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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#391

Post by brozaman »

chalst wrote: post #344
iamaelephant wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android, Chromebook, the Home series, Maps, Drive, Google Cloud, Docs/Sheets and many more. A lot has happened since Gmail.

Maps is a clear in-house success. Android and Docs/Drive/Sheets were two acquisitions. Google is certainly a contender in cloud computing services, but they have a market share of 4% in 2018 for a product category they were one of the first to enter on a big scale, and I don't think niche success is what they are after. I'm not sure what I think about Chromebooks. I'd like to hope that it has an exciting, Fuchsia-col…

Maps is also an acquisition, although we could argue that what google maps successful was developed after the acquisition.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#392

Post by dang »

tech234a wrote: post #241

It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run. Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1] [1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/317917…

Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, I have to go find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the replies to the surviving copy. That takes quite a lot of REPL work.

Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email hn@ycombinator.com and get us to merge them. Then your comment will get moved to the winning branch, and you've benefited the whole community with an un-split discussion.

(I appreciate your mentioning the duplicates, though, because otherwise we wouldn't have known about them. Maybe there's a software idea in there.)

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#393

Post by hsivonen »

ilamont wrote: post #79

Google Cloud Print was a disaster. I could get it to work properly maybe 20% of the time, even with Android devices using the app and Chromebooks. A favorite bug involved a simple print job from one of my kid's Chromebook causing a Brother printer to "print" a blank piece of paper for every sheet remaining in the main tray. By comparison, AirPrint just worked, quickly recognizing new printers from new devices and run…

To print to an AirPrint printer over LAN from Android, one needs to install the Google Cloud Print apk from Play Store. (I witnessed just this week that it didn't work on a newly set up Android One device running Android 9 before installing Cloud Print from Play Store.)

With the cloud part of Cloud Print gone, will Google continue to provide the AirPrint-compatible Android software so that Android users won't have to install software from printer vendors like Windows users have to?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#394

Post by irq-1 »

danans wrote: post #332
kllrnohj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-argument: Just let it sit there and keep working? Outside of security patches, if there even are any, there's always the option of "just stop touching it." After all, the whole pitch of elastic compute is you only pay for what you use. It's not like resources are being freed up for other things here. The software industry is always on this treadmill of churn, leading to stable products continuing to have a co…

> Silo it off and just leave it be. Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers. Besides the code management issues others have mentioned, services like this require a great deal of product and partner coordination and testing effort to ensure that even small security patches don't break the heterogeneous ecosystem of devices. More import…

What are you going to use after this? A internet available print server? VPN?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#395

Post by taco_emoji »

lonelappde wrote: post #43
jacurtis wrote: post #4

Wow, that's a real shame, because Google Cloud Print was one of those nice little services that did ONE THING amazingly. I loved that I could print stuff from anywhere and it would be sitting on my printer when I got home. If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would b…

I suppose the workaround is to send all your printables to a Google drive folder, and then have an app on your devices that send those printables to the printer whenever the printer is visible on wifi. Not sure if Android offers sufficient APIs for that though.

Yeah or have that folder synced to a PC running at home, and then have a service running on that machine that prints anything that shows up in that folder.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#396

Post by hinkley »

vonmoltke wrote: post #320
hinkley wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google isn’t Google anymore. They’re Google, an Alphabet Company. So there should be more space for this. The problem is that Page and Brin, the authors of the perverse incentives at Google, are still in charge. Alphabet would have been a great place to bring in some people who are good at maintaining projects. Hell Google could learn a thing or two via osmosis about efficiency from them. Maybe cut the ageist bul…

> Maybe cut the ageist bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come with experience instead of making the same mistakes over and over. Hey, they're more than happy to hire anyone who can pass a four-hour CS undergrad final as a mid-level engineer, regardless of age or experience.

Fairly sure that was sarcasm, in which case I approve.

One of the things that people learn in college is that college is way harder than high school and a bunch of things that didn’t matter much in high school are super important. Same thing happens when you leave college.

College teaches a bunch of skill that will absolutely save your ass once a month, maybe once a week at first. Then you have to learn a bunch of skills that save your ass every single day.

It is rare that I compliment Microsoft, but somehow they managed to hire people right out of college and not give them Peter Pan syndrome, while Google has failed at this. And I think it starts with the interview process. MS looked for improvisation. Google focuses on book learning.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#397

Post by PascLeRasc »

dang wrote: post #392
tech234a wrote: post #241

It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run. Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1] [1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/317917…

Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, I have to go find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the replies to the surviving copy. That takes quite a lot of REPL work. Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch,…

Would it be possible for you to preserve the highest-scoring dupe when you do this? I was reading through one of them with around 350-400 points, and now I can't find it but this has around 100. It makes it unclear that it's the same original discussion moved, and I doubt this was your intention, but it could come across like you're trying to downplay the significance of a topic when the main discussion loses points and frontpage ranking.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#398

Post by eecc »

formercoder wrote: post #292
q3k wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Counter-argument: Just let it sit there and keep working? Outside of security patches, if there even are any, there's always the option of "just stop touching it." That's not exactly possible with a monorepo that has no branches and everything has to be maintained 'in step'. Any time a library breaks API, all dependents must pass tests, and/or be fixed so that they do. Any time a runtime API breaks (think things li…

This. Someone has to be in OWNERS and it’s difficult to find people willing to do this because fixing breakage due to API changes isn’t going to be on anyone’s OKRs. And if it’s not on your OKRs, it’s not contributing to your promo.

Which proves the futility of these OKR metrics.

Once the metric becomes the objective, it loses any usefulness, indeed it becomes the opposite

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#399

Post by markstos »

I'm glad to see Google is dropping their closed-source, "share a copy of everything you print with Google" service. Instead, they are doubling down on supporting open source printing standards and projects like CUPS. That's a win.
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