'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

[nfmax]

This is just ridiculous.

But then again it was even controversial that Linux uses the number 0xB16B00B5 as the host id in HyperV. Whats wrong with it? Well it looks like big boobs... Its not like you even get to see this number anywhere. You only see it in the form of a #define in the source code. Why would you even care?

Well we must also start banning all Java applications, as Java .class files uses 0xCAFEBABE as header magic number.

Alternate proposal: we just document the magic number as uint32_t 3199925962, then nobody can be offended, as it's the same bits but a different interpretation.

Or back to octal - nothing contentious about 031277535276

[bd139]

Politicising language idioms is how we end up with burned books.

No... I'm pretty sure that fascism is how we end up with burned books........

Fascism starts with ideological dishonesty, manipulation and how do we do that? Language.

Be careful.

Somewhere in the middle is good. A radical shift to either side is bad.

[John B]

Somewhere in the middle is good. A radical shift to either side is bad.

Is the middle ground sound advice?

One camp is flexible and accommodating, another is extreme and authoritarian.

Take the "middle ground" through multiple iterations and you have drifted to one side.

[bd139]

Actually you're wrong. Both extremes are very authoritarian. Both are detrimental to everyone but in different ways. The biggest mistake politics ever made was allowing it to divide into two extreme ideological camps and promoting those as the only answer. It's divisive and idiotic.

The answer is scrapping both wings and taking ideas on individual merit, not ideological association.

This is basically censorship if we like it or not regardless of which wing it comes from. All that does is remove voices, burn books, rewrite history and silence the language used to criticise at the end of the day, ushering in a golden new age of tyranny.

[cgroen]

O my god (one out of 6000 different, do your own pick), personally, my compiler and soldering iron are my gods.....
At first I thought you were making a joke 

Why oh why bother with idiotic stuff like this, its been master/slave for obvious reasons, if someone gets this wrong, its their own mind that is wrong in the first place ("for the pure, everything is pure").

STOP BEING OFFENDED AT ANY POSSIBLE CHANCE

And no, "primary" and "secondary" has nothing similar to "Master" and "Slave", the "Master" is, hmmm, "The Master" and the slave obeys.
What about "Female" and "Male" adapters, maybe the "Female adapter" don't think of itself as "female" but one of the other 68 different types that exists.....


EDIT: Here is some more to be offended about:
0xDEADBABE
0xDEADFEED
0xBABEFEED
0xC0DEFEED
0xC0DEBABE

Go ahead


Geez, enough of this craziness 

[bd139]

On connectors we're going to be forced to use GR-874's until a hermaphrodite gets offended 

[John B]

I didn't say that there are only two camps/wings/groups/whatever. I identified characteristics of two distinct groups. There's a difference.

[Berni]

On connectors we're going to be forced to use GR-874's until a hermaphrodite gets offended 

Oh phew i thought id have to use those APC-7 connectors. My wallet can't afford those.

But yeah my coworker kept referring to them as "hermaphrodite connectors" because he forgot the name for it and having only one gender is the main feature.

[nuclearcat]

I'm from Slavic ethnic group(Slavs). Wiktionary says "The spelling of English ``slave``, closer to its original Slavic form, first appears in English in the 1500s. Slavs became slaves around the beginning of the ninth century when the Holy Roman Empire tried to stabilize a German-Slav frontier. ". To be more honest it is one of word roots theories, but most popular one. Obvious that our ethnic group suffered from slavery hundreds of years. I think i have right to talk about slavery, isn't it?
And i, god damn it, dont have anything against using "slav" part in "slave" in tech stuff. This is technical terminology.
Worst part is when a talented techies (but seems complete idiots in rest of real life), begins to solve social problems in "their own way".
If some idiots have nothing more to do than pick such non-existing problems out of their noses, there is tons of problems of real people in the real world (including slavery) they can really help to solve, not imitate that they are "working on social issues problems".

[daqq]

We have to understand that different countries and ethnicities have different offensive or generally frowned upon practices, for example in China planting chopsticks upright in rice is very frowned upon (it has to do with how dead people’s are remembered).

...so, what, before designing literally anything I should check my work against an incredibly VAST (and apparently ever growing) checklist of stuff that could offend someone? That's a great excuse to do nothing, as eventually you will find that anything offends someone in some culture.

I'm honestly not sure what you wanted to say here. Yes, different people are offended by/dislike different things. Boo hoo.

It is the same thing also with code of conducts, I don’t get why people’s are so against them, nobody will object if cose is rejected for technical reasons, however insulting people’s via mail should not be accepted as normal, just as it is not accepted in an In person meeting...

Most notably, because the problematic codes of conducts do nothing to improve the quality of the product, but are an attempt to grab power in disguise. See: https://hub.packtpub.com/linux-programmers-opposed-to-new-code-of-conduct-threaten-to-pull-code-from-project/
Also, regulating the behavior of adults to the point of treating them as idiot children in a kindergarten is a problem in and of itself as far as I'm concerned.

edit: From the article I have linked:

The CoC aims to overcome meritocracy, which in many organizations has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology

Canceling meritocracy in science and engineering would effectively kill the progress of humanity. Yes, it's sad that someone was able to go to a prestigious school and/or get an education by his social/ethnic/whatever background, but that does not mean that his contribution is more valuable.

[trash]

And what am I supposed to do with my male and female connectors?
I'm going to have to start using gender neutral or trans DB9 connectors?

Normally I would suggest that somebody says these things as a great prank joke.
But unfortunately there are people out there who take the idea seriously.

[Jeroen3]

Insert quote from Rick and Morty:
"Maybe people that create things aren’t concerned with your delicate sensibilities, y’know?"

[tggzzz]

I vote for

• "manager" and "minion"
• "politician" and "elector"
• "controller" and "controlled"
• "SWMBO" and "Rumpole" (but nfmax beat me to it)

[madires]

Black or white-washing language will only help hiding racism superficially. It won't solve anything. Video streaming services have started blocking some movies because of "inappropriate language or scenes". But you still can get them on disc. What about all the literature we have? Paintings? If we start cleansing we can't simply stop, there are also many other things which offend people. In the old days of BBSs and the various store-and-foward networks we had some basic rules called "netiquette". One of the rules was "don't offend anyone and don't get offended easily".

BTW, if your DB9s don't mate get some gender changers.

[cgroen]

.
BTW, if your DB9s don't mate get some gender changers.

I feel quite offended that I only can find "Male to male" and "female to female" gender changers for DB9 
How about some diversity among gender changers, what if want to change my DB9 male to something not female/male 

[madires]

How about some diversity among gender changers, what if want to change my DB9 male to something not female/male 

Those are called "diverse" (the official German term for anything/anyone neither female nor male).

[Syntax Error]

I must admit, I have never been happy with the use of the term master and slave. I suggest somewhere the meaning was lost in translation? Primary and secondary or, host and target or, client and server, no issue with those. Even a layer or node notation fits better with today's bus controller methodologies; such as USB or CAN.

As for male and female connectors? Always just called them plug and socket. Avoids the sniggering idiots

So what about a web site whitelist/blacklist though?

+ Bluetooth allows the creation of a Multislave Piconet. Hashtag-BANBLUETOOTH! You read it here first

[JPortici]

This again?

Next they will go for male and female connectors

Those are just words. There is no need to eliminate them from the language entirely if they were used for bad things in one specific context.

They are already doing that for connectors.. and frankly it's better for clarity one assumes male is plug with male terminal and female a socket/receptacle with female terminal.
Well, here in the automotive world we have all four genders (mostly receptacles with male terminals and plugs with female terminals) and sometimes you even see some crazy hermaphrodite mix

And just to be sure, in the harness drawings we put the photos of the various components so they can not be mixed up

Edit: this is ethically wrong 

[donotdespisethesnake]

I worked on a disk drive project. Historically, bad sectors have been described as being "blacked", and added to the "blacklist".  We were told to stop using that term, and use "blocked" instead. This got really confusing, because disks have blocks as well. In addition, "blocked" is also used in software to describe threads that are suspended.

Technical meetings became a careful dance around trying to work out what people were referring to without using any of the bad words. I don't know if it helped inclusiveness or not, and it made no difference to the behavior of the manager who consistently expressed homophobic, sexist and racist attitudes but got away with it by not using the banned words.

[tggzzz]

I must admit, I have never been happy with the use of the term master and slave. I suggest somewhere the meaning was lost in translation? Primary and secondary or, host and target or, client and server, no issue with those.

Master/slave is used where the master tells the slave what to do, and the slave just does it.

Primary/secondary doesn't work because those terms are used for entities that are nominally equal: the secondary takes over when the primary becomes unavailable.

Host/target doesn't work because typically a host contains something, sometimes the target.

Client/server doesn't work, because the flow of information and control is not one way, plus because of the X-Window system

[madires]

As for male and female connectors? Always just called them plug and socket. Avoids the sniggering idiots

Over here the common terms for connectors are also plug (Stecker) and socket (Buchse, a built-in female connector). But we also have coupling (Kupplung, female connector at the end of a cable).

So what about a web site whitelist/blacklist though?

The internet and telecommunications terminology is full of masters, slaves, whitelists, blacklists and so on. If you replace those terms with something else you would cause a lot of fun.

[madires]

Edit: this is ethically wrong 

DB13W3 (the version with three coaxial sub-connectors) was used for video interfaces in old workstations like Sun or SGI.

[coppice]

Eliminating the accurate use of the word only dodges the shameful things that people have done to other people in the past, it still happened.

What's this "in the past" thing? There are more people in slavery today than at the height of American slavery.

[themadhippy]

Neutrik  were  ahead of the game when they released the  transgender plug sockets  connector ,NC3FM-C

[aandrew]

Producer/Consumer was a soft attempt at a "computerised" term but never really caught on in synchronous exchanges.

No, Producer/Consumer is quite different from master/slave. The former is about data flow, where the latter is about control. The closest analogue I've seen to master/slave is leader/follower. It still implies some kind of control relationship, but IMO is still more open to misinterpretation about what is actually going on.