Josh Wieder

A few years back - around 2011, Redhat released a Free Cloud server tier to compete with Amazon EC2's offering (IMHO this was an attempt by the big boys to try to annihilate the downside of the market). While EC2 continues to offer free tiny servers, Rackspace bowed out; their minimum offering these days is somewhere around $16 / month. I came across some references to Rackspace continuing to offer free services, b ut this time only to OSS developers . The benefits are great for those who qualify; while it sounds somewhat flexible no doubt depending on the marketing gains to attracting a big name project, even somewhat niche projects are being offered $2000/month in free services . That buys a lot of muscle for the smart consumer. Jesse Noller is the man with the hookup. Send him an email to see what you can get if you meet the requirements.

I'm a fan of video games. While being a grown up means I don't have a chance to play them as frequently as I used to, I still enjoy decompressing on the weekend with the old XBox and try to do it as much as I can. That said, I would rather jump out of an airplane without a parachute than pay $60 for a newly released console game. No matter how much I take home, its difficult for me to justify that  sort of expense. Every once in a while there are some titles that pique my interest and that at least tent me to break that rule. However, a disturbing trend among game developers has just about ensured that will never happened. I am referring to the trend in which a video game is released to the public without being finished. I could go on for quite some time listing examples, but two particularly egregious examples have been well publicized recently. The first, Aliens: Colonial Marines. Take a look at the brief YouTube video below for an example o...