mouso /mow'soh/ n.
[by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in
an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen.
Compare thinko, braino.
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MS-DOS /M-S-dos/ n.
[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of CP/M for
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 term operating system does (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!"). See mess-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 Zen koan:
A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha
nature?" Joshu retorted, "Mu!"
See also has the X
nature, Some AI
Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (pointer in the Bibliography in Appendix C.