Oh cool, the Bluetooth 5.1 specification is out. Nice. *control-F* master-slave... 2,000 results Version 5.1 of the Bluetooth wireless networking specification debuted recently, bringing with it the ability to identify the direction of a transmitting Bluetooth device from a receiving antenna – and divisive technical jargon. Directional location finding has the potential to improve Bluetooth location-based services and …
As an absolutely avid OpenBSD user I admit that I have to give up a lot of luxuries...
... luckily I have never missed Bluetooth. I always found it a big fiddly pile of crap all the way since Windows XP.
If Bluetooth does get its shite together, congratulations, you have just made a connection that RS-232 could have achieved. Then you need to install the driver to actually operate on the data and that is always an absolute mess.
Does anyone else have a better experience with it compared to say, USB?
I'm not sure how I would go about using my hands-free setup in the car with RS-232?
(Yeah, I know, you could use e.g. SLIP and then IP networking to handle the logical channels you get from Bluetooth, and build some mechanism to stream audio over IP and provide the out-of-band signalling used to indicate incoming/outgoing calls, but that's an enormous amount of faff, and definitely as much of a hassle as doing it with Bluetooth)
Multiple cars, multiple Bluetooth phones, headsets, etc. I've yet to find one that works consistently and reliably. Sometimes it connects immediately, sometimes I wade through menus. I've yet to discern a pattern, aside from phases of the moon.
At this point if there's an option to using Bluetooth that's what I'll choose.
This is correct. And the reason is that early protocols were sufficiently ambiguous that two implementations that followed the specifications to the letter would still end up as unable to connect. One of my clients were bitten by this. And when this was clear there was already a huge number of products on the market.
So the specifications were redrafted but because of all the existing products they had to retain backward compatibility - with semicompatible products. It is easy to say now that they should have declared a flag day but synchronising this with ALL members of the Bluetooth SIG is hard.
My previous phone (an HTC One) hated connecting to my car (Honda Accord). Had to restart the phone every morning if I wanted it to stream music. Switched to an iPhone 6s and haven't had problems since.
Admittedly, that phone didn't seem to like any network. Bad signal on the cell network, almost never worked with wi-fi calling, so I wasn't too sad to dump it.
Headsets I've had better luck with though. Picked up a pair of Shure wireless/wired earbuds for Christmas and I've had no trouble connecting them to anything I've tried. Those replaced a BT adapter for wired headphones that I'd had for about 10 years before it started to go wonky.
One odd benefit of BT is that it tells me if I try to leave the house without my phone. My car makes the connection while I'm still in the garage and starts playing music, but it cuts out before I've gone more than a few feet, thus reminding me to go back and get my phone... again.
First, comparing Bluetooth to RS-232 or USB is asinine, since the latter cannot operate without wires in your OpenBSD world.
Second, you're perfectly welcome to continue to insist that every peripheral come wired to your computer. It's not clear that you really are giving up a lot of luxuries. You don't have a basis of comparison to make such a judgment.
Third, your complaint about the driver is misplaced, since you would also have to load drivers for RS-232 or USB if they were missing from your kernel. By the same token, you could avoid separately loading drivers for Bluetooth merely by running a kernel with the necessary driver already in place. If those constitute an absolute mess, then perhaps OpenBSD isn't for you.
comparing Bluetooth to RS-232 or USB is asinine, since the latter cannot operate without wires
Years (decades) ago, back in the days when HMG was sniffy about private radio spectrum use, a friend of mine had a remote controlled aircraft that worked over RS-232, and fairly obviously that didn't have wires. He use an LED on the controller and an IR receiver attached to a small micro in the aircraft and it worked fine.
"...and it worked fine"
Paint me sceptical but I do not believe that. IR in daylight at various angles, speeds and at significant distance?
I could imagine that it might work in good conditions in a remote controlled car if you followed behind it pointing the controller at the receiver, but a plane - I'd have to see it myself.
IrDA for instance needed good alignment and worked over a metre or so. Even my TV remote (very low bandwidth) needs semi accurate positioning.
"Free space optical communication" is the term and with lenses it works across more than 1 km. A powerful IR LED will work around 100 m. The demonstration I saw (and also tried myself, was a remote controlled model helicopter. Daylight is not a big problem with IR and in any case you use a carrier rather than baseband. A lock in amp will recover even tiny signals from the noise.
Most IrDA LEDs operate in the uW range which is handy for privacy. 1W IR LEDs are also available for 1 million times the power output. Using the inverse scaling law you see this improves range a lot.
You can't use lenses very easily when controlling a model plane unless you controller also has some kind of tracking system or a scope to look through to ensure alignment.
Daylight is a problem with IR as it causes swamping of the signal, for instance when the plane turns and the receiver is pointing into sunlight.
The receiver would need to detect in a half sphere so that the plane could be pointing in any direction and at any reasonable angle.
The latency and bandwidth would have to be high enough to make quick, precise reactions to the remote so that it doesn't over-correct (auto levelling systems wouldn't have been available then).
I'm pretty sure that 1W IR LEDs were not available at a time when there was no reasonable public spectrum available for RF transmission.
So I stand by my statement that "it worked fine" seems unlikely. It "just about worked while on the ground but instantly crashed 2 seconds after take off" I could believe.
The remote control has a IR diode that emits light with a hemispherical distribution and is the size of the end of your index finger. The receiver is hard to see but appears to be sensitive over a wider area so when manoeuvring we don't lose control.
As for bandwidth, back in the day 9600 bps was considered good and 57600 bps was amazing. IrDA at the slowest rate supports 115200 bps.
Regarding power, I remember powerful red LED was easily available in 1978 when I started working with these and IR was more powerful. Longer wavelengths were always easier to make and operate at high power. To remind myself I saw this at Wikipedia:
In 1957, Braunstein further demonstrated that the rudimentary devices could be used for non-radio communication across a short distance. As noted by Kroemer[23] Braunstein "…had set up a simple optical communications link: Music emerging from a record player was used via suitable electronics to modulate the forward current of a GaAs diode. The emitted light was detected by a PbS diode some distance away. This signal was fed into an audio amplifier and played back by a loudspeaker. Intercepting the beam stopped the music. We had a great deal of fun playing with this setup." This setup presaged the use of LEDs for optical communication applications.
And that was in 1957. And for music to be useful you need several kHz bandwidth. The trick to make it work in daylight is the modulation. There is a reason why you do not use baseband, even on a TV remote.
You may consider as you wish but it is actual use that counts.
If he did that as a hobbyist and got it to work, he could have made a fortune working at the likes of Nokia. Typically their IrDA modems needed a clear and sustained line of sight, no bright lights, the correct sequence to establish a handshake (granted the plane would be one way traffic) and a waning moon to function.
To pull that off on a moving plane outside in the sunshine? I'm unconvinced...
Bluetooth has gotten better... but it still really sucks.
Stuff still has limited (or no) ability to pair with multiple devices - what?! I might want to use this expensive Bluetooth keyboard with something other than my phone?! You mean I might want to pair my $900 motorcycle helmet communications with more than one phone? Heretic!
Stuff still sort of assumes it'll be paired with stuff from the same manufacturer.
I tried setting up a Bluetooth beacon on my motorcycle, to activate my garage door app when I got on it. Never got it working after weeks of coding.
BT still isn't great. It can be flakey. Too many times when it's refused to accept that the other device is there, to pair. Or indeed to accept that the usual device isn't but a different one is. Or, in the car, strangely differing levels of utility. One phone will send a contacts list to the car's handsfree, another won't. I assume that this is in the phone design and how it implements BT. But ether way there's no consistency in what the whole shebang can be expected to do
It's nearly always worked very well for me. My connects to my car via BT and can be used to stream music, satnav instructions and of course handle calls. I have several BT headphones they work seamlessly - a couple from rather surprising distances like the eight metres from my coat to the kitchen at work (going through a substantial stone wall on the way).
I've recently purchased a Game Golf Pro it apparently uses BT to link the sensors on the club grips to a medallion on my belt (and/or my phone) so that I can just pick a club out of the bag and use it and it will register it.
So it works well.
But there was one failure. I bought a hands free mic/headset to use at work with my computer and I never managed to get that to work. Windows 10 would see the device and apparently pair with it but then completely failed to see it as any kind of audio device. But hey - I don't blame BT for that. I blame Windows 10.
I find that BT works or doesn't. when it doesn't faffing can always fix it but I can't be bothered.
I set up my car BT to connect to family phones, that just works. Even for music, calls, if the phone BT is turned on after the car etc.
I set up BT speakers and audio cable to BT adaptors. They just work. I set up Bluetooth pairing for Internet when one phone runs out of data. It just works. But if I send an image from a random device to another randon devie it's pot luck time.
BT drivers on PC used to be atrocious as they were tied to the chipset used and so you couldn't have a BT dongle in a laptop with an otherwise crappy BT internal module, etc. Pretty much those situations are resolving themselves as BT drivers standardise.
Hell, if you use a Wiimote, you're using BT. You can even connect them to a standard PC.
My wife was struggling to understand the differences between mobile data, wifi and bluetooth on her phone, and why she might want to turn them on or off depending where she is and what she's trying to do.
A process of explanation immensely complicated by the fact that she's with British Telecom, so the toggle for mobile data is labelled 'BT' and the toggle for bluetooth is also labelled 'BT'.
Sigh.
Mobile data is this phone connecting to the Internet. It costs money.
Wifi is this phone connecting to the house's Internet. It doesn't cost money.
Bluetooth is this phone connecting to something else. Headsets, other phones.
Though, in theory, you can connect using Bluetooth to another phone's mobile data offering (Bluetooth PAN), it's very old-hat and I've literally only ever used it once as any decent phone has Wifi hotspot functionality (which is harder to explain but still only "Hotspot is this phone offering out its Internet to other phones by pretending to be Wifi. It costs the hotspot phone money, but not the others").
You probably have to tell windows to output the audio through the Bluetooth. I've had this sort of issue before and usually its just a case of manually changing the audio since it doesn't always automatically switch over (even more fun when software chooses which audio to use.... Webex I'm looking at you)
I used to find Bluetooth flakey for audio especially on Windows a dozen years back. These days I rarely use Bluetooth on my computer (mouse uses proprietary Logitech dongle) but I'm pleasantly surprised at how reliable it is on my phone, even when paired to cheap headsets. The only issue I've had in recent years was my phone just refusing to pair to a Ford Transit. I can understand though how you might mistrust Bluetooth today if you've had bad experiences in the past ( it took me a while to get over my shyness after being bitten)
For listening to podcasts (where maybe audio quality isn't as crucial when listening to music) whilst doing active work, the freedom from wires is great. I leave my phone charging whilst moving around the room, I can leave the phone in an area of good cellular signal whilst I clean inside a steel tank, and - most wonderfully - I don't catch the cable on anything that results in the ear buds being rudely popped from my ears.
Much as I might want premium earphones for active noise cancellation, I know that I would only lose or break them so cheap, near expendible buds are my most sensible option.
That said, I'm currently using the wired earbuds that came with with Samsung, with a bit of malleable silicone earplug to create a better seal.
Indeed, the last issue I had with audio wasn't Bluetooth's fault. Microsoft's Silverlight, on which a streaming TV service ( Netflix iirc) runs on MacOS, doesn't allow Bluetooth audio streaming due to DRM issues. Wouldn't be so bad, but there no dialogue box telling you this, you're expected to research it yourself. And really, if I wanted to copy the soundtrack of a Netflix series, I wouldn't be using Bluetooth.
"The authors of the revised spec, however, missed the memo that master-slave terminology is inconsistent with inclusive development communities and has been purged from various open source projects. The almost 3,000 page spec is littered with the terms – each appears about 2,000 times."
Pffftt... that's so funny. Wait? You're not joking?
Quoting from Reddit user nanodano:
Next on the list of things deemed too offensive:
Use of the term 'female' and 'male' when referring to adapters
Use of the term 'kill' when referring to ending a process
Use of 'whitelist' and 'blacklist'
The newly changed 'parent' reference because now people will say 'kill the parent' when referring to killing the master process
The newly changed 'parent/worker' relation because it insinuates children are no more than workers to parents
EDIT: more, contributed by others
Use of the term 'classes' because the class system represent a history of inequality
Use of the term 'whitespace' because it shows a color bias
Using the term 'inheritance' because it's not fair that all objects do not have equal permissions
Use of the term 'penetration testing' in security because it can taken as a sexual reference
> Please don't force me to watch Star Trek Discovery again
It's gone a bit Special Circumstances, with Michelle Yeoh being part of a Star Fleet dirty tricks unit. Cool! This idea of a utopian society using tricks, brutality and terror seems to have upset Trekkies ( who can just watch the Orville) but as an Iain M Banks fan it doesn't bother me, except for: Hey Amazon, what's going on with your Consider Phlebas adaptation?!
Use of the term 'partition' because it has colonialist connotations - disks will now be divided into 'spaces' (some of which might be safe)
Use of the term 'device driver' because it implies a lack of choice on the part of the device - the new term is 'device facilitator' which will enable dialogues on an equal basis between operating system and hardware device.
-- This post has been approved by the Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terminological Ontologies and their Rehabilitation Into Society.
I grew up within a couple or so miles of an area that had coal mines. Although I don't, so far as I know, have any actual miners in my direct ancestry some of my C18th and C19th relatives were. I also have ancestors with the surname Collier which probably means that somewhere along the line I'm descended from charcoal burners who would have been just as blackened by their occupation.
On these counts I find the blogger's failure to respect the occupations of those relatives and ancestors of mine to be deeply offensive. The article should be taken down forthwith.
>On these counts I find the blogger's failure to respect the occupations of those relatives.....
I blame the educational system myself. A lack of historical perspective coupled with a tendency to historical romanticism leads to a mindset that makes assumptions about the historical relationships between races, nationalities and genders that are pure fantasy. One of the biggies (for example) is superimposing US cultural history on UK history -- the UK is, and always has been, class based (it could be traced back tot he Normans) so when it came to screwing over the lower orders British society was distinctly equal opportunity. This mindset persisted into the 1940s where in the colonies like Singapore officers and their ladies occupied the sidewalks ("pavement") while lower ranks and natives walked in the gutter. We have thankfully evolved a lot since then but instead of achieving a state of egalitarian enlightenment we're mired in a particularly unpleasant form of Puritanism, one that I rather suspect is engineered rather than evolved, being designed to fracture any nascent attempt at class solidarity. (You can tell this by the derogatory comments I'll get about using the term 'class'....Psyops Lives!)
"it could be traced back tot he Normans"
You can probably go further back still, at least to the hegemony of Wessex. They started a tax collection system to pay Danegeld. Beware the usual saying about Danegeld. The reality was that you could get rid of the Dane but you couldn't get rid of the geld. Domesday records the valuation for geld of each property TRE, ie. at the death of Edward the Confessor a few months before Hastings. England was already a feudal country, not necessarily along the exact lines of Norman England but feudal enough.
The NYTimes has a longer version of the same article. It sounded absurd until it got to the part where they talked about all the stuff that had to be removed when translating the books into a movie because it was even worse. Plenty of uses of "hottentot" were cited. It also pointed out that a few of them made it back into the new movie in different forms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/movies/mary-poppins-returns-blackface.html
Let's face it. The reviewer was never going to *read* the whole spec. I did it for version 1 and it took 10 days of two hours a day. I remain deeply scarred by the experience.
As originally specified, Bluetooth was meant to be a point to point solution. It was only when the specification was merged with Motorola's "Piano" piconet protocol that the problems began. It adopted "big" networking and was only saved from implementing IBMs SNA by adopting OSI.
Actually removing some terminology might be useful for changing design thinking. In a nod to Mel Conway seminal article "How do committees invent?". If we can remove any reference to "master", "parent" or "manager" we could avoid command and control thinking pervading designa that should be as autonomous as possible.
You mean I might have trouble getting my old orphancontrol.sh script into production nowadays?
(quick hackup to solve temp problem of buggy app throwing off orphan processes)
e.g.:
if [ "${ORPHANPROCESSES:-NoOrphansFound}" = "NoOrphansFound" ]
...
else
# kill them if invoked with -k or else dump a reportif [ "$RUNMODE" = "DIEDIEDIEYOUMOTHERLESSSWINE" ]
then
This post has been deleted by its author
Technical terminology has specific meanings. Irrespective of how the diligent umbrage takers may dislike terms adopted as technical (a) need to remain and retain that technical meaning and (b) should be seen as having a context of their own in which they are understood irrespective of their meanings in other contexts.
(a) For one thing existing technical documentation isn't going to be rewritten to accommodate feelings of some third party unless that third party is prepared to pay for it and the economic cost of scrapping it instead would be too huge to bear. For another as soon as the grip on strict terminology is loosened marketing are likely to muscle in, change meanings to suit themselves and suddenly we lose all ability to express anything with adequate precision.
(b) There really is no necessity, and sometimes even no possibility, to connect a term with any other context. For instance we all know what a right hand thread is but how does that meaning connect to one's right hand? Or even depend on having a right hand? Indeed, if someone finds any of these terms the OP lists as offensive they can only do so by thinking of them in some other context where they would be offensive but they shouldn't be thinking like that as it's an entirely unacceptable way of thinking to their way of thinking. They should wash their minds with soap and water.
Plus, a simple observation, master/slave terminology is exactly correct. Changing the terminology will not suddenly rewrite the history of North America or indeed change the status of a single modern slave.
However, for many people talking about doing things is seen as being as effective as actually doing something. Let's suppress the terminology and that's as good as the expensive and tedious process of uncovering and ending slavery.
Indeed. Master/slave is exactly what's going on in the spec. It's disheartening that we as a society seem to no longer have enough nuance to find slavery of humans offensive, while at the same time being fine with "slavery" of inanimate objects. An adult ought to be able to perform reasoning on concepts more complicated than one single word.
This post has been deleted by its author
Just think of Master/Slave in BDSM terms, then *DEMAND* that we be recognized as BDSM'ers, and our rights MUST be respected, affirmative action special treatment blah blah. I'll laugh while the chaos ensues and a bunch of SJW's step up to the task to "defend us", and eat popcorn and drink beer.
Ok to make it official (again) there's:
master/slave
dominant/submissive
giver/getter
top/bottom
Uki/Semi (it's a JUDO term. Judo. Heh)
etc. (I'm, at a loss now, don't wanna do another google search on BDSM terminology)
(and the safety word is: semprini)
...use of 'edge-triggered' because trigger is a trigger. Oh, so much trigger, someone should write an angry letter or something.
"You normally concentrate on serious stuff, not nonsense like the terminology being used."
Unfortunately outside the STEM world an awful lot of people do just that. The technical term for them is "users", and nowadays we can't simply mark them as "Out of scope" and leave a trainer to pick up the pieces.
This post has been deleted by its author
Are Bluetooth beacons still designed so that a third party must translate their UUID into coordinates? I've never bought the claim that headphone jacks were removed to free up space and improve sound quality. It had to be something sleazy like forcing people to turn on Bluetooth more often to broaden the tracking power of beacons. Bluetooth beacons, if I remember correctly, were invented as a means for high resolution tracking of people in shopping areas. High-resolution navigation without GPS was a side effect used to sell the idea to phone users.
I give a fair number of presentations and have found Bluetooth very helpful for that. I have a "presenter" (manufacturer's name for it) I hold onto which has a laser pointer and the slide advance/back/darken screen buttons on it. The computer side is a tiny Bluetooth dongle that plugs into a USB socket on my laptop. It works Impress a treat. The dongle even stores inside the presenter when not in use. Very handy little gadget.
The BT ones don't even necessarily need a dongle since your machine might have that radio already, but those with a proprietary dongle (e.g. nRF24L01+ radio) are transparent-- just a USB thing with mouse and/or keyboard endpoints. Guess which one I like? The one that works already as a generic HID with every system down to KolibriOS.
The flaw in Bluetooth is that it adheres to the OSI specification for networks. This gives it very limited connectivity options, adequate for point to point wire replacement for limited classes of data transfer (hence those 'profiles') but otherwise not very flexible. (OSI is still entrenched in standards bodies which results in all sorts of kludges to get 'real' networking -- look at WiFi for an example where you're see the traffic is carried on LLC Type 2 frames which then host Ethernet format frames on top....its very inefficient). Compared to that the master/slave thing is just PC nonsense -- it has a very specific meaning in machinery that has absolutely nothing to do with the social context, historical or contemporary.
For those who think purging the language of undesirable terminology is a good idea I suggest reading Orwell's "1984". And I mean reading it, not watching the movie or the summary on Wikipedia (or wherever). Newspeak, the language in development by ingsoc, has a very deliberate purpose -- its intended to make dissent impossible by removing the ability to express dissident thoughts. (But I suppose I'm just out of date, "old and in the way", so I'll leave everyone to their endless search for feeling entirely comfortable and I'll retire to the cafe with my Victory Gin....)
Spot on. Orwell was very set on highlighting the dangers of controlling thoughts and actions by manipulating speech. People often ignore or miss this fact when quoting passages from 1984, as if it were a general warning against all forms of non-descript totalitarianism. I also recommend reading his essay "Politics and the English Language" (available through all good search engines) which discourages readers from using overly complicated or flowery language, to enhance clarity of meaning.
When teaching (university level..) I usually tell them that "students have no sex", and that all pronouns I use to address the group or describe students in general are meaningless.
I also tell them to approach me, either directly or indirectly through the students' union or a friend to tell me if I should be more careful / inclusive / considerate with anything, including these things. I got a lot of comments for other things, and try to change things, but none in this case. Students here are a bit more grown up.
(and I use the three grammatical genus randomly, sometimes changing mid sentence)
"all pronouns I use to address the group or describe students in general are meaningless"
If I were in that position I'd probably take the line that as a male I personally find it offensive that "my" pronoun has been hijacked for the general usage.
The "I'm a bigger snowflake than you" approach is likely to be one they haven't anticipated.
This post has been deleted by its author
There's something very strange going on in the US/North america where social media is enabling a bunch of people who are looking to be offended. Every statement, comment and word is dissected to define some myriad way in which it causes offence.
Genuine offense is not something one needs to search for.
This mindless SJW "I am offended by everything" stance means that genuine cases get drowned in these fickle ones.
This is also coupled with a hijacking of language and the enforcement of terms that one must use, with the implication that *not* using specific words is offensive.
This reminds me of the Handmaid's Tale with the equivalent being "Under his Eye" and "Blessed be the fruit".
The blog post where the person sees coal miners and equates it to racist hatred speaks more about their thinking rather than what is actually happening. They should ask themselves why they see that in something that was a normal physical occurrence of a job. It ironic that they seek censorship of historical fact, that has nothing to do with racism, for their individual issues, but equally (and rightly) want the *facts* of racism brought out..
“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance”
BTW they would have to burn the Bible - what a minefield of offence. Imagine the word of god edited now for the SJW universe.
If someone finds the phrase master/slave or male/female offensive when used to describe a communication spec or electrical connector, they really do have bigger problems they should be dealing with.
The number of people of people who need a good hard "get a grip" slap is growing so high that my hand is getting quite sore.
Let us now start pandering to those who dislike the terms Client and Server - Server being particularly problematic as it implies a subservient role.
The terms Provider and Consumer are much more closely fitting our modern day sensibilities.
So, all together now, Apache is not a web server. It is a web resources provider. So much simpler.
with respect to adopting the bullshit around this kind of crap... (i.e. the SJW "sensitivity" bullshit)
neither do MOST people, from what I've seen. I generally rebel against the entire concept. I'll continue to use 'he' as a generic pronoun with the sex of the subject is not known. "The baby crapped HIS diaper". It was a girl? Well, the sentence is still grammatically correct. I won't change it.
And *NEVER* *EVAR* use "the singular 'their'" - *shudder*
Icon because too many people fall into this trap and give "them" what "they" want, those bullies! NO rewards for bad behavior!
Am I allowed to say curate's egg?
Interesting being able to pinpoint locations, but I shudder to think what complexity it adds to an already severely overloaded protocol.
Master-Slave? Good on them for not following the nonsensical PC crowd. As I said when this came up previously, it is a very exact and correct description of the relationship.
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
