451–460 of 567 posts
If you’re that passionate and people will miss the service, then that sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Just because it’s not revenue positive (enough) for google, doesn’t mean it couldn’t support a smaller start up.
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The problem I had that cloudprint solved was printing from a Linux machine to a local non-Linux-compatible printer. With CUPS and driverless printers, this is no longer a problem. I don't generally need to print remotely to my printer.
Well... I do and I choose my printers based on availability for remote printing. You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork.
I'm guessing you are referring to a scenario where you have configured an elderly person's printer to allow you to print directly to it, sort of like a one way fax machine? I can see how that could be useful for some people, but it's a very rare use case, and hard to argue for maintaining the cloud print service based on that.
There appear to be alternatives for this specific use case, like HP ePrint, or you could set up a VPN to use in these situations. You could also just use printer that hooks up directly to eFax: https://www.faxcompare.com/blog/signing-up-for-efax-with-you...
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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…
It's not free to run and it is not generating revenues. Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable argument for jut keeping it up.
If there's only a few users then it's cheap to run. If there's a lot of users then this is a mountain of bad PR right at the time they are trying to get users to adopt new products (like, say, Stadia). Since all it does is shuffle PDFs & images between endpoints I'm gonna guess this is on the order of basically free to run.
But either way canceling it isn't free, either. I'm arguing the cost of canceling this is far larger than the cost of keeping it running.
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…
Google Print was a great way to get around these issues, but not anymore. Crazy how out-of-the-blue Google will kill off certain products.
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This is the right move though because moving towards "Driverless printing" will solve the overall problem in a simpler way: https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/ Google is pro-adapting to change. And it is painful but it is usually the right thing.
Until there's more competition in the printer space: good luck. Printer companies want to differentiate and upsell. The best way of doing that is via software which means first party "drivers" (which is really this huge bundle of bloat and ads at this point). If anyone has recently installed a consumer inkjet for a family member will know what I am talking about. It is basically adware. Those of us sticking to our ni…
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Ridiculous that a patent for such a thing should ever have been granted. "Driver" is merely the word we use for "protocol", when the protocol is ad-hoc, non-standard, or badly documented.
On what grounds should that patent not have been granted? Seems like a pretty normal patent to me. Technology doesn't have to be likable, a good design, or even functional to be patented.
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Google pays their engineers a lot and they’d need to recruit a lot more of them if they were going to keep running everything they ever killed. That, or stop launching so many new products.
I know it's beside the point, but you stepped on one of my peeves. Google doesn't have to pay their engineers "a lot". They don't have to keep sucking more and more wealthy people into a concentrated corner of California. They could open a modest office in Nebraska and pay some 5-figure salaries. They could hire some run-of-the-mill college grads to work on a "dead" project. They could cut their teeth on low-profile…
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> 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…
> Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers. Of course it's possible. Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this. And if they were it'd be a change in the protocol. It's easy to just freeze the protocol (which already happened years ago), and if any printer manufacturer wants something ne…
Of course things change. Security protocols get upgraded. New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed. New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration. That all requires human effort to make happen. All of that has to be worth the cost of maintaining the project.
> CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part.
Even if it needs them, the point is that it has them now, probably due in no small part ot the fact that CUPS is used on the Mac.
The product has been around 10 years, and they're giving over a year notice before killing it. Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.
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…
But it's more than that. Consider how something like GDPR impacts this. It requires at least some work from Legal, Product, Eng, etc. And these things happen fairly often. Even without a monorepo it takes work to stand still.