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Comment by maallooc | Hacker News Reader

Master/slave is a model of asymmetric communication or control where one device or process controls one or more other devices or processes and serves as their communication hub. From wikipedia. Primary/secondary does not accurately depict the meaning.

>inb4 we can sacrifice accuracy over feeling

You're welcome.

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Would you please stop using HN for ideological flamewar? You've been doing it a lot, it's not what this site is for, and we ban such accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Master/slave is a model of asymmetric communication or control where one device or process controls one or more other devices or processes and serves as their communication hub.

Exactly. That's why it's a bad choice of name for IDE controllers and for the main boot record, where the master does not control the slave.

> inb4 we can sacrifice accuracy over feeling

Firmly agree that we should not sacrifice accuracy over feeling. I have no sympathy for people whose feelings are hurt because they're told that "master"/"slave" terminology is inaccurate. Facts don't care about your feelings.

Actually it makes sense because the slave always ask the master whether they're currently communicating with the controller. Master boot record also, because the program from the record controls the boot process of associated partitions.

Oh, sorry, you're right - when a slave wants to go talk to someone, he can do so at any time as long as the master isn't currently talking to someone. And the slave gets no orders from the master, both the master and the slave get orders from someone else.

And yes, the master makes no decisions on his own, the master simply sees which of the slaves has indicated that he wishes to be passed control, and then the master passes all control onto that slave and leaves.

I completely forgot what slavery means. I thought that slavery meant that masters controlled the slaves and the slaves didn't have freedom. Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You do it often enough that I wince when I see your username in threads like this, even though you're generally a good HN contributor.

Comments like this do not help, regardless of how right you are on the underlying issues.

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