Twitter Engineers Replacing Racially Loaded Tech Terms Like 'Master,' 'Slave' (cnet.com) 350
For Regynald Augustin, a Black programmer at Twitter, the impetus for change arrived in an email last year with the phrase "automatic slave rekick." The words were just part of an engineering discussion about restarting a secondary process, but they prompted Augustin to start trying to change Twitter's use of words with racist connections. Augustin was used to seeing the term "slave" in technical contexts. "But with 'rekick' -- I was madder than I ever thought I'd be in the workplace," he said. From a report: First on his own and then joining forces with another engineer, Kevin Oliver, he helped spearhead an effort to replace terms like "master," "slave," "whitelist" and "blacklist" with words that didn't hearken back to oppressive parts of United States history and culture. He recounted his thoughts at the time: "This has to stop. This isn't cool. We have to change this now." No one expects that changing technical terms will end centuries of racial injustice. But some people at technology companies, including Oliver and Augustin at Twitter, are pressing for the changes that are within their reach. That includes the effort to replace racially fraught technology terms like "master" and "slave" that describe things like databases, software projects, camera flashes and hard drives. Managers at the social network formalized the two engineers' effort in January, endorsing work to address the issue systematically across the engineering division and expanding it to terms linked to discrimination on the basis of sex, age and disabilities -- replacing "man hours" and "sanity check," for example. Oliver and Augustin detailed the effort in an exclusive interview with CNET. Twitter is the latest company to make these changes. In recent weeks, scores of firms including JPMorgan GitHub, and developers of Python, Go, and Android have adopted similar measures.
Automatic slave rekicks are wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Automatic slave rekicks are wrong. (Score:3)
What if she.. (Score:2, Funny)
But, what if your slave likes it when you whip her into shape?
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It's how you spawn child objects. This causes excessive interruption.
1984 was not an instruction manual (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is this really even a doublethink thing.
The term "slave" and "master" in most contexts aren't even descriptive. A "master" IDE drive isn't controlling the "slave" IDE drive, that's just flavor text. Using neutral terminology such as "Primary" vs "Secondary" aren't *euphemisms* for master and slave, they're actually more descriptive of the actual relationship.
Additionally "Controller" is a synonym for "Master", so for any situation in which you use "Master" then you should be able to swap in the term Control
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While server-client works to a degree, it does not work for many protocols. Not that big of a deal to change, but it creates some ambiguity.
Re:1984 was not an instruction manual (Score:5, Interesting)
Fine, but what do you do, with writing with black pencil on white paper, huh? huh? huh?
Eventually you have to realise this is all bullshit political theatre. To divide workers and have them fighting amongst themselves whilst the bosses lord it over them.
Where is the USA workers party, why do workers not have a voice, they are the majority. Why are idiot workers in America fighting over scraps, arguing about the COLOUR OF THE SKIN, man seppos be crazy and just full of it.
Workers do not have a voice in America and you idiots about what you name stuff, this just stinks of corporate PR misdirection.
Re:1984 was not an instruction manual (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
I asked my black boss whether we should also purge such terminology. Although he understood why others might find it offensive, he had no particular objection to the terms and told me to stand down.
I get on with my boss (we've worked together in the past and he got me my current job) so we were comfortable chatting about it some more. It was clear he was much more concerned about how few black faces there were at board level than the term blacklist and master slave in our documentation.
These press releases bragging off how 'woke' a corporation is about the language of technology is a distraction from the elephant in the room.
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Completely ignoring I2C
The terms "master" and "slave" are not racially... (Score:5, Insightful)
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In fact, one has to deliberately choose to relate their usage to specific historical accounts where one race happened to get enslaved by another to even make any sort of connection between the terms and race
Well, the word slavery does derive etymologically from the Slavic people. So using it to refer to any other race is technically cultural appropriation (and yes, I have heard at least one Slavic person complaining about this).
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No mention of a person's race.
No mention of a person's race.
No mention of a person's race.
No mention of
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That's kind of disingenuous. If you're talking American English then the terminology slave/master within the *American* historical context is definitely that of black vs white. Sure the concept of masters and slaves is cross-cultural but it's being kind of deliberately obtuse to not get how that flies in American English, specifically.
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"Write it on the blackboard."
"Did you just call me a shitskin?"
- From the books of things that never happened.
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Wow look at all these black people enjoying these symbolic changes while still being lynched by pig cops https://imgur.com/a/BGYeZH5 [imgur.com]
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There are also plenty of alternatives for describing the subordinate of Master elsewhere in this thread which I'll happily use.
Personally I'll lose more sleep over Mozilla changing Firefox's on-click address bar behaviour. 10 days and it still annoys me!
Re:The terms "master" and "slave" are not racially (Score:5, Informative)
Etymology of "master": Old English mæg(i)ster (later reinforced by Old French maistre), from Latin magister; probably related to magis ‘more’.
Etymology of "slave": Middle English shortening of Old French esclave, equivalent of medieval Latin sclava (feminine) ‘Slavonic (captive)’ the Slavonic peoples had been reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th century.
Neither term is "racially loaded" and the only people who would come to that erroneous conclusion are either uneducated or racist themselves.
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Re: The terms "master" and "slave" are not raciall (Score:4, Insightful)
Well hell, if you're going to play the "more recent usage" game, the technical usage of master/slave as well as the BDSM usage of master/slave are both more recent than 150 years, therefore we can just forget about anything before that, right?
Re: The terms "master" and "slave" are not racial (Score:4, Funny)
Do I look like Justin Trudeau to you?
If you did it would be my honour to call you master, or daddy, or whatever you wanted.
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Re: As an American (Score:2)
Just like it is hard not to associate human with a fast track to extinction.
We have been here before and it turned out to be simply be putting putting lipstick on a pig. There are some symbols that make sense to replace, while others are just a nod to SJWs without fixing an underlying problem, and potentially prevents a healthy discussion from happening.
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Just like most black people have been programmed by black culture to think the reason they did not get the job,the promotion, the reason why the cashier did not say "Hello" to them, why they were asked for ID and the 10 people in front of then weren't.....is because they are black. They have been brainwashed from a young age that you didn't get something because you were black. No other ethnicity does that to their own people. Blacks actors, singers, comedians businessmen are seen as "sellouts" by members
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Correct. The real evil is teaching children that there's no point in even trying since the white man is determined to hold them down regardless. Lots of people are making a ton of money perpetuating that however - the real modern-day slave masters.
Re:As an American (Score:5, Informative)
"We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people," Barkley said.
Barkley, a native of Leeds, said African Americans are too concerned with street cred than true success and that's holding the community back.
"For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person. It's a dirty, dark secret in the black community.
"There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don't have success. It's best to knock a successful black person down because they're intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they're successful. It's just typical BS that goes on when you're black, man."
-Charles Barkley
https://www.al.com/news/2014/10/unintelligent_blacks_brainwash.html [al.com]
Re:As an American (Score:5, Interesting)
"We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people," Barkley said.
Barkley, a native of Leeds, said African Americans are too concerned with street cred than true success and that's holding the community back.
"For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person. It's a dirty, dark secret in the black community.
"There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don't have success. It's best to knock a successful black person down because they're intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they're successful. It's just typical BS that goes on when you're black, man."
-Charles Barkley
https://www.al.com/news/2014/10/unintelligent_blacks_brainwash.html [al.com]
I attended the top public New York City magnet high school many years ago. The black kids I met there worked extremely hard and had big dreams for the future. One day I ran into one of them in the subway when he was in the company of other black kids I didn't recognize. He brushed me off like he didn't know me. The next day he apologized and told me: "You have no idea what it's like for me with my street friends. If they knew I studied they would ridicule me for acting white and rip me apart".
I was shocked and bewildered by this insane attitude. Black kids think studying and striving for success is "acting white"? Wouldn't that equate "acting black" with being an ignorant slacker? It's just an insane way to think.
I'm sure that guy went on to a bright future, but that experience really opened my eyes. So Charles Barkley's words are in line with my experience.
Re: As an American (Score:3)
Black immigrants don't think like this at all. Black immigrants also, for some unknown reason, turn out to be far more successful compared to native Black Americans. Who knows why...
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Or maybe it's because they genuinely do face discrimination every single day. Maybe it's because a black person is far more likely to be stopped by the police than a white person, even if they've done absolutely nothing wrong. Maybe it's because they're less likely to get a job interview [hbs.edu] if their resume gives any clue about their race. Maybe it's because black people convicted of crimes receive longer sentences [washingtonpost.com] than white people convicted of exactly the same crime. Maybe it's because they see the presid
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The context is what it is (Score:3)
Maybe I'm too paranoid, but there's tons of stories of prisoners being forced into labor with threats of solitary confinement. There are judges in the South who has found debtors in contempt of court and thrown them in jail until their families can pay and they're forced to work on farms for pennies an hour while racking up debt for their room in board in prison. These are real things that are going on right now. Even in t
Re: The terms "master" and "slave" are not raciall (Score:2)
every future slashdot story about this bs should just have 1 comment, tfp.
forgetting the past. (Score:2)
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This is dumb. How is renaming master and slave drives burying the past?
Simply asking this question shows you need to read 1984 by George Orwell.
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Master. Slave. Connotations assigning nomenclature to the winners and the losers of a confrontation, and it's in no way indicative of racism so much as it is human nature... It's human nature to dominate, else, there'd be no domination of the planet by the hairless apes. Frequently, this tendency, distastefully, this leads to the domination of one subset by another. It is not limited to race, or color, or religion. We would characteristically find some division to squabble over due to our genetic predispos
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Re: forgetting the past. (Score:2)
I will try to avoid name calling, but yes this is a dangerous road to go down. Removing words from a language is a form of censorship and prevents an idea from being expressed correctly.
In the end new words will crop up to say the same thing, as all the creative words for certain parts of the human body exemplify.
Removing words from a language doesnâ(TM)t solve the underlying problem, rather it just hides it. This is dangerous, because it is a feel good action, that gives the impression of a solution w
we're doing it wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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There's a comedian who sez replace the terms with cookie names. It's a funny routine. It's hard to get overly mad when someone calls you a fig newton.
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Client / Server (Score:2)
Client / Server or Subscriber / Publisher is more descriptive anyways
Re:Client / Server (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter's engineering teams are working to change terms that touch on race, sex and ability, Oliver said. Terms and recommended replacements include:
Whitelist becomes allowlist.
Blacklist becomes denylist.
Master/slave becomes leader/follower, primary/replica or primary/standby.
Grandfathered becomes legacy status.
Gendered pronouns (for example "guys") become folks, people, you all, y'all.
Gendered pronouns (for example "he" or "his") become they or their.
Man hours becomes person hours or engineer hours.
Sanity check becomes quick check, confidence check or coherence check.
Dummy value becomes placeholder value or sample value.
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Re: Client / Server (Score:2)
Twitter becomes irrelevant?
Dangerous and pitiful SJW like actions.
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I'm tired of hearing loaded financial terms (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Only a Fool is Offended! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are offended by something not meant to offend you, then you are a fool. If you are offended by something meant to offend you, then you are a greater fool, for you have played into the hands of your enemy!
This is paraphrased from the one Brigham Young is attributed to having said.
"He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool."
If you are so shallow and fragile that you must destroy anything that causes you this kind of distress then you are listening too much to or being controlled by someone that does not have your best interests in mind. They are like a little demon in your your ear telling you that people are trash talking you when they are not even talking about you. It makes you mental! As we are currently seeing around the world.
Re:Only a Fool is Offended! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are offended by something not meant to offend you, then you are a fool.
That is just dumb (no offense intended). Slavery was not intended to offend Black people, it was intended to enslave them for profit. Segregation was not meant to offend Black people, it was intended to keep them in their place (i.e. whether they bristled at their inferior status was beside the point).
In the abstract I have no objection to using terms like Master/Slave, and when Slashdot had a similar story in 2004 or so, I thought it was ridiculous. But we have armed White people angrily defending statues honoring men who broke their oath to the Constitution, took up arms against the United States, and killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. We have a President who will veto any bill that renames a military base named after one of these traitors in defense of slavery. These explicitly White Supremacist gestures highlight what I hadn't considered in 2004: if America had delivered on its promise of equality, then there may have been enough black engineers at the get-go to have objected to terms like Master/Slave--or maybe in an equitable society they wouldn't have bothered.
We still don't live in an America that consistently lives up to its ideals. As it stands, African Americans have to walk past monuments and serve on military bases named after men whose only accomplishment was a a treasonous, failed attempt to see them born in chains. So, given the work that America still has to do, I don't think wanting to eradicate all vestiges of white supremacy suggests any special fragility on their part.
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This went entirely over your head.
"We still don't live in an America that consistently lives up to its ideals. As it stands, African Americans have to walk past monuments and serve on military bases named after men whose only accomplishment was a a treasonous, failed attempt to see them born in chains. So, given the work that America still has to do, I don't think wanting to eradicate all vestiges of white supremacy suggests any special fragility on their part."
This sounds more like the "victim" Olympics ra
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I will tell you who all the racists are... all the groups on all sides that views everything through the lens of race.
May I assume that your definition of "racist" includes Brigham Young, who believed that blacks would be servants in the afterlife, and complained:
What we are trying to do to day is to make the Negro equal with us in all our privilege. My voice shall be against all the day long. I shall not consent for one moment I will will call them a counsel. I say I will not consent for one moment for you to lay a plan to bring a curse upon this people. I shall not be while I am here.
Because if your definition excludes him, it is worthless.
But if you think that Bringam Young is a racist, I have to wonder why you decided to quote him to make your point when he couldn't possibly have believed it--when he is an example of how racist ideology influences theoretically non-racial institutions for generations. Mormons didn't allow Black priests unt
Re:Adapt to changing times or get left behind (Score:4, Insightful)
He's the one freaking out? Let's look
Seems to me that you're the snowflake.
Ok, so let's look at your message.
You remind of those greybearded idiots, who were always fat, obnoxious and unfuckable slobs
Yeah, ok. You have issues. This isn't adapting to Swift because it's better than Objective-C. This is forcing people to stick with Objective-C because something in Swift offends them. Don't you see that?
The point isn't what Twitter does or did. The point is political correctness has gone so far that it is now affecting code. And why? Because "master and slave" are racial terms. But they aren't. There are still hundreds of thousands of slaves in the Middle East and Africa and the races of each are the same.
Choice is fast going away. There is no subtlety. No nuance. It's orange man bad and disagreeing no matter what. It's "niggardly" sounds too close to another word so if anyone uses that word, destroy them. It's a rodeo clown who always wears presidential masks being fired and humiliated after wearing an Obama mask. It's any rope with a loop in it, has to be a noose because the NASCAR driver assigned to that garage happened to be half-black. Everything now is "don't think. Just assign something racist or sexist or homophobic to it and that's all the thinking required.
Controlling vocabulary is the first step to control thought.
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You remind of those greybearded idiots, who were always fat, obnoxious and unfuckable slobs...
You're relating technical skills with specific technologies to word choice as a society. These are completely different things.
These companies are more than welcome to waste their resources changing words that will have absolutely no effect on anything (because they're just words!), but that doesn't mean we should glorify it as though they're doing something amazing to improve equality.
It's just pandering to the lowest common denominator, and it makes those people making the "changes" feel as though they've
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I am not freaking out, just pointing out that their behavior makes them weak. A person easily offended has always looked weak and are quickly taken for granted and played by their enemies. It's a personal invitation for destruction without any gain.
Just take the simple example of "Back to the Future" where calling Marty a "chicken" has successfully caused him to do something he should not be doing. That is what being played means. Once people know how to press your buttons, they are going to press them.
You're the one resistant to change (Score:2)
If you think this is about clinging to the past, then you are failing to understand the issue here.
You're the one calling Twitter weak for changing their terms. Let's turn this around. Why is it sooo important to preserve those terms? They're not even particularly good terms. Leader and follower is much more articulate description of the relationship. Also, try hanging around black folks...ask them how harmless the term "slave" is and how much they want to hear about it dozens of times at work.
It's simple logic. What does twitter gain by acting? What do they lose?....and vice-versa, what do they
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Also, try hanging around black folks...ask them how harmless the term "slave" is and how much they want to hear about it dozens of times at work.
It's pretty disturbing for people to feel emotional about words that describe other people nearly 150+ years ago. Some perspective would be good here.
Should Jews feel averse to that term as well? They were slaves building the pyramids in Egypt, after all...
How much time needs to pass before we can understand that words describing ancestors don't describe us today?
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Wait... do you seriously think this is about the words Master/Slave?
If you truly believe that then you are blind. These words are not important, this is only for one purpose. Pandering... and if you are willing to accept good will from someone or something that is pandering to you... watch out. A dagger is what will be in your back before you know it.
The problem here is intrinsically Pavlovian Conditioning. And the problem is that now many people have been "conditioned" to see race in things where race
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't that play into white supremacists hands? (Score:4, Insightful)
White supremacists can then deny slavery ever existed. They'll claim it was just leaders and followers. The black followers chose to serve their white leaders willingly, and could have left at any time if they didn't like their situation. And because master/slave was wiped from the lexicon, kids will only know of leader/follower which has been stretched to cover two different meanings. And white supremacists can exploit that by deliberately picking the wrong meaning.
If there were alternate words with the same meaning (like negro and black - "negro" is just black in Spanish), I wouldn't really have a problem with it. But forcing a switch to inaccurate terminology solely for the sake of changing terminology carries the danger of your forced change not working out quite the way you expect. To learn from history, you have to be able to remember history - accurately.
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Whatever happened to multitasking? Or for that matter, multiprocessing? We are embarrassingly parallel...
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Because petty things like this turn people against movements (and is probably on purpose). They look at it and think "These people are whining over that? Yeah I'm not supporting them anymore, fucking snowflakes".
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How about we first get blacks to stop killing blacks. Blacks on black murder is 10x higher than any other ethic on same/different ethnic murder rates.
A dozen blacks get killed in Chicago every day and it doesn't even make any of the MSM news, at least no the leftist MSM news.
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Humans have enslaved each other for our entire history. I don't think we'll forget the concept. Although, for sure, the terms are and will be misused. F'rinstance, many people think that (insert choice of government/economy/society) is slavery.
How To Avoid Work and/or Blame (Score:2)
Make a big fuss over the NAMES of things, deflect everyone's attention to things that only sound like they will make a difference but don't cost you anything, and tell everyone you're only doing so to help "those people" who are so victimized they can't help themselves.
Equal parts laziness, blame-shifting, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and condescension.
The most racist word in the world is... (Score:2)
..."race".
Seriously, is slashdot going to create a goddamned post for each and every idiot that declares they're going to stop using the term "master" and "slave", so that we can all regurgitate the same shit that we said in the last post?
But if you would like to see some intelligent people's opinion on race, check these folks out:
Conservative Twins [youtube.com]
Anthony Brian Logan [youtube.com]
These folks are black, and have their heads on correctly. Since they're black, they get to say the things that white people are having to hol
What a Coincidence (Score:4, Informative)
If one starts in the mid-80's, and compares black wealth and incarceration rates with the number of words which became taboo or modified (which some call "political correctness") ... what one finds is that "Political Correctness" has had absolutely no positive effect for black people, and in fact, correlates quite negatively with black well-being.
Affluent whites, however, those most likely to champion these speech codes ... have done insanely well.
Everyone else has suffered.
What a coincidence.
So, here we are. More hand-wringing over terms. This time it's master/slave in the context of computing.
Gee, I wonder who will come out ahead after this one plays out?
Poor minorities, I'm sure, since that's ... you know ... the intent.
At least that's what we're told.
Wait, there is more! (Score:2)
This is really royally fxcked!! (Score:2)
Wait until these shits get to movies and TV and entertainment?
No more "Black Alert" on Star Trek: Discovery ?
"Good Guys wear Black" , Men in Black, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Black Hole, Black Beauty will be banned?
Back in Black will be labeled a racist album?
No more "Black Friday" sales?
Something Is a Little Off (Score:2, Insightful)
Of all the words in the English language available to influential "progressives", they sometimes choose ones which reveal their hands, if ever so slightly.
In particular, I'm speaking of the word that has become most associated with progressives for the last 20 years.
Tolerance.
What does it mean?
tolerance | täl()rns |
noun
- the ability to accept or endure something/someone unpleasant or disliked, with forbearance
So, modern day "progressives" quite vocally consider themselves tolerant of black people, gay
where is master and slave used? (Score:2)
From a tech standpoint master/slave is gone. (Score:2)
Back in the old days device interfaces were very limited. So you had hardware protocols that talked to the first device and that device would then communicate with a device hooked up to it. The 2nd device aka slave would pass the info back to the master and the master would pass it to the computer. In that case master/slave was needed.
We no longer have that. for clustering master/slave does not make sense since
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Quite a few non-obsolete technologies use the terms "master" and "slave." In car braking systems you have the "master cylinder." In the SPI bus you have signals called MISO (Master in slave out) and MOSI (Master out slave in). There are "bus masters" in various systems. There are systems that support "multi master" operation. Discussions of I2C also often refer to one device as "master" and others as "slave." (Just google I2C slave and you will see what I mean.) I think SMBus and I2C officially use host and
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I2C isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Stay in your lane, junior.
Nice job hiding the crazier ones (Score:4, Insightful)
They also want to replace grandfathered to "legacy status", all sorts of gendered pronouns for stuff like "y'all", "Man hours" turns into "Person hours", Sanity check turns into "Confidence check", Dummy Value turns into "sample value"...
It's not racism, its the whole social justice train of hell.
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Sanity check turns into "Confidence check", Dummy Value turns into "sample value"...
Those two are pretty telling.
Master has multiple meanings (Score:5, Informative)
Master has multiple meanings. Are we going to just stop using words and phrases that include the word "master?" For example which of the following, if any, are acceptable?
Master Chief in the Navy?
Master Cylinder in braking system?
Master Carpenter?
Master Craftsman?
Master Alarm?
Master of my own fate?
What about mastering a skill?
Bus Master?
I2C multi-master?
SPI master and slave?
And the J-K flip-flop (Score:2)
To be fair (Score:2)
even just 'rekick' is awkward. Hipsters and their Restless Leg Syndrome.
And so goes the political correctness tard train (Score:2)
Word or concept (Score:2)
Is the issue the particular word choice "Master", "Slave" which can be changed or the interaction between devices which it would be silly to change. It is often a good solution to have one piece of hardware or software completely control another. Its OK to call that something else, but we need to agree on a term that is not-offensive but which still indicates that interaction.
I'm happy with a new term if we agree to use it widely enough to avoid confusion
Dystopian newspeak (Score:2)
Fuck these people.
Won't someone please think of the Slavs! (Score:3)
"The term slave has its origins in the word slav. The slavs, who inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD." [bbc.co.uk]
I'm reminded of Helen Lovejoy [i.redd.it] on the Simpsons.
I'm sure Yuri is breathing a sigh of relief, not having to constantly see the word slave.
Um "master" and "slave" are historical NOT racial (Score:4)
For most of the history of this planet, most people have had contact with slavery, and slaves have been of all colors, as have slave owners. At his very day, there are people who own slaves and people in slavery. It's not even accurate to say "well in AMERICA it was a black-and-white thing". Nope. As always, actual history matters here:
One of the fhe first documented slave owners in what is now the United States was a black man named Anthony Johnson, and we know this because the records of a court case in the 1650s in which he fought to recover an escaped slave still exist (Johnson v. Parker, court of Northampton County). Oh, and some of the slaves this black man owned were white. Indeed, at the time when the US Civil War broke out there were black slave owners in the South (look it up, it's a historical fact). Do not misunderstand me: Slavery is atrocious, and unjustified in the modern world. Centuries ago it was often a way civilizations handled persons who incurred more debt than they could repay, or persons who were on the losing side in a war, but this history is being energetically erased in order to drive certain political projects, and civilization needs to reject this Orwellian erasure. We all need to learn from the past, not erase it.
In truth, the vast majority of white people in the United States are descended from immigrants and the vast majority of them were poor people from Europe, NOT rich aristocrats. As a result, we can reasonably assume that most were probably the descendants of European peasants and if you could trace back far enough, probably many would have ancestors who were enslaved by some European leader or by some Roman. It'a also true that many Asian Americans, if we could trace their ancestry far enough back would encounter ancestors who were slaves in Asia. While it is true that many American blacks can trace their ancestry to slaves in America, it's also true that many (like Barack Obama) have no black American slave ancestors, but they may well have ancestors who were enslaved to other blacks on the African continent. It's also possible that many Americans who are black have ancestors who were slave owners in Africa, further possible that some of those ancestors sold other blacks into slavery. There may well be some Americans who have some ancestors who were slaves in America AND ancestors who owned slaves in Africa AND ancestors in Africa who sold other black people to white people. It's also true that as more people in America marry across racial lines, there will be more and more like Barack Obama who are black but have no black American slaves in their background but do have white slave owners in their ancestry, and without any rape or other barbarity being involved.
Slavery is simply NOT a racial matter.
The terms "master" and "slave" are used in many industries as a simple and universally-understood shorthand for a relationship between two entities --- like master and slave hydraulic cylinders (nearly every car has them for brake and clutches). These two words, when used together, have long been used in industrial and computing settings because they are useful efficient, descriptive, etc and NOT as some stupid way to make some descendant of a long-dead slave ancestor feel bad - if they had THAT function then we'd nearly all have been offended by them long ago. Of course "long ago" was not the 2020 election cycle where one party desperately needs as much chaos and racial strife as possible to knock somebody they hate out of the White House... All of this strife and "wokeness" will likely get worse all the way up to the November election.
Re:'slave' is racist? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that is part of their bad habit of gate-keeping the term. Every Culture on the planet has had ancestors that have been slaves. There are slaves today of all walks of life, no culture is spared but those with the biggest pulpit usually get to carry the flag and often times they do it so badly that it only waters down the the sins of yesterday.
No one is looking for justice, they are looking for revenge... and like all other things... if you want to perpetuate the cycle, then you are no better than your enemies!
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No one is looking for justice, they are looking for revenge
You are giving them way too much credit. There's very very few people alive today in a civilized country who have experienced slavery and can therefore be seen as seeking justice OR revenge. The people who tout this PC shit are the same as everyone else: they seek power. They're the same types of people who start a degree program in a science or math field, suckered in by Bill Nay, Neil Disgrasse Tyson, or Michio Kukoo, looking up to entertainers pretending to be scientists like simple little peasants, t
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Imagine someone steals your house, car, and wealth from you and then dies .. but now his kids have all that stuff. Meanwhile your own are in poverty and can't afford anything and worse have to beg for scraps from the kids of the guy that stole all your stuff since today they own half the town. Is that fair?
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No US citizen alive today has ever been a slave or owned one.
Now now, don't forget Epstein. We know all world leaders and politicians are actual pedos who participated in sex slave rings. Best not to devalue the sentiment you're trying to convey by stating an absolute, especially since nearly all absolute statements are wrong - it allows people to attack a good idea with some idiotic fringe exception.
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Only black people have been expected to carry the stigma and burden of it across generations.
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A person, who happened to be black, didn't like the term. Doesn't really matter whether he thought it's because he was black or whether he thought it independent of his own race, but the fact that he's an American who is black, and the US has a particularly poignant and recent history of slavery with respect to black people, is so obvious it shouldn't need to be called out every damn time this comes up. So it shouldn't be surprising that black people are, on average, more sensitive to these terms.
Slave ha
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A person, who happened to be black, didn't like the term...So it shouldn't be surprising that black people are, on average, more sensitive to these terms.
Except there is a growing number of black commentators saying these efforts to replace terms are, well, bullshit. For example, John Legend wrote on twitter [twitter.com] regarding realtors renaming "Master Bedroom":
“Real problem: realtors don't show black people all the properties they qualify for. Fake problem: calling the master bedroom the master bedroom. Fix the real problem, realtors.”
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I'm assuming you're going to change your handle of "Your.Master?" That's offensive. And you know, with our particularly poignant and recent history of slavery with respect to black people, it is so obvious changing your name shouldn't need to be called out every damn time something like this comes up.