Yeah, you've got the master DB in databases that holds info for all other databases on the server.
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Tech terminology (master/slave, whitelist/blacklist) come under scrutiny during tech anti-racism efforts
- Thread starter RastaMentality
- Start date
Battle is long lost. People now use them to self-identify and taking that away is an act of violence.
I remember being a kid and noticing the master/slave thing when an old PC was going through it's boot cycle and thinking it seemed really weird. Whitelist/blacklist are pretty ingrained, standard English terms at this point, but master/slave honestly feels unnatural, even once you know what it means.
The master/slave dichotomy in technology has never once made me feel comfortable using it. I work in Software Security and encourage my team to use our internal terms Active/Passive in lieu of Master/Slave when writing code and designing the UI. I've also personally asked a technical writer several releases ago to use the Active/Passive naming convention in our external docs.
Hell, this naming convention even extends out from what I do for a living and into my favorite hobby of photography:
Hell, this naming convention even extends out from what I do for a living and into my favorite hobby of photography:
It's interesting you guys mention that. I always remember when I was 10 years old, and my dad was a technician and he was explaining to me how to wire a computer. I remember specifically that conversation about "master/slave" about the Hard Drive. I remember being confused with this particular designation.
I personally don't really see how it's bigoted if the origin of the terms aren't tied to bigotry. I always assumed black and white lists came from color psychology, but I could be wrong.
That being said, it's up to the devs what to call it so if they don't wanna use those terms it's fine with me.
That being said, it's up to the devs what to call it so if they don't wanna use those terms it's fine with me.
I think there are different ways like you could use parent Record and child record for example. But even then that could have different connotations. There has to be some kind of hierarchy and it's easier to use things that have some kind of relationship,
I think it's more how it makes people feel. Like if you were black would that make you uncomfortable? Maybe, maybe not but if people say it does then we can probably accommodate for it.
The master/slave one always sounded gross to me. Never liked that term. I think host/client is the preferred term now?
In most contexts we've moved away from Master/Slave in tech: Server/Client. Parent/Child. Host/Instance, etc.
I do think PC Master Race has become way more distasteful to me over the last few years though. I know it was meant in a fun way originally, but I really think that terminology should go away if it hasn't already.
I do think PC Master Race has become way more distasteful to me over the last few years though. I know it was meant in a fun way originally, but I really think that terminology should go away if it hasn't already.
I've been operating under the assumption that:
biological sex terminology = male/female
gender terminology = man/woman
Is this not the case? I'm honestly looking for clarification here.
biological sex terminology = male/female
gender terminology = man/woman
Is this not the case? I'm honestly looking for clarification here.
I would have never ever made that connection in my mind. It's really weird to me, maybe because english is not my native language idk.
I guess if really people feel that way, it should be changed. But please find some good substitutes, approvelist & denylist sound horrible.
I guess if really people feel that way, it should be changed. But please find some good substitutes, approvelist & denylist sound horrible.
Whitelist means allowed in, approved, good to go
Blacklist means the opposite.
Why those two colors used for that description?
Nope, there are no English words that specifically denote sex versus gender. You need to qualify it with "biologically" or "chromosomally".
That would be the 'online' version though. Back in the day, on 90s machines, the master / slave (with having to set the physical jumper for the boot drive -master disk- and all) thing made 'some' sense, even the naming scheme was always clearly not entirely without motive.
edit: oh right, I just remembered scvhost (svc? not the starcraft constructor) is also a thing in win 7. Guess host / client is also local then.
By windows 2000 and the Pentium 3/4 they already made jumperless motherboards a thing though. These days you don't even deal with the bios anymore beyond a curiosity of 'hey, this is a thing my computer has too!'.
Can't say I've ever liked the terms, but tech is FULL of sexism and racism to the point where it's somewhat easier to hope for quick advances to nip it in the bud rather than actively campaign against it. Silicon Valley isn't the exception, sadly, but more or less the rule of how the industry is.
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Wiki is wrong, the first recorded use of blacklist was in The true peace-maker: laid forth in a sermon before his Majesty at Theobalds written by the Bishop of Norwich, Joseph Hall, in 1624:
"Ye secret oppressors,..ye kind drunkards, and who euer come within this blacke list of wickednesse."
The term probably derives from the process of blackballing which was first recorded in the 1500s. Blackballing was a process of selecting membership to clubs or societies or members votes on discipline: positive votes for prospective members would be white balls placed into a container, negative votes would be black balls. So in one respect there is the white/good and black/bad concept but the root concept of blackballing goes all the way back to Ancient Greece where the voting process for removing the citizenship of someone (usually a politician) used light shells and dark sea shells, later dark fragments of pottery on which the name of the person to be removed were etched.
The Greek name for these ballots, ostrakon, forms the root of the English word ostracize, which literally means to shun undesirable members of a society or group. Blackballing during ancient times often meant a complete stripping of all rights and privileges, plus the added indignity of being exiled from the community.
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In VFX we use render farms.
I have always been annoyed at the Master/Slave shit.
"START SLAVE - KILL SLAVE"
But, its something that none of my white coworkers likely dont even bat an eye to. Just that word alone brings up thoughts.
You don't often come across "SLAVE" in your day to day. But when this is your day to day, it does have an effect that doesn't need to be there. Esp the master/slave combination. Where else is your mind going to go.
I have always been annoyed at the Master/Slave shit.
"START SLAVE - KILL SLAVE"
But, its something that none of my white coworkers likely dont even bat an eye to. Just that word alone brings up thoughts.
You don't often come across "SLAVE" in your day to day. But when this is your day to day, it does have an effect that doesn't need to be there. Esp the master/slave combination. Where else is your mind going to go.
We had them in a german engineering course at university 5 years ago.
That already gets used when inheritance is involved, but that isn't the case with master/slave.
Parent/Daughter boards is used
I would prefer Primary/Secondary or Auxillary (all of which are actually used here and there at random it seems)
There really isnt a standard in electronics and tech... just whatever
I would prefer Primary/Secondary or Auxillary (all of which are actually used here and there at random it seems)
There really isnt a standard in electronics and tech... just whatever
I have never understood why they used master slave when there are about 14,000 other similar relationships that don't have a hideous history.
As an aside, I used to work for the woman who tweeted this (or the one cited in the OP, anyway) and she's dope. Weird, but dope.
As an aside, I used to work for the woman who tweeted this (or the one cited in the OP, anyway) and she's dope. Weird, but dope.
FUN FACT: There's absolutely nothing about IDE devices that justifies the master/slave dichotomy in the terminology. The controller just treats the two drives on the chain as separate devices with no inherent differences. The master drive does not have any increased priority or privilege over the slave drive, nor can it issue commands or even directly communicate to the other drive. They could have just had numbered devices like SCSI chains do and it would have made 0 difference.
If you think about any relationship where one part unquestioningly executed commands of another it would be a violent one. A difference between humans and machines...for now.
Words or phrases, though created with different intentions or meanings, can still be interpreted in future times to be unacceptable, and that is okay. Whitelisting and blacklisting (as shown above) has no ties to racial issues when it originated in ancient greece (literally came about from the colour of seashells, and then balls), but today could obviously be interpreted differently. We can change the words we use and still understand that the original usage was not racist.
A good example is niggardly. When you say it out loud...you will get some looks. It has no ties to the n-word at all, but because it is so close in sound, it is obvious why people would simply substitute it today for "cheap" or something similar.
So even though some terms may not be actually racist, their modern interpretations can at the very least result in uncomfortable assumptions, so there is little harm in using different terms unless (I suppose in some niche cases) there is a very specific reason why the original term would be used.
A good example is niggardly. When you say it out loud...you will get some looks. It has no ties to the n-word at all, but because it is so close in sound, it is obvious why people would simply substitute it today for "cheap" or something similar.
So even though some terms may not be actually racist, their modern interpretations can at the very least result in uncomfortable assumptions, so there is little harm in using different terms unless (I suppose in some niche cases) there is a very specific reason why the original term would be used.
Master/Slave was very common in 80s/90s when I learned engineering, but can be easily replaced by primary/secondary (it should be common that way now, master/slave is not really used nowadays).
white/blacklist is more difficult, since I (and I guess most people) don't associate it with race but with a color code (much like green is to go and red is to stop). But if inappropriate we should start changing it to "allowed"/"not allowed " list.
white/blacklist is more difficult, since I (and I guess most people) don't associate it with race but with a color code (much like green is to go and red is to stop). But if inappropriate we should start changing it to "allowed"/"not allowed " list.
You do not want to get involved with green and red, trust me. Depending on the jobsite I'm at, they could mean opposite things for a motor or valve than a different place. It's especially annoying when places change their standard in the middle of development.
Example:
Location 1)
red=running/unsafe, green means off/safe
Location 2)
red=stopped, green means running
We also use slave/master for a lot of communication protocols when describing the system that is initiating a request for data a transfer and the location the data is coming/going.
A new term would be fine, but none so far seem as universal in meaning as slave/master.
The master/slave dichotomy in technology has never once made me feel comfortable using it. I work in Software Security and encourage my team to use our internal terms Active/Passive in lieu of Master/Slave when writing code and designing the UI. I've also personally asked a technical writer several releases ago to use the Active/Passive naming convention in our external docs.
Hell, this naming convention even extends out from what I do for a living and into my favorite hobby of photography:
in this case we can switch to command unit and something like subordinate units. A little too military but the main idea is the chain of command anyway.
I agree with her.
And also holy crap, I was an intern along side Leah about 15 years ago. Seems she's doing alright for herself.
And also holy crap, I was an intern along side Leah about 15 years ago. Seems she's doing alright for herself.
Google banned this language a few years ago.
reason.com
Google Told Employees to Delete Politically Incorrect Language From Code
"The cost of not doing this is the harm done to other Googlers every time they encounter these terms," says the company's diversity and inclusion team.
reason.com
Just to add to the discussion, as a software developer from a non-english country, a lot of those English terms are used without translation in our country in a daily basis. As software development is not a us centric thing anymore this cultural change will be harder worldwide. In Japan for example スレーブ/slave, マスター/master, ホワイトリスト/whitelist and ブラックリスト/blacklist were imported from US but don't have the same negative connotation as the slavery history was different.
The terminology is used with AI and neural networks nowadays.
In lieu of calling things "master" which I'm not sure I directly have a problem with, but I also have no real attachment to - an easy alternative could be calling it "Database Prime" or "Drive Prime"
Prime is a cool word I want it used D:
Prime is a cool word I want it used D:
"Prime" is often used to detonate alternates, derivations, or transformations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_(symbol)). It could be reasonably understood to mean the exact opposite of what you are thinking.
Some time back most databases made the transition from master/slave to primary/replica or standby. For instance, Drupal:
Replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica"
Replace master/slave with primary/secondary.
www.drupal.org
except more often it is used used to denote the "first" or original in common language. I've never seen the prime you showed used in tech in all my years of working in it.