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MOTAS
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MOTAS/moh-tahz/ n.
[Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, afterMOTOSandMOTSS] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See alsoSO.
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MOTOS/moh-tohs/ n.
[acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of The Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. SeeMOTAS,MOTSS,SO. Less common than MOTSS orMOTAS, which has largely displaced it.
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MOTSS/mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ n.
[from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member Of The Same Sex, esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on Usenet is calledsoc.motss. SeeMOTOSandMOTAS, which derive from it. See alsoSO.
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mouse aheadvi.
Point-and-click analog of `type ahead'. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept such input, in anticipation of the program accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make aWIMP environmentmuch more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.
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mouse aroundvi.
To explore public portions of a large system, esp. a network such as Internet viaFTPorTELNET, looking for interesting stuff tosnarf.
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mouse beltn.
Seerat belt.
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mouse droppingsn.
[MS-DOS] Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left droppings behind. The major causes for this problem are programs that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.
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mouse elbown.
A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of aWIMP environment. Similarly, `mouse shoulder'; GLS reports that he used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.
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mouso
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mouso/mow'soh/ n.
[by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Comparethinko,braino.
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MS-DOS/M-S-dos/ n.
[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] AcloneofCP/Mfor the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS order to have something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name further annoys those who know what the termoperating systemdoes (or ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). Seemess-dos,ill-behaved.
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mu/moo/
The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense. Native speakers do not recognize the Discordian question-denying use, which almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzai Zenkoan:
A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu retorted, "Mu!"
See alsohas the X nature,Some AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (pointer in theBibliographyin Appendix C.
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MUD/muhd/ n.
[acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A class ofvirtual realityexperiments accessible via the Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc.
Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist today and are sometimes generically calledBartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven'tlived'til you'vediedon MUD!"); however, this is false -- Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain in 1985. BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.
Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.
AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as `MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the more game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the termMUDitself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See alsobonk/oif,FOD,link-dead,mudhead,talk mode.
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muddien.
Syn.mudhead. More common in Great Britain, possibly because system administrators there like to mutter "bloody muddies" when annoyed at the species.
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mudheadn.
Commonly used to refer to aMUDplayer who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See alsowannabee.
To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi legend of the mudheads or `koyemshi', mythical half-formed children of an unnatural union. Figures representing them act as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. Others may recall the `High School Madness' sequence from the Firesign Theatre album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers", in which there is a character named "Mudhead".
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muggle
[from J.K. Rowling's `Harry Potter' books, 1998] A non-wizard. Not as disparaging asluser; implies vague pity rather than contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly) popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others' existence - most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts.
In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as `muggle-friendly'. Compareluser,mundane.
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multician/muhl-ti'shn/ n.
[coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user ofMultics. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'.
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Multics/muhl'tiks/ n.
[from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early time-sharingoperating systemco-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor toCTSS. The design was first presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several more years to achieve respectable performance and stability.
Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (seeOrange Book).
Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging thatsecond-system effecthad bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful: at its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar mainframe.
One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken Thompson, andUnixdeliberately carried through and extended many of Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name `Unix' as `a weak pun on Multics'. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See alsobrain-damagedandGCOS.
MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977. Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites were known to be still in use as late as 1998. There is a Multics page at http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.
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multitaskn.
Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but seethrash). The term `multiplex', from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly.
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mumblage/muhm'bl*j/ n.
The topic of one's mumbling (seemumble). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when `mumble' is being used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives.
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mumbleinterj.
1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?" "Well, mumble...I'll have to think about it." 2. [MIT] Expression of not-quite-articulated agreement, often used as an informal vote of consensus in a meeting: "So, shall we dike out the COBOL emulation?" "Mumble!" 3. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement (distinguished from sense 2 by tone of voice and other cues). "I think we should buy aVAX." "Mumble!" Common variant: `mumble frotz' (seefrotz; interestingly, one does not say `mumble frobnitz' even though `frotz' is short for `frobnitz'). 4. Yet anothermetasyntactic variable, likefoo. 5. When used as a question ("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you". 6. Sometimes used in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco." 7. A conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can beglarked from context. Compareblurgle. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be fruitless.
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munchvt.
[often confused withmung, q.v.] To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related tocrunchand nearly synonymous withgrovel, but connotes less pain.
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munchingn.
Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager. Comparecracker. See alsohacked off.
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munching squaresn.
Adisplay hackdating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T -- seeHAKMEMitems 146-148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened `munching triangles' (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), `munching w's', and `munching mazes'. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as `munching foos'. [This is a good example of the use of the wordfooas ametasyntactic variable.]