Wow, so for every Jar-Jar rendered, there can be 10 more just like him! Flippancy aside, I do wonder that the ability to make eye-candy that much faster might actually have a negative effect on movie going.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:05PM (#12561716)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Wow, so for every Jar-Jar rendered, there can be 10 more just like him! Flippancy aside, I do wonder that the ability to make eye-candy that much faster might actually have a negative effect on movie going.

      Chee-rist, I hope not. I'm still feeling after-effects from the scripts of Episodes I & II.

    • It will house up to 1,500 employees by next fall.
      150 terabytes of storage

      At first that sounded really impressive. Then I thought, I'm a geek who has two hard drives in my home desktop with a total of 500 GB of storage. Lucas is into storage of huge movie image sequences, and they only have 100 GB/employee of storage. Somehow I'd have thought they'd have more.

      • it will house up to 1,500 employees by next fall. 150 terabytes of storage

        At first that sounded really impressive. Then I thought, I'm a geek who has two hard drives in my home desktop with a total of 500 GB of storage. Lucas is into storage of huge movie image sequences, and they only have 100 GB/employee of storage. Somehow I'd have thought they'd have more.

        The problem is - that's an average. When you figure that 100 accountants will share 50 GB of space, and 100 HR people another 50GB...

        • Still, between my roommate, I, the ailing G3, and the MythTV box in the living room, we have 928GBs in our 2 bedroom apartment. And as soon as I can we'll be above a terabyte, and probably to two terabytes by the end of next year. And we're really poor. A paltry 150 terabytes...pfft! Maybe they'll rethink that.
          But whatever works for them...I guess they aren't storing 400 full TV series or insane amounts of porn.

    • Re:Faster or Better? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @09:29PM (#12562430) Homepage
      Perhaps one day they'll come up with a way to fix one thing that's always bugged me about the Tattooine sequences in old and new SW movies:

      Shadows.

      On a planet with two suns, all shadows cast would look deicdedly different from what we're used to. Going by the two shots that show the suns, they appear to be (impossibly of course) in the area of 10 sun radii apart. This would produce two sharp, light shadows for each object, with a darker patch where both shadows intersect.

      Because they were filmed in mono-sunned Tunisia, it would have been impossible to give the correct effect when filming the OT, and very difficult with the last 3 films. Even with current state-of-the art CG post-processing such a task would be very time-consuming, and would probably involve creating a 3D model of the objects and environment to get the shadow casting looking anywhere near realistic.

      Of course some shots would need to remain unaltered for artistic reasons (for example the shadowed Padme/Anakin hug on the igloo wall in AOTC), but you could use the justification that this was late evening and one of the suns may have already set.

      If done well, this would be one CG revision that I would welcome.

      I can't believe I just typed this.

      • Re:Faster or Better? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @12:11AM (#12563381)
        Going by the two shots that show the suns, they appear to be (impossibly of course) in the area of 10 sun radii apart.

        Some scientists believe there's a third dimension (I know it souds crazy). I think they call it "depf" or something. It's a direction that is not sideways or upwards, but is a direction that is perpendicular to both, if that makes anysense..

        Anyway, the theory goes that two objects that are side by side can actually be very far apart in this third dimension.

    • The Presidio had 10+ terabytes of storage as of 1999 or 2000. It's where the Internet Archive [archive.org] and now-Amazon subsidiary Alexa Internet [alexa.com] started.

      If I remember correctly, around 1999, they had approximately 2B web pages on disk in the most recent snapshot, with the previous two snapshots on disk and another n snapshots on tape.

      --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

  • Pride and Presidio (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:02PM (#12561688)
    Don't be so proud of this technological terror you've constructed... the ability to make two out of your past three movies suck galactic superclusters through buckytubes is insignificant next to the power of the Farce.

  • Leather Pants (Score:3, Insightful)

    by flood6 ( 852877 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:03PM (#12561695) Homepage Journal
    So San Franscisco is going to solidify it's position as a Meca for those "outside the mainstream"?
  • I thought they meant Lucas Electric, that Brit company that built electrical auto parts that crumbled to dust. You know the jokes, why do Brits drink their beer warm? They have Lucus refrigerators, etc, etc.
  • "...150 TB of storage..." ...don't put me in charge of backups

  • Isn't it funny how . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dgrgich ( 179442 ) <drew@NOsPaM.grgich.org> on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:12PM (#12561776)
    . . . a terabyte just isn't as impressive as it used to be? After all, it is possible for a relatively green computer tech to go down to Best Buy and slap three 400MB drives into her rig (ahem...) and have a terabyte ready for whatever goodness she chooses to place there.

    I know, I know, in three months, this will be quaint but it used to be - not so long ago - that a terabyte was this massive hill on the horizon. Now - well, not so much.
  • the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.

    Which means that, instead of waiting 26 years between trilogies like last time, they'll have Episode VII out 2.6 years from now instead!

  • I was quite baffled there for a minute.

    Over here in blighty, you see, "Lucas" is the name of a car part manufacturer (now part of TR automotive - the people who made the wheels for the model T interestingly enough), and while it is important to be able to buy a spare headlamp for your car, it isn't news for nerds.

    {Don't mind me folks, I'm just grumpy because I had a submission rejected on the grounds that "someone posted the same story with worse links after you did, so we ran with that one"}
    • "Lucas" is the name of a car part manufacturer

      Ah, yes, "Lucas, the Prince of Darkness". Lucas Electric was notorious for their, well, dim electrical automotive products. Much of the bad reputation and subsequent decline of the British automotive industry resulted from the low quality of Lucas components.

      Somehow, Lucas never figured out that they were in a damp country and needed to protect against corrosion. They also stopped upgrading their technology some time in the 1950s.

  • I wonder what happens to it?

    (Especially when he dies).

    Been there once. It was... quite a thing to see...
  • It's true!

    In fact, Lucasfilm's HQs will someday become the Academy's freshmen dorms.

  • Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by K8Fan ( 37875 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:29PM (#12561917) Journal

    I thought the Presidio was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, like the Internet Archive.

    • The presidio was a military housing base and is now half residential/half military housing and commercial property. I think there are a few non-profits there, but there's a lot of little tech/media places too.

      On a side note, I read they buried a lot of toxic chemicals [cpeo.org] under the presidio and a bunch of people may have contracted cancer from living there.

      Way to go Military!

    • Presidio is required to be self-supporting (Score:4, Informative)

      by aaronrp ( 773980 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @09:57PM (#12562635) Homepage Journal

      From http://www.nps.gov/prsf/ [nps.gov]

      On October 1, 1994, the Presidio became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Since 1998, the Presidio has been jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Presidio Trust. The Presidio Trust is a special public-private governmental agency tasked with managing most of the buildings of the Presidio and making the park financially self-sufficient by 2013.

      Certain areas are rented to non-profit groups, and much is set aside for public space, but development in the Presidio is required for it to pay for itself. It is the only National Park Service unit expected to do so.

      The Presidio Trust site is here. [presidio.gov]

    • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by NutscrapeSucks ( 446616 )
      Short answer: The Republican Congress didn't like the idea of creating a National Park in a strong Democratic constituency. So the park has to perma-lease public recreational land to fatcats like Lucas in order to cover the budget. Then Lucas makes movies comparing republican governance to the "rise of the Sith", so it all works out karmically.

  • Mixing SciFi -- The Presido is Home of Star Fleet (Score:5, Funny)

    by HighOrbit ( 631451 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:30PM (#12561935)
    Noooooooo! Not even the "Temporal Cold War"(R)(TM)(C) can explain this.

    The Presido is the home of StarFleet Command. Not the seat of the Galactic Empire.

    Somebody call for a re-write!

  • Cool. Yet, the future is in Games/VR. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:31PM (#12561939)
    This is - of course - tres cool. I envy Lucas and his minions who are going to work there. I'd like to work in such a facility. Being a 3D Animator is hard work but I figure it would be very rewarding. Imagine something like "Yeah, I did the Shading on the Podrace" or "Yepp, T-Rex. He's mine." - Neat.

    However, I think this is more of Lucas fullfilling his dreamstudio than something extremely future focused.
    Movies and their making as we know it are about to go through radical changes. I even figure Lucas knows this, since he's actually partly lead the way.
    Global viewing habbits and a big shift in the classical work and entertainment preferences ("work up the sweat at day, zero activity passive entertainment at night") will have todays movies decline in importance.
    I actually expect Video Gaming (in it's broadest sense) to outrun moviemaking within an decade or two.

    Just think of an ultra high resolution, lightweight tablet, wireless broadband everywhere and the promise of constant revenue streams for MMORPG providers. On the tram? Log in and re-outfit your character. In the car? Dial into the Chatroom and check with the Clan how things are going. That's not far away at all.
    A game like World of Warcraft, Phantasy Star or Ragnarok is just to complicated for Grandma nowadays, because the AI avatars leading you on a tour through the virtual world aren't there yet. But they will come.
    • "However, I think this is more of Lucas fullfilling his dreamstudio than something extremely future focused."

      Not necessarily true. While what you state here has parts of truth in it, this facility is in fact top notch. I worked a great deal on this facility and have seen that it has a lot of features that will allow it to last and be updated for a long time in a very efficient way. I cannot give away a lot of detail, but the following statements may (or may not) be entirely true about this facility:

      - mult

  • Hrm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digitalsushi ( 137809 ) <slashdot@digitalsushi.com> on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @08:33PM (#12561963) Journal
    I have 1.1 terrabytes in my computer, it's worth about 400 bucks. The next number that'll get my jaw to drop is seeing someone with a petabyte kicking around.
  • Somehow, I had hoped that the Presidio would be home to something with a bit more class and style than Lucas and his company. It's just such a beautiful and unique spot.

    • Re:too bad (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mr.dreadful ( 758768 )
      Like the Marriott that competed for building there? Regardless of whether or not you like Star Wars, George has a real sense of architecture. The new buildings are beautiful, and match the 100+ year old facility perfectly. And yet they are totally state of the art, and have many green features. It could have been much worse.
  • Does anyone have links to articles about the technology infrastructure behind the Force? I'm looking for something describing the server room side of the operation.

  • not even tops on the Presidio ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by akb ( 39826 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @09:18PM (#12562343)
    ... for storage. That honor goes to the Internet Archive [archive.org] with over 500TB [archive.org].

  • We are moving (Score:5, Funny)

    by OneArmedMan ( 606657 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @09:21PM (#12562363)
    To the Precedio .....

    Employee : But i dont wanna..

    GL : Search your feelings , you know this to be true.

    E: No thats not true, thats impossable!!!!

    GL : It is your ..... *Destiny*
    • As many as 1,300 to 1,500 Lucas employees will, by next fall, be working in buildings made to look like they've been part of the centuries-old Presidio all along.

      oh great, even more CGI retconning

      quit it georgie

      Suchetha
  • Yeah, by that time we'll all have this kind of comupting power on our wrist watches. pshaw.

  • I got to go there (Score:2, Interesting)

    by KeithGap ( 808218 )
    It's a beautiful campus. Wish I could work there. There's pictures on my web site. Eek...I'm about to get slashdotted...

    Letterman Digital Arts Center [gappage.com]

    • Re:I got to go there (Score:2, Informative)

      by peteMG ( 87639 )
      You want to work there .. it's not impossible! I saw an image in a prior article a few weeks back which detailed the uses for each building in the project. About one and a half of them - a whole heck of a lot of space - were reserved for leasing to third parties, somewhat like other office co-ops in SF.

      In this SFGate image [sfgate.com], it's the rightmost building and half of the one next to it that were slated for subleasing. So, get yourself into a little company and move the offices there!

      Ah, here we go. Various [google.com]
  • ...and lot's of air conditioning.

  • A give away of public resources? (Score:4, Informative)

    by doom ( 14564 ) <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @10:07PM (#12562722) Homepage Journal
    Not everyone is happy about Lucasfilm moving to the Presido. Here's a sample: from the San Francisco Bay Guardian [sfbg.com]
    • Wait a minute, the Presidio was paid for with tax payers dollars, and closed eventually (doing not much more than taking up prime real estate). So Lucas, a private citizen, purchases it.

      Meanwhile, there's oodles of cold war era nuclear silos that were paid for with tax payers dollars, which private citizens can purchase (for a song considering).

      Slashdot readers are fine with the latter, so what exactly is so wrong with the former? Is it because Lucas is rich? Hell, I bet the average Slashdotter is far mor
      • You don't appear to know much about what you're talking about, but it's like this: you've got this public property, which has for all intents and purposes become a public park -- most of us urban dwellers like the idea of public parks, something libertarians really need to come to grips with. But there's some office space in this particular park, because it's a former military base... instead of, say putting it up for auction, or going into the landlord biz and renting it at market rate, they cut a deal wi
  • I sure hope it's the Sith. I would hate for Lucas to have a headquaters in a building that was built using non-absolute measurements.

  • CONSUME (Score:2, Funny)

    by Cryofan ( 194126 )
    CONSUME [contentvulture.com]

  • Sounds like a Star Wars character. (Score:3, Funny)

    by isny ( 681711 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @10:28PM (#12562862) Homepage
    Meet my new apprentice...Darth Presidious.
    And my backup apprentice, Darth Congeniality.

  • 10x faster (Score:2, Insightful)

    by locnar42 ( 591631 )
    They have 1500 employees and 4000 processors and they claim it'll be a 10x speed increase? So, they have ~400 processors right now? I'll go on a limb and say that the processors are faster in the new computers, so it's more likely ~800 processors. At best, every other employee has a computer?

    Maybe that 4000 processors is just a render farm or something? Overall it's not that impressive, but if all those stats are just a render farm then it's not too bad.

    • They actually mean 4,000 processors, rederfarm + workstations.

      The 10x increase is just a number. By that they mean not only number of processors, but their speed and speed of their network and storage.
  • Wow, now I can complain locally when my electrical system in my Triumph fails. Now I don't have to go to England. Lucas the King of Darkness.

    Oh you mean there is another Lucas?

  • New Lucas Headquarters (Score:4, Informative)

    by Knightcrawler ( 773405 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2005 @11:32PM (#12563205)
    Lucas bid on putting something on the Presidio as a lark and was surprised when he won. The new headquarters combines all of Lucas's companies into I place; Lucas Arts, Lucasfilm, THX, ILM, Lucas Merchandising. Before this alot of it was at Skywalker Ranch and the rest scattered throughout California. He thought that since the video game company and the movie company were often working in much the same thing that they should work together more. Also, no more episodes even after he dies. Lucas has specifically made it so that no one can use the Star Wars property after he dies.

  • The site... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Palal ( 836081 )
    The site is quite nice. I remember it being built when I worked at the Presidio Trust one summer. I went by a few weeks ago and it looks like they're ready to open it. It fits in quite well and looks much better than that old and ugly hospital building that once stood there. Hopefully they'll extend trolley buses into the park now that there'll be demand for them. Also, hopefully Lucas will provide some sort of a visitor center to attract people, considering the fact the Palace of Fine Arts, Exploratorium a
  • 4,000 processors and 150 terabytes of storage -- massive computing power and speed, with the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.

    Cue the users to increase the workload by 20 times.
  • I thought this was going to be full of British refrigerator jokes...

    http://www.kitcar.com/articles-kitcar/humordept/lu cas-prince.html [kitcar.com]
  • About 8 months ago I was offered an a job at ILM. Granted this was an entry level full time job with ILM. But here is the catch. They wanted me to work for $38k and live in SF. Isn't this BELOW the povery line in SF? Needless to say, I didn't take the job. The future of the job was essentially 5+ years, you may move up and become a TD, and we may pay as much as 65-75k for a TD. So, the option was: Move to SF and make MUCH less that I currently make in my dream job, live about 1.5 hours away from wor

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