201–210 of 567 posts
That thing almost nobody used? Seems fair. EDIT: At this point, is there any value in comments about how Google kills things? I feel like it's a waste of time for a knowledgeable crowd like HN.
It allows to print documents even when you're not on your network.
Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CUPS is exactly what Google is switching Chrome OS to, as a replacement for Cloud Print. But the reason to have Google's (or someone's) servers involved is so that you don't need to be on the same network (e.g., you can print to your home printer, behind a firewall/NAT, while you're at a coffeeshop, also behind a firewall/NAT).
Buuuuut, is that really a valid use case? how many people do actually want to remotely print from another network to a printer, beside print shops without dedicated WiFi networks? How many people do actually want to use it as some sort of fax-machine replacement?
I support relatives using Chromebooks and the old fashioned model is printing is much easier to explain and deal with! The wifi printers in my life never seem to maintain reliable connections over long time spans so we resort to using them as USB printers anyway.
Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one. The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where pe…
They should just sell their dead products. I know they don't need money, but someone could probably maintain the Cloud Print codebase and add value to the world.
Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one. The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where pe…
This is the entire industry. I work for a non-sexy "tech" travel company, and it's the same thing. Pay down tech debt? Good luck getting any kind of recognition. Make a react graphQL api? You're making senior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should just sell their dead products. I know they don't need money, but someone could probably maintain the Cloud Print codebase and add value to the world.
They would mean selling all documents ever printed using their product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like Postscript 20 years ago?
Can you elaborate on the similarities? I don't really understand PS, CUPS, or GCP, but I think an overview of how they relate would be really interesting.
CUPS is a program that implements the Internet Printing Protocol, basically a way to send, view, and cancel print jobs over an HTTP API. If you have a local printer connected with a parallel port, you can run CUPS and have other machines send to it. The other thing CUPS does is conversions: you can send a PDF to CUPS, and it will run the driver to convert it to whatever format the printer needs. So an application that talks to CUPS only needs to know how to generate PDFs. CUPS also supports talking to remote print servers, e.g., other CUPS servers, printers that natively speak IPP, or printers that speak some other protocol.
Google Cloud Print is a service which has the unusual property that printers connect to it, not vice versa. Therefore you can print a document to a Google Cloud Print printer without being on the same network, which IPP doesn't let you do. (For printers without direct GCP support, you'd need to leave a computer plugged into it and running, but some newer printers with built-in networking know how to talk to Google and let you register it to your Google account.)