Re: "RESET"

On 24/05/2025 23:34, Don Y wrote:

I don't quite understand the need for "reset" buttons on products.

There are things like routers and mobile phones where there is a very significant difference between power on/off and a hard factory reset. The former recovers it form having crashed internally whilst the latter trashes all previous settings into oblivion.

That function is always available by cycling power -- even for devices
where that is difficult for the user (e.g., PoE, BBU, etc.)

Not always available - there are quite a few different levels of reset too. I recall one particularly annoying one on an early Android device that require holding the on/off button and volume down in for 4 minutes. It did do a hard factory reset on about the fifth attempt. The previous four having failed because my fingers slipped. One minor annoyance was that the very hard reset put it into Chinese language mode.
ISTR the ordinary soft factory reset was about 10s holding the magic buttons in (but didn't work on this unit).

 Shouldn't a device be able to get itself out of a "pickle" without
requiring the user to intervene?  Particularly devices that are
intended to "run forever"?

In an ideal world yes. But I have seen such devices in a state where the only process still running was the one pressing the dead man's handle to say that everything is OK. Many routers tend to go haywire after a continuous uptime of about 2 or 3 months having fragmented their stack.

I.e., it seems like the presence of a reset button is a tacit admission
that the engineering is "lacking"...

It could also be to reset to a known state. Several of the more annoying gadgets have one time programmability from a PC but to make them secure the moment you make them active all further communication is impossible.
The only way to reprogram is factory reset and start again from scratch. User interface designed by someone who really enjoyed the maze in Zork.
(some TV tuning menus fall into this category)
--
Martin Brown