At least you could get the spare part. I have an electrolux refrigerator in Iceland which I bought used; one of the food compartment lids broke a week ago. Electrolux doesn't have a service center in Iceland and none of the other ones overseas will export to me, they said "just find someone local who sells electrolux refrigerators and order through them", except that none of the local retailers have been willing to.

And at least it's an Electrolux. What if it was a company that had gone out of business?

I want to see a certification label that manufacturers can put on their goods that certifies that replacement parts are printable and their models are in a free open database. Perhaps with multiple levels of certification - "Bronze" certifies that at least some parts are printable, "Silver" certifies that at least 60% of all parts are printable, "Gold" certifies that at least 90% of all parts are printable, and platinum certifies that 100% of parts are printable. That doesn't mean "printable cheaply" or "that a particular printing service will be able to do it" or that it's "no assembly required". Just simply that "it's conceivable that you could print it and make use of it, you have the necessary models available to you".

It's not just places like the Canadian arctic. Here in Iceland, if I want to import anything, after shipping and import taxes, I have to wait several weeks and pay usually over double the purchase price. 3d printing most definitely has its uses, if it can get mainstreamed.

I'd imagine NASA made that with laser sintering, which produces parts at highway robbery prices.

That said, I think you're being a bit overly pessimistic. 3d printing is rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping is not mass production, but it's an incredibly useful thing in its own right. And some things are only ever needed in low volumes, mass production will never apply to them. Most consumers only think of consumer goods, but it's industry for which 3d printing can really shine. For consumers, it's really only useful for custom goods - not "white plastic chair", but "snow globe containing scuptures of my family" or "earrings based on my particular rare nerdy hobby" or whatnot. It could potentially be useful for small spare parts, too, if manufacturers would start keeping a universal a database - sometimes tracking down spare parts can be almost impossible (for example, you live in a non-serviced area, or the company goes out of business) or the delays insufferable.

I also think that it's possible to have a smooth continuum between 3d printing services and bulk manufacturing services. Picture a system where you design your part, whether for personal use or commercial sale. Each time you buy one, it's 3d printed. But you also have the option to prepay to tool for higher production volumes, on the same site. Maybe you have to wait for quotes, maybe the site automatically assesses tooling costs, times, and unit costs for you... whatever the case may be. The higher the volumes you pay to tool for, the lower the cost per unit you can get. And of course such a system could automatically recognize when others are already producing the same parts for something and use an existing production line, or where an existing line could be easily modified to produce your part, or could suggest modifications to your part to make use of an existing line... there's a wide range of possibilities. The service could, without the user having to pay for it, tool up to produce a part that many people are ordering in small quantities (paying back the upfront cost via the lower production cost, then slowly reducing the purchase price). Assembly services could be likewise made available to users. But the short of it is 3d printers could be part of a continuum of manufacturing possibilities made simple for users behind companies that deal with the actual contracting out for production, in exchange for a couple percent cut of the profit. The user is simply made aware of the possibilities and picks the ones that best suit them - whether it's "I want this custom bracelet" or "I want one of these bike gears... good, that works well, now make me 10.000 of them".

I have six or seven Debian servers, none of which have GUIs, let alone music players. Now it is true that a few servers do have audio capabilities on the motherboards, so an audio driver is being loaded. If I want so squeeze a bit more RAM out of the machines, I could disable those modules, but other than that they are very minimal installs. Basic userland, Samba, maybe LAMP and a few other useful tools and that's about it. I don't know how much smaller you can get without moving to embedded variants like DD-WRT, which have only a subset of a typical *nix user land. Far less useful as servers, mind you.

MAD prevented WWIII. I don't care whether the people who build them or the people who authorize their construction are corrupt, or worship a giant statue of a sexually aroused Beelzebub, the fact is that we are kept largely secure from would be Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins by the mere fact that these weapons exist.

Who said anything about open source? Even the old direct Unix server variants all ran Bourne shell or c shell and their descendants. For chrissakes, a CLI-based server OS running a scriptable shell is decades old, predating Windows and FOSS by decades. This idea that Server 2012 is doing anything unique boggles the mind of anyone with even a basic understanding of operating system development and administration for the last half century. Maybe the Microsoft-funded diploma mills churn out admins who actually believe that Server 2012 is some revolutionary step, but for those of us who have been in the industry for oh, over seven or eight years, seeing somebody claim "we tossed out *nix and put in Server 2012 'cause it wuns with just a CLI" is liking seeing some fuckwit claim "I just invented the toothbrush!"

If you threw out *nix servers because you like the modern Windows toolset, then great! No prob. I have a network that runs a Server 2012 AD domain and a couple of Hyper-V servers, so it's not like I'm allergic to Windows. But fuck man, reading the parent's post (I dunno, maybe it's your post, I can understand why you would go AC to write such an incredible retarded post), with the underlying notion that Server 2012 is doing something revolutionary, and yeah, I start seeing red. Server 2012 is merely Microsoft, after twenty fucking years, getting the fucking hint.

Can you be specific here? What on a basic net install of Debian or CentOS does not fit your criteria? Christ, the base install of Debian doesn't even come with Samba.

Windows sysadmins amaze. For fifteen years I listened to them rattle on about how the GUI in Windows NT and its descendants was absolutely necessary, that it opened up servers to people who couldn't or wouldn't learn how to work from a CLI. So a few server distros put the head on their installs, worked like mad dogs to build GUI and web-based management systems like Webmin, and now suddenly all those Windows sysadmin flunkies are declaring Server 2012 is the bestest ever because you can run in headless with a CLI.

Listen you fucking asshole. *nix has been running CLI longer than most people posting here have been alive. It had mature toolsets and script libraries when Windows was a 16-bit cooperative multitasking layer on top of fucking MS-fucking-DOS. Generations of system administrators have lived and fucking died while Windows was forcing a clunky GUI toolset that you couldn't fucking script properly, and that you ended up having to go to REGEDIT and a bazillion GPO entries to fine tune.

Oh no, but Windows is so fucking cutting edge because in the last seven or eight years has developed a fucking shell that you can properly fucking script (even if the scripting language in question is a verbose and unbelievably slow executing piece of shit that is in almost every way the exact opposite of the elegance of *nix).

Well congrat-u-fuck-ulations Mr. "We paid a bazillion dollars to Redmond in licensing fees so we could have a scriptable CLI-based OS in our data center". I bet you even think you did an amazing thing.

Fucking Windows admins. Arrogance, stupidity and a total lack of knowledge of their own fucking operating systems incredibly dubious history as a Server OS.

Meanwhile, in the time it takes you to type out the name of a Powershell scriptlet and its arguments to import a CSV and puke it out as a SQL script, I can do write the code in awk or Perl in a bash wrapper. But hey, I must be stupid and you must the be the super fucking genius.

If you want a real thin install, pick something like Gentoo and Slackware. You can build minimal installs from the kernel up. In ye olden days when I was working on pretty minimal hardware (low RAM, slow CPUs, small drives), I used to install minimum base on top of a very small kernel (only the hardware found on the machine, plus a few generic IDE drivers just in case I had to move the HD and fire it up on another computer). It's a pain in the rear, and with even low-end hardware having huge amounts of RAM and storage space, I don't bother.

The whole point of the net install version of Debian is that it installs a very base version of Linux; and then you build on top of it. If you really need some sort of unique kernel variant, most fine tuning can be done in /boot or /proc.

I'll be blunt, if you claim to be a sysadmin who works with Linux, and you don't know how to build an optimized small footprint server, then you're talking bullshit, and whoever has hired or contracted you should give you the boot really fast.

If you are creating a design and then testing it empirically under relatively controlled conditions to determine if it works, then you are doing science.

Using science to evaluate a design? Sure. But the design itself is... wait for it... engineering. Of course engineers can do science, and scientist can engineer. Heck, musicians can be scientists, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean that engineering is science.

Bullshit. People predicted that there were planets outside our solar system, and some contested that it was an oddity.

No evidence for thousands of years, then just over a decade ago, BOOM, demonstrated. You're just being intellectually lazy, here.

That's pretty crazy there, pal. Just an FYI.

As have I. I have several Debian based routers and KVM servers that are out pure CLI. I have no idea what the writer is taking air. And neither does the writer, methinks.

Yeah, I know. That's why I said it was naive. Most people construct their ethics to minimize or maximize variables as a result of your choices. But a naive system that asserts that it's impossible to see all conclusions, and thus only takes responsibility for direct consequences of your own actions does indeed suggest complete nonviolence.

Bingo. I wish there were a way to fish out the ADB and Fastboot stuff, and leave the Sync Manager app out of the equation, since I never use it I don't need syncing of anything to and from the desktop. My contacts/mail/calendar/reminders are synced to Exchange. My apps are backed up via Titanium Backup encrypted [1], and tossed onto Dropbox. My music winds up coming from Amazon's service. Photos get tossed onto a cloud service. If I want to use the phone as a physical copy mechanism, I can, with PGP/MTP when plugged in, or ssh/nfs/samba/ftp/http/https when on the same wireless segment.

So, other than fastboot and ADB, I never use my PC for anything phone related except initially tossing on music or when I am doing a complete firmware upgrade or re-ROMming the device.

[1]: TB has one of the absolute best ways of encrypting backups. It uses a public key for the backup, and a restore, you unlock your private key.

[2]: Even without drivers, the HTC One M8 will appear as a MTP/PTP device, so one can copy files to and from.