Daily Archives: November 25, 2003

Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians:

Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades – but is still in perfect health.

Can a new Shazzie diet’n’book combo be far behind? The videos will be simpler, that’s for sure.

Squiddies and exsquiddies of some vintage will remember Mark Phillips, one-time product manager, occasionally known as The Captain.

He was in charge of things when we were adding arrays to the product for scalability. We originally called the array member in charge the “master”, and the subordinate servers the “slaves”. These terms were used in command-line tools, documentation, etc.

The Captain objected to “master” and “slave”, since they might possibly offend. We countered that master/slave was well-established terminology in the computer industry, but he wouldn’t budge. We eventually settled on “primary” and “secondary”, and cursed The Captain whenever we spotted another mention of “master” or “slave” that needed to change. (Some of us were still doing this five years later, as engineers occasionally wrote log messages using the original terminology, preserved in places deep within the code.)

What a waste of time, we thought. But it looks like The Captain was right all along. Los Angeles County recently announced that “based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, [master/slave] is not an acceptable identification label“.