Switch

In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can break an electrical circuit, interrupting the current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The mechanism of a switch may be operated directly by a human operator to control a circuit (for example, a light switch or a keyboard button), may be operated by a moving object such as a door-operated switch, or may be operated by some sensing element for pressure, temperature or flow. A relay is a switch that is operated by electricity. Switches are made to handle a wide range of voltages and currents; very large switches may be used to isolate high-voltage circuits in electrical substations.

Description

The most familiar form of switch is a manually operated electromechanical device with one or more sets of electrical contacts, which are connected to external circuits. Each set of contacts can be in one of two states: either "closed" meaning the contacts are touching and electricity can flow between them, or "open", meaning the contacts are separated and the switch is nonconducting. The mechanism actuating the transition between these two states (open or closed) can be either a "toggle" (flip switch for continuous "on" or "off") or "momentary" (push-for "on" or push-for "off") type.

Switches (band)

Switches were an English indie rock band, consisting of members Matt Bishop (lead vocals and guitar), Ollie Thomas (guitar and backing vocals), Thom Kirkpatrick (bass guitar) and Steve Godfrey (drums).

Career

The band initially met whilst at university in Guildford, Surrey. When Matt was young, he wrote songs and made music in his Essex home. After meeting and befriending the other band members, they did some gigs and got publishing interest before finding a manager. Meanwhile, the boys where experimenting with different band names in order to "conjure something non-cliché, something simple and bold". They cite many artists as their main influences, all of whom can be seen here.

They released their debut EP on Degenerate Records, entitled Message from Yuz on 10 July 2006. It was produced by Paul Schroeder. Their debut single (limited to 500 copies), "Lay Down the Law" appeared in September 2006. The band began recording their debut album in August 2006 at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, where Prince recorded some of his classic 1980s material. The album was recorded by record producer Rob Schnapf and engineer Doug Boehm.

CONFIG.SYS

CONFIG.SYS is the primary configuration file for the DOS and OS/2 operating systems. It is a special ASCII text file that contains user-accessible setup or configuration directives evaluated by the operating system during boot. CONFIG.SYS was introduced with DOS 2.0.

Usage

The directives in this file configure DOS for use with devices and applications in the system. The CONFIG.SYS directives also set up the memory managers in the system. After processing the CONFIG.SYS file, DOS proceeds to load and execute the command shell specified in the SHELL line of CONFIG.SYS, or COMMAND.COM if there is no such line. The command shell in turn is responsible for processing the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

CONFIG.SYS is composed mostly of name=value directives which look like variable assignments. In fact, these will either define some tunable parameters often resulting in reservation of memory, or load files, mostly device drivers and TSRs, into memory.

In DOS, CONFIG.SYS is located in the root directory of the drive from which the system was booted.