It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
A gremlin is a folkloric creature, commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented with a specific interest in aircraft. Their origin is found in myths among airmen, claiming that the gremlins were responsible for sabotaging aircraft.
Source
As every good sysadmin knows, it is part of standard practice to send data to the screen of interesting variety to keep all the pixies that make up your picture happy. Screen pixies (commonly mis-typed or re-named as "pixels" are categorized by the type of hat they wear (red, green or blue) and will hide or appear (thereby showing the color of their hat) whenever they receive a little piece of food. Video cards turn data into pixie-food, and then send them to the pixies - the more expensive the card, the better the food, so the better behaved the pixies are. They also need constant stimulation - this is why screen savers exist.
...
I would strongly discourage people sending the data they do not want out to the network. The fairies who do the packet switching and routing get annoyed by it as well.
Originally posted by c3hamby
Either Gog and Magog are rising up from the four corners of your keyboard and are gathering for war, or the contacts of your keyboard have simply gotten dirty.
Neither dirty contacts nor Gog and Magog can stand up to the force of pressurized air in a can, or a new keyboard.