jmervin
While there has long been a surprisingly sizable population of engineering professionals living in and working OUT of the area, over the last few years an enthusiastic startup business culture has emerged.
There are multiple incubator / co-working facilities, a convenient airport, beautiful environment and as you note, a favorable tax structure.
Tesla, along with the gaming and defense industries, should really be just anchor businesses in a much deeper technology ecosystem. Reno very much has this potential.
As you say, a real sleeper.
[edit: mobile-typo]
The SUN workstation-wielding guy in the lab next door to me got hit by this, though we were unscathed. Periodically you could hear him yelling through the wall.
Amusingly (in hindsight), I had recently cleaned up a bunch of virus-choked PCs in some student labs and because of this fell under departmental suspicion (very briefly) of having something to do with these new problems. From then on I left such thankless scut work to someone else.
Another interesting -though brief- account appears in the epilogue of Cliff Stoll's "Cuckoo's Egg" (itself a classic tale from the early Internet days).
Large draw distances, high particle & script counts and more than a few dozen avatars in a single region all tend to result in poor performance and user experience. And the platform appears to be quite sensitive to the usual concerns of bandwidth and GPU. As a longtime SL user I'm not surprised at the issues described by the author.
Linden Lab itself has seen a number of shaky management changes (founder + CTO out, new CEO, founder back, founder out again, etc) and this may have taken some toll on engineering efficacy.
That being said, I think that innovation on the SecondLife platform will be forced by pressure from the furiously advancing OpenSim project, an open source, reverse-engineered version of the SL "backend" that is usually described as "the Apache of the open metaverse". http://opensimulator.org/
Basically, SecondLife, though filled with an amazing amount of wonderful art, code and creativity, won't last another 8 years without somehow opening up and keeping up with the explosion happening just outside its walled garden.
While it's mostly known as an in-memory store, redis also has a virtual-memory option which can be useful when you have a (relatively) small number of keys -all of which can fit into memory- that are associated with much larger values which cannot fit into memory. Sure, there is a swap cost, etc, but I found this to be quite acceptable for a small sync server app I'm building (after prototyping with MongoDB and SQLite).