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Final thoughts, musings and reflections

Nick Veitch was the original editor of Format, a role he played until he Mac where I produce got bored and went in dual-screen music and the Bad to work at mode where I do much Voltage podcast. instead. Splitter! of my work.

eveloping software can be hazardous. I don’t mean the risks of RSI or health Dproblems associated with over- caffeination. I mean receiving death threats. PS4 for some downtime There has been a lot of media attention with Battlefield 4. focussed on the threats to various people My friends buy me lots of involved in the games scene recently. From the I shuffle Bacon related gifts. This coverage it would be easy to deduce that the playing cards in is my fave: Dave Bacon internet is full of unpleasant teenage boys with meeting when I (I named him). am thinking. disturbing attitudes towards women. However, the problem isn’t limited to games or boys. There has been a growing incidence of this sort of threatening behaviour, or at least of people who have decided they are not going to put up with it. Most recently, Seth Vargo, who worked at cloud enabling software company My Linux setup Jono Bacon Chef (www.getchef.com) has quit, citing unwanted death threats from the community as The man at the helm of the Bad Voltage podcast, Xprize one of the motivators. You can read his blog Foundation community chap and formerly Ubuntu person. here: (https://sethvargo.com/leaving-chef). In my day things were more personal – I got What version of Linux are you Red Hat, then Mandrake, a quick flirt with death threats in the mail. These days threats can using at the moment? Corel Linux, then to , and finally be delivered in moments by hastily opened On my laptop I am running Ubuntu Ubuntu. I have never considered anything dummy accounts. One problem with such and on the desktop machine, which else since Ubuntu. behaviour is that it shuts down any reasonable I use for producing Bad Voltage as well as discussion. An agent provocateur need only lob a recording music, I’m running What Free Software/open source molotov of threats from within an otherwise Mac OS X. I also run Ubuntu on my can’t you live without? sensible protest and everything becomes all CS servers. A few things; Firefox, Chromium, gas and water cannon. When everyone is Gimp, Inkscape, and XChat on my shouting, nobody is listening. What desktop do you prefer (as if laptop. On my servers I couldn’t live Either people are going to need to grow up and we can’t guess)? without Wordpress and Discourse (and realise that threatening behaviour never does My desktop of choice is . I like their associated servers/databases). their cause any good (unlikely) or at the very how it just gets out of my way least, communities are going to need to be and lets me focus on my work. What do other people love but managed better to make this sort of thing have you can’t get on with? consequences. It seems impossible to do that What was the first Linux setup A bunch of people use KDE, and I without some restrictions on web anonymity, you ever used? have tried, but it just doesn’t work which seems like a high price to pay, but we also I started out with Slackware 96 back with my brain. This isn’t KDE’s fault, my can’t expect developers to put up with threats. in 1998. I then moved over to using brain is stupid.

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