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L.A. County Bans Use Of "Master/Slave" Term
SlashChick writes "In an interesting twist on political correctness, L.A. County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave' (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, 'someone within the County bureaucracy... had taken offense at "master/slave" references and complained to the board.' L.A. County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references. Incredible. Read the full story."
From: Dave Schroeder <das@doit.wisc.edu>
/00303043
d _ATA.htm
c onf_Jumpering.htm
Subject: Computer terminology
Date: November 24, 2003 12:27:14 PM CST
To: jsandoval@isd.co.la.ca.us
Cc: seconddistrict@bos.co.la.ca.us, thirddistrict@bos.co.la.ca.us, fourthdistrict@bos.co.la.ca.us, fifthdistrict@bos.co.la.ca.us, firstdistrict@bos.co.la.ca.us
Regarding the recent memo sent to a county vendor regarding "master/slave", it may interest you to know that this is, and has been for years, the accepted and only terminology that refers to the hierarchy of the most commonly used computer hard drive interface in the world, known as "IDE" or "ATA". It may also interest you to know one of the definitions of "master" and "slave" according to Merriam-Webster:
master - 3 a master mechanism or device
slave - 5 a device that is directly responsive to another
And from the definitive reference on the English language, Oxford University's Oxford English Dictionary:
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry
master - e. A component of a system which controls or regulates the operation of one or more of the system's other components. Cf. SLAVE n. 5b. See also master-slave, sense C. 6.
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00227171
slave - c. techn. Used to denote a subsidiary device, esp. one which is controlled by, or which follows accurately the movements of, another device.
master-slave a. (attrib.) (b) chiefly Electronics and Computing, designating or relating to a system in which one component controls the behaviour of one or more other components.
The names "master" and "slave" are codified in the official ANSI ATA-1 interface standard, X3.221-1994, titled "AT Attachment Interface for Disk Drives". You may be aware that ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, is the largest standards body in the United States. It would seem odd that a county purchasing agency would want to throw out well established standard names created over years of cooperation and deliberation by scientists, engineers, and standards experts. Further, almost every hard disk currently in the possession of the county has the words "MASTER" and "SLAVE" printed directly on them. Perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to destroy this labeling on each drive, spending thousands of manhours and voiding manufacturers' warranties in the process. Your next computing equipment bid will likely be an interesting one, since all hard drive manufacturers refer to their drives using the same terminology.
Insisting that vendors comply with the requirements in the memo makes the county look extremely, extremely foolish, and directly flies in the face of accepted, descriptive technical names for device interaction. You may also wish to caution your vendors about using the words "male" and "female" in the description of plumbing and electrical fixtures.
Regards,
Dave Schroeder
Los Angeles County native
cc: County Board
Ref:
ATA (ATA-1)
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/st
Single, Master and Slave Drives and Jumpering
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/
INCITS Technical Committee 13 (T13), responsible for X3.221-1994
http://www.t13.org/
I live in LA. This PC BS has gone far enough!! More than just black people were slaves. Romans had slaves, greeks had slaves, the chinese have slave labor. dammit, the whole master-slave thing accurately describes the connection between the devices
Of course this should also be sent to the big auto manufacturers and parts vendors who provide master and slave cylinders (part of the automotive brake and clutch systems, respectively).
Primary/Secondary would refer to the IDE channels.
That would cause MORE confusion if used to describe drives. "The primary drive on the primary controller" vs "The Master on the Primary controller"
Eh, I guess that you *could* interchange the two, but master/slave *is* an industry standard.
Actually the IDE interface on the motherboard is just a 'host adapter' while the brains reside on the 'master' drive.
The slave drive is just that: a slave. Therefore it behooves you to put the most modern drive in as the master to avoid compatibility issues.
This was much more significant back in the days when I had my first WD 40mb - not so much now.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The correct spelling is "newspeak", a joining of "new" and "speak".
Organizations like the Unitarian Universalist Association -- known for its politically correct constituency -- were quick to rename "webmasters" to "web weavers" for this exact reason. All said, perhaps a good thing; however, it does require a shift of convention and a grain of salt. The shift of convention is necessary for those terms which explicitly conjure bad feelings; the grain of salt for those which are simply ridiculous.
Of course, this is a perfectly natural step in the development of Newspeak.
Clearly the entire concept of a Master/Slave relationship is unacceptable to BB. It promotes a distrust of authority. I trust that the LA county ISD is working hard to strike all references to masters and slaves from public school textbooks.
Next they can hire some ASEAN consultants for assistance in firewalling the Internet at the county borders.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
About 15 years ago my town (Ithaca, NY) started recycling paper and every school had two bins in each classroom, one labeled 'white only' and one labeled 'colored' - since, at the time, the recyclers didn't want the two mixed when pulped. As a joke, a kid scrawled the word 'racist' on one of the bins, and the administration freaked out. Within a few days the labels were changed to 'bleached' and 'dyed'.
Around the same time the city was exploring alternative names for 'manhole' and 'manhole cover'. Many suggestions were submitted, but none were euphonious to be adopted ('sewer hole', 'conduit entry point') and in the end nothing happened.
So, sometimes offense can be avoided when simple and obvious alternatives can be found, but sometimes it can't. In the case of 'master'/'slave', the nomenclature is too established and there is no obvious alternative, so I doubt anything would come of this.
(In the case of 'male'/'female' cable connectors, we could just as easily get along with plug/socket|jack)
Ithaca is the same town where there were serious debates about eliminating the word HIStory, as it was gender-biased. A simple counter of the bias of the word HERitage was enough to stop that.
every stain tells a story
why dont ya just get over it!!! Or how about actually finding out what really went on. And dont say the US Supreme Court threw the election, because they did no such thing. If anything the Florida Supreme Court screwed up. Let me explain.
The US Constitution has this weird idea that no one is better than anyone else, aka Equal Protection. This idea extends to election law, in that no ones vote counts more than anyone elses.
Now when the Gore realized how close the election was, his buddies in the Democratic party wanted to count just areas that vote heavily Democratic. The Repuplicans requested that the entire state be counted. First the Democrats got a judge in theses areas to approve a recount. Then the Republicans got a higher court to over turn that decision. Next, Gore's buddies appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which is predominantly Democratic, which OK'd the limited recount. The Republican Party appealed to the US Supreme Court, stating that a limited recount violated equal protection.
Now when the case was heard by the U.S Supreme court, they heard the Bush lawyers arguing for a state wide recount, while the Gore lawyers argued a) against a statewide recount and b)extenting the deadline for certifying election results ( defined by Florida law to be due by the 13th of December )
The US Supreme Court's decision therefore two parts. The U.S Supreme court agreed by a 7-2 vote that a limited recount violated the U.S Constitution. The Supreme Court decide by a 5-4 vote that it would not overturn the Florida law establishing a deadline for certification of election results, since that law did not violate the US Constitution in any way. This decision came down on a Thursday and the election results had to be certified on the following Monday. There simply was not enough time to do a recount.
Like I said Gore and his buddies and the Florida Supreme Court kissed the pooch on this one. If they would have been behind a state wide recount things might have turned out different. But what do you expect from a bunch of ninnys...
How about taking the Worlds Smallest Politica QuizSELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
0 rows returned
The infamous "niggardly" case is a bit different, IMO. Yes, it's a perfectly good word, and yes, it has nothing to do with race -- but it's also a rather archaic word (I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone use it in a sentence, except to discuss the case) and, obviously, has a lot of potential to be misunderstood. As I said at the time, using "niggardly" in a room full of black people is kind of like being in a room full of homosexuals and saying, "It's cold in here -- throw another fagot in the fire."
All that being said, the person who complained about "master/slave" on racial grounds is not only an idiot, but also a racist. Slavery is not and never has been confined to any one group of people based on the color of their skin. There have always been, and unfortunately still are, slaves of every race.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It is true that as far as the user is concerned, the difference between master and slave on an IDE bus boils down to which drive is "first".
However, the terms "master" and "slave" directly relate to the two drives and how they relate to the IDE controller and system. Yes, they don't send commands to eachother, but the master constrains the clocking on the bus and the slave is, well, slaved to the clocking the master negotiates. That is why you must have a master even if there is no slave. Further, "cable select" selects the master via its position on the cable, but it is still the master.
Even a quick google on IDE handshake clocking would reveal to you that there is *TECHNOLOGY* involved in the distinction.
For instance, you always make your fastest device on the IDE bus the master, otherwise, if the slower device were the master the faster device would be bounded to clock with the slower. (Etc.)
My full attention isn't being paid to this post, but it clearly trumps your "but the bios lets me switch them" level of investigation.
It is not so much the questioners that are causing the fall of this society, it is the persons like yourself, willing to answer those questions without even bothering to decide if they have the requsite knowledge.
sigh.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Not that I agree with LA county on this one, but I think you are assuming that human slavery has been eradicated. It has not. Not even in the U.S.
Support SETI@home
> black people have every reason to be pissed about it.
Black people aren't the only ones who have been slaves.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
They're not sending the letter to the manufacturers, just the distributors/vendors who sell the products to the county. Since the manufacturers aren't going to do custom production for as small a quantity as LA County buys and they know the distributors/vendors have to buy drives regardless, I don't see the manufacturers changing their terminology. The vendors aren't going to take on the costs of custom documentation etc., so I suspect LA County will soon be in the position of either reversing that request or not being able to buy hard drives at anything below quadruple list price.
Singular 'they' is perfectly acceptable English, in use since at least the 14th century A.D.
It was only in the 19th century that some grammarians attempted to rid us of that usage, based on the fact that it didn't match up with Latin.
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html
http://www.vocabula.com/2003/VRSept03Altieri.htm
Apprentices aren't slaves. At least not in the majority of cases. Admittedly, they're underpaid and maltreated a lot, but they always have the choice to walk out. It may not be a sensible thing to do, but that doesn't change the fact that it is possible and totally legal for them to do so.
Act of parliment (1890? about then) made it illegal to use "they" for singular
It's wonderful to see how these things get garbled. There was an Interpretation Act around 1889. One of the things it did was to make it officially unimportant whether a singular or plural word is used in (UK) legislation. The aim there was to get rid of one kind of lawyers' delight (like arguing that if a law makes it illegal to steal horses, then could it still be legal to steal only one horse?). It had nothing to do with making the use of singulars or plurals illegal!!
If you check the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see that "they", "them", "their", and even "themselves" are used in the singular and have been for at least six hundred years. The notion that "they" is only plural is a modern invention, not based in actual use. Shakespeare and Chaucer used these words as singular.
In looking at the older OED citations, such as "Bath ware made sun and mon, Aither wit ther ouen light" from the 1300s, it is remarkable to note the singularity of "their" has remained steady in the English language while so much else changed around it. Any feature that has survived so much change over so long a period is clearly well established. The notion that it is plural only is a myth that deserves to be dismissed.