AB negative

Our exciting story of printer switch boxes prompts some reminiscence from former civil servant Niall Fisher.

‘Seven years ago I worked in the civil service, and one day I was asked to go down to the finance office and install a printer switch box between two computers and a printer. We didn’t have any more automatic switch boxes, and the printer was not network-capable, so I had to use a manual 2 port switch.’ His instructions to the two users:

Niall: Jason: you are on switch A. When you want to print, switch the box to point at A.

Jason: OK.

Niall: Emma, you are on switch B. When you want to print, you have to make sure the switch box is pointing to B.

Emma: Right.

Niall then left for lunch, returning to discover a new support call from finance. Emma had been trying all lunchtime to print a document, but for a reason she didn’t understand the printer did not respond. Niall successfully resolved the problem by moving the switch to ‘B’.

He doesn’t say if Jason has been trying to print something since 1998 as a result.

Who wants to start the bidding?

As a new eBay user, Simon Goldstone contacted eBay with a question about the bid system. In response, the company sent him this to ‘clear up the confusion’:

‘When a single bidder has consecutive bids on a reserve item, and the bid does not meet the reserve, any consecutive bids placed by the same bidder will not influence the current bid price. Although there are multiple bids, the current bid price will not increase because the proxy bid system does not raise the bid until a competing bidder places a bid, or a

bidder raises their maximum bid and it meets the reserve.’

So, that’s clear, then.

The key to the ALT GR problem

‘Dear Backbytes. Can anyone shed some light on what the ALT GR key does?’ asks Edward Jones, at NVS.

The best we can offer is that it plugs a gap in the keyboard to the right of the space bar, but we jiggled it and it worked so it must do something. Or must have done something once in 1985.

Please advise.