reset button next to a submit button?

Can anyone tell me what genius came up with the idea to put a reset button next to a submit button? Can a designer really be that stupid?

ROTFL!

What is a reset button for a single textarea good for anyway?

(I´ll ask a mod to move this to the lounge, ok?)

Actually, I believe that it is a long-standing computer design tradition. The Apple II had its power on/off button in one corner of the keyboard, right next to a frequently-used button (ESC, maybe; I was on active duty at the time and Apples were far too expensive for me to even consider). I even saw third-party ads selling flip-up plastic guards to cover the power key and prevent you from accidentally hitting it instead of the key next to it.

At school we had PCs (486, desktop) where the reset button was sticking out on the front. If you pushed the keyboard back (which was not unlikely to happen by accident), you pushed the reset button in

"What is a reset button for a single textarea good for anyway"

I guess the designer decided it was mission critical. How do people like that have jobs?

Hehe, how about a prompt? Something like, "Hey knob, you sure you wanna do this?" That way the quick reply doesn't vanish with a misclick.

That seems to be a standard. I've even mimicked it when I didn't really need a reset. *shurg* I guess I just follow the masses.

When i was studying the power point for each pc was at floor level directly beneath it. The desks were not deep and half the time when you stretch out your legs you kicked out the power cord. Was very annoying leaning back after finishing a section of code and then kicking out the powercord before you saved it.

When I worked at a casino (putting myself thru uni) they introduced a game that had a running jackpot and lights on the table. That ment power and network. They put a normal household powerpoint and a BNC network point under the table sticking up out of the floor.

One day I was dealing and the power went off. All the jackpots went down, errors on all the dozen tables as they could not get the count to increase the jackpot.

Soon there was techs everywhere. Testing the jackpot slots on the table for faults. Pulling the wiring out, the whole bit..........

It only took them 20mins to find out I had managed to turn the power switch off with my foot!
We were taught to rest our feet on a box under the table but because the power point was there the box did not fit...........

Ooops

Did someone kick you for that?

lol. the casino probably lost $$$ cos of a little switch

I remember having PCs like the ones Hirsch mentioned, and I can vouch that they were a serious pain in the arse!

I also used to have a crummy old Compaq desktop that we set on the floor next to the computer desk. It had a big blue button on the front that could only do one thing: put the PC in hibernate (actually, it could supposedly shut down if you held the button, but that never worked). I have really long legs, and every time I would try to recline or stretch, I'd hit that damn button and the PC would go to Hibernate. Inevitably, Win98 wouldn't recover from Hibernation and you'd have to pull the plug out because there was no hard power switch ANYWHERE on the stupid thing. Eventually, I got so fed up with it that I took the face off and cut the wires from the button, but then the only way to reboot or turn off the computer when it froze was to pull the power cord! Arggghh! (I've refused to buy a Compaq ever since..)

lol, never seen a Compaq like the one you described, but can imagine that would have been a royal pain. I would have gone to local electronics store and wired some sort of proper switch into it.

Heh.. this was back in the days before I really got into computers (back when I thought you could do a finger from a browser's address bar...), so I'd have just fragged the system anyway (I once installed a hard drive upside down... needless to say, I was out a hard drive).

I have to admit, I'm guilty of such faulty design myself though. I developed a system that someone from another department could add / remove / update a portion of the Intranet for which they controlled the data (basically, a small highly customized CMS). The idea is simple: you have a bunch of text files that hold data while the person works on their pages ("draft" mode) and you can publish them into a database that then uses perl scripts and templates to display the data to web browsers. You see a list of the available "drafts" in a multi-line menu box and can select one or more, then perform the following actions:

Edit
Delete
Publish

Unfortunately... they're in exactly that order, and they're not seperated by much whitespace. Delete and Publish execute on the selected files without warning. One day I came in to a rather upset gentleman who thought that the system had eaten 26 of his edited files. I fished around for an error for awhile, but couldn't find one. After about an hour, something dawned on me - you can highlight any number of files and hit delete and there's no warning or prompt. Yes, this poor guy had tried to hit publish to save all of this changes, hit delete by mistake, and poof - 26 files worth of work disappeared from the NTFS. Oopsy. To this day he's convinced that there was a problem with the code that swallowed his changes, but it was poor design choice, not sloppy coding. Now, I don't let people delete ANYTHING without a prompt. I usually hide it from there view, then clean it up with a batch after awhile. The system in question now has a prompt that fires every time you click the Delete radio button. Annoying? Yes. Safe? You betcha. Now if someone deletes all their work, I'm covered!

Incidentally, I have NO clue why this guy worked 26 files before committing any of them to the database... so he gets at least part of the blame.