What's the deal with the expensive power strips?

[Rysto]

@John T. Conklin

We have several of these in our development lab. The allow each outlet to be turned on/off programmatically via SNMP or interactively via a web interface. Very handy when you load a firmware image that hangs the box — you just flip the power yourself instead of having to call someone who’s down at the lab to do it for you.

Bingo. This allows him to work on stuff from home.

Apparently, they’re also used in remote datacentres. If a server dies you can restart it without physical access to the machine.