11 karma · joined March 17, 2011
It's not terribly surprising that they'd have something like that though. Kodak's Rochester plant was basically the chemical version of Hanford Site--lots of government work, little public oversight. My grandfather and several uncles worked there, and all received comprehensive life insurance as a standard benefit.
Inferno IE4 plugin: http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html
Lively Kernel: http://www.lively-kernel.org/
It's also a side-project of Steve Streeting, the founder of OGRE3D: http://www.ogre3d.org/about/team
Case in point: if I'd known there were more startups looking for talent, I probably wouldn't have moved out to the eastern part of the state in 2007. At the time, my options after burnout+dismissal seemed to be 'work for another large company'(which I'm still wary of), 'pursue your own idea on your lonesome'(which I didn't have any of at the time) or 'don't work at all'.
(My best classes at WSU were with Hagemeister, Wang(CS460 FTW), and Biker Bob. Contributing to my slight-insecurity as a dev, I was also part of the Benson class that petitioned to have him removed: for tossing us a description of car/cdr and expecting us to build a complete Lisp in SML)
It's not necessarily an insurmountable gap but it's enough to intimidate most people who aren't already outgoing, or who are accustomed to a friendlier town.
I grew up in Redmond, went to college at WSU, and moved into Seattle in 2002. For the longest time after that, when walking into a bar or show, I had to keep persuading myself that people were not going to point and scream at me like Donald Sutherland in the 70's Body Snatchers movie.
In the 5 years after college that I lived in the city proper, the only tech group I managed to hang around was Seattle.RB, and only a few meeting at that.