The Ultimate Reset Button

Gary writes "The gigantic red switch looks more like a mushroom straight out of Super Mario. It can be connected easily using two wires and can be activated in any direction. To get rid of the blue screen of death all you have to do is hit it with something (like, a fist)."

Re:Unix guys prefer...

[mulvane]

If I could get one pedal for escape and another for ":", I think vi could rival most anything for speed.

Guard

[Dachannien]

You should really add a mushroom-head pushbutton guard [rockwellautomation.com] to this, so you don't frob it accidentally.

Re:Funny but stupid

[duguk]

Do you have a suggestion for dealing with a BSOD that doesn't involve resetting?

Linux?

Ok ok! I joke!

Or you could find out how to automatically reboot on blue screen of death [wintipz.com].

More impressive

[stg]

I think http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/911 6/ [thinkgeek.com] would be much more impressive, if it could be set as a reset button.

I'd be a bit worried about being arrested as a terrorist, if I had one of those in a office, though...

The ultimate GDO

[Anonymous Coward]

The switch looks pretty dumb sitting on a desk. Realistically whos computer not suffering from hardware problems spontaneously crashes anymore?

Wire this sucker up in your garage instead and you have a very cool looking and very useful garage door opener. I might even replace my door bell with one. Although it would look painfully stupid outside my front door it might give the javahoas and dish network goons second thoughts about pressing my ESO.

Also if your going to bother making a computer reset switch like this I'd damn well make it useful. Instead of taking 5 minutes to wire it to the reset pins on your motherboard...

There should be a watchdog driver to go with it, if it stops sending keep-alives to the switch it should have an option to press itself. It could also light up in different colors or patterns to indicate various error conditions...

Low/No mem, something spinning the cpu, Disk I/O queue full, watchdog failure, drive timeout, network down..etc.

There should be an "enterprise" edition of the same switch only it would be ethernet based using SNMP traps and host MIBs to monitor servers and devices and then issueing reset signals to a managed RPB when pressed.

Is anyone interested in a cell phone that looks like a mineature DHD? The first 100 people who hack the neilson database in order to dramatically improve SG1's ratings get a complimentry DHD phone with lighted chevrons and big red glowing button in the center in their choice of unlocked GSM/UMTS or CDMA models.

Re:Options.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did something like that years ago, to disconnect electronics that were wired to people's auditory nerves in the lab. Being able to hit it when being slammed in the ears by the loudest sound you can even imagine hearing was an important safety feature.