German magazine Spiegel online has a whole page on a purported attack of Chinese made clothing irons that infect WLAN networks with viruses.
It is an interesting piece of journalism because it is a straight faced article despite the fact that the plot would not even be credible in a B movie.
The article inspired the K-Landnews Random Research team to perform a similar yet different test. Can our computing hardware do a good job as a clothing iron?
To anyone who has ever set foot into a server room, the question is painfully obvious. You have these nice, flat irons that get quite warm, even hot, and we go to great lengths to keep them cool.
The first thing you notice when you do a Google image search for blade servers is that the vast majority were not designed with ironing clothes in mind.
They tend to have sharp edges and the top is generally not as uniformly flat as ironing a delicate 200 dollar short demands. The Dell blades we saw have wavy embossed style tops, as if a good looking blade top made any difference in the buying process or once the iron is placed into the rack with a hundred or a thousand identical siblings.
Not surprisingly, IBM produces the most utilitarian blades, all macho edges and a 'shucks, nobody cares about beauty on the inside anyway' design philosophy.
Luckily for us, the Random Research team found a Hewlett Packard blade that passed the basic requirement of 'at least one flat surface'. The find is an unexpected redemption of HP in our eyes because we have felt cheated by HP's evil 'regional settings' on their ink cartridges. Never buy an HP ink cartridge printer, they make you bleed through the nose in yellow, cyan, and black for the cartridges.
But that was yesterday, today is the day of the 32-core clothing iron proudly made by HP.
For the impatient readers: it works.
Here is how we tested the iron.
We plugged in the ProLiant family iron, fired it up and tested the temperature using the old clothing iron method. Touch the surface very briefly with the tip of a finger.
After about three hours, the iron had reached a comfortable temperature for permanent press fabric.
The ironing board had been set up during the warm up period, and an older shirt that we would not miss if things went wrong was draped on the board.
As we picked up the HP iron we started a timer.
The big difference between a dumb clothing iron, i.e. the kind generations of us are used to, and the smart iron from the server rack is, of course, their difference in size.
Dumb irons can be operated with one hand, while you maneuver the shirt with the other hand. The HP smart iron needs two hands to move in a coordinated fashion.
We used a light ProLiant BL6x iron for the permanent press shirt, although HP also offers heavier irons suitable for heavy industrial fabric.
Once the back, the largest surface of the shirt, was done, we had to set down the iron and rearrange the shirt to get at the arms and the collar. This worked well after a bit of getting used to.
When done, we hit the timer and found that using an HP ProLiant iron is as fast as a regular dumb clothing iron. It's the surface, of course. The ProLiant has a usable surface about three times as big as grandma's dumb iron, which more than makes up for having to set it down and rearrange the shirt.
Our only criticism of the HP design is the absence of a handle that would allow single handed use. It is no big deal because none of their competitors has such a handle either.
So, here is our suggestion to all blade server manufacturers: Think of the other use as a clothing iron, and you might actually create an aftermarket for your gear. Once it gets to slow for computing, it could have a second life in ironing.
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