Every so often I get asked for an explanation for some programming-related bit of jargon. Sometimes, if I know the person who's asking will get the joke, I make up the answer. For example, today the word "blitting" crept into an email thread and one of the S&M folk replied,
Not too sure what "blitting" is; a technical term perhaps ;-)
and I wrote back,
Yes. It refers to the process of ensuring the Heidegger component integrity is unchallenged among shared resources vying for the bitmap; errors here often lead to crashes and in extreme cases (usually when the computer’s under heavy load and there’s a bug in the resource contention handling) it can lead to quantum irregularities in the hardware, resulting in several bytes of data in RAM being swapped to the state it represents in a parallel quantum universe. Usually, this is unnoticed since the universe is nearby and the data is the same but occasionally it can be radically different and the image drawn to the screen is entirely wrong. We want to avoid that since graphic bugs look bad to the user. As a result, we blit the bitmaps first to ensure everything’s in a known solid state.
Cheers,
David
It got a great response :)
What's the best fake (funny) technical explanation you've ever given someone?
If you took advantage of someone's gullibility, please don't include that. Good-natured jokes only :) The best answer within a couple of days wins the coveted "Accepted answer" green flag...