I’ve heard parent & child.
Sabotaged?
No, sabotaged means damaged, made to fail. These programs are partially functional and can work if you send the author money. Often one payment is enough to unlock what you need, but more and more they are trying to further the ugly subscription model.
Watered down?
There’s a good german word : verschlimmbessern
Good reply/username combo !
May I suggest Dom/Sub?
Domain Subscriber?
If you’re trying to ascribe malice by the vendor, “maimed” is good in addition to many of the other sorta-violent alternatives upthread.
“Hobbled” is probably the best mostly-value-neutral choice.
Particularly for a feature than can unlocked by an upgrade, you want a word describing a reversible process. So no to “maimed”, but yes to “hobbled”.
Hobbled and hamstrung are both great words, and not ones I think I’ve ever really used. I think they have the same breadth of meaning as “crippled,” which is nice.
That said, “nerfed” is the word that I really wanted but couldn’t think of. I think there’s this psychological phenomenon where you think of the wrong word, and then can’t think of the right one. It has to do with your brain “helpfully” clearing out similar words. I don’t remember the name for the concept.
None of this is to say the other words here aren’t useful at times, too, BTW. I’ll probably use them all.
Oh, and @Kent_Clark I was indeed talking about Microsoft. Specifically it’s how they nerfed Windows Update options. That said, it wouldn’t be so bad had they not hobbled their testing team.
I just don’t think anyone should have to pay for Windows 10 Pro just to be able to hold off on updates for a bit to wait until the bugs get ironed out, so I always recommend using the “Pause Updates” feature.
At my company, we’ve been told to remove this and similar terms. In the software I am aware of we did this a long time ago (not sure we ever used “slave”). We do use “subordinate”
Brian
What I’d heard before was just primary and secondary, rather than subservient. However @N9IWP indicates they use that word, too. And I admit it’s been a while since I’ve heard these terms. It was mostly about IDE hard drives.
Same here. They’ve suggested the following replacements for master/slave, depending on the context:
Primary/Secondary
Initiator/Target
Server/Client
Primary/Replica
Source/Sink
Coordinator/Worker
Active/Standby
Leader/Follower
I think if you don’t want to say “Widget B is the same as Widget A, but they crippled it” you could simply say “They’re both the same but Widget B has some of the features turned off”.
Hydraulic systems typically have a master cylinder and a slave cylinder, and I have not heard much about revising that terminology, though I could see something like control/actuator in that case.
I’d advise not going with gimped.
“It’s gorked, Jim!” is also counter-recommended.
“Nerfed” is what I’d say at work.
“nerfed”?
Think of a Nerf sword. It has the shape of a weapon, but it’s been made to be ineffective for that purpose.