131–140 of 567 posts
I use cloud print weekly to print off some homework for my child on the Chromebook. What is the alternative?
Why doesn't Google just charge for this? This is the only thing that makes printing off of an Android phone even ok. I have a Pixel and for the life of me I cannot print easily from it, and I have tried multiple different printer manufacturers.
Google is a mass market company thus chump change is irrelevant to them.
Plus they are used to operating at a scale by providing products for free. Consumers are used to Google providing products for free. Thus it’s jarring for a lot of users to suddenly pay for basic functionality. Enterprises probably don’t need this because they’ve already figured out network printing decades ago.
Plus when you start charging people “money,” you’re expected to provide “human” support. Google won’t come near products where “human” support is necessary even with a 10ft pole unless you’re spending gajillion dollars with them.
In a strategic sense it makes sense for “Google” to shut it down. Companies like Readdle will probably fill in the spots
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).
Does CUPS support securely printing over the network, or can you only do it with a VPN?
I know Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their historical support of legacy systems, but on the flip-side it means that as an enterprise you trust that they won't abruptly deprecate something you use.
Despite all the disdain for Microsoft in the spirit of slashdot sentiments, Google has turned out to be worse in many respects.
That's a bummer; it was a god send for accessing printers without drivers on the client.
Printers are standardizing on a thing called "driverless printing," based on having some common Page Description Languages (or having the printer have support for handling a PDF directly): https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting#Driverless_Pr... Each printer having its own driver is sort of like ... each terminal having its own escape sequences. When printers and terminals were purpose-built electronics with l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there paying enterprise customers of Cloud Print? Even today, https://www.google.com/cloudprint/ has a "(beta)" in the logo. Enterprise customers need to figure out that if you're paying $0 for something, you get $0 in support.... if you want something that works, either pay someone enough money to support it, or find an open option and pay your employees enough money to support it in-house.
That leads to warped thinking though. When I worked at ebay we weren’t allowed to use open source software for this exact reason. If we wanted open source software we had to find a vendor we could pay for support. For that reason we could only run RedHat or Solaris and whatever they supported.
You may install a particular library and then leave, and the new person has no idea what that thing does. If there's some kind of support contract in place, the new person has the means to at least have that thing supported.
>It's enterprise-ready Hahahahahaha oh man they actually wrote that. Sorry for the useless comment, but I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment. I don't think it really matters, of course. Android phones have a full set of manufacturer-specific printing drivers which work fine over the local network, and geofft noted upthread that ChromeOS…
I am starting to think that I need a similar saying about Google.
>It's enterprise-ready Hahahahahaha oh man they actually wrote that. Sorry for the useless comment, but I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment. I don't think it really matters, of course. Android phones have a full set of manufacturer-specific printing drivers which work fine over the local network, and geofft noted upthread that ChromeOS…
Sadly not for all printers, my printer requires an awful app that does everything itself. Not acceptable! But yeah, Cloud Print doesn't seem to have been particularly widely used or supported.
99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud Print before seeing this headline. Look, I too got annoyed when Google killed Reader. It sucked for a couple days. I moved on. This doesn't even register as a product. It was an experiment that wasn't needed, so they killed it. Holding onto every silly project you ever worked on doesn't make you responsible, it makes you a directionless hoa…
So yeah, a lot of people think "Oh damn they are shutting down GCP" because it legitimately impacts them. This bizarre notion throughout this discussion that it was some weird fringe service is not supported by reality.
And Google has a poor product record for good reason, so the criticism is very well deserved. They made their bed and now they lie in it. Someone would be incredibly foolhardy to seriously "buy" games on Stadia, for instance, which is a service that has an incredibly high probability of being Googled.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there paying enterprise customers of Cloud Print? Even today, https://www.google.com/cloudprint/ has a "(beta)" in the logo. Enterprise customers need to figure out that if you're paying $0 for something, you get $0 in support.... if you want something that works, either pay someone enough money to support it, or find an open option and pay your employees enough money to support it in-house.
That leads to warped thinking though. When I worked at ebay we weren’t allowed to use open source software for this exact reason. If we wanted open source software we had to find a vendor we could pay for support. For that reason we could only run RedHat or Solaris and whatever they supported.
For lots of software, you can either trust that it's well-supported upstream and such bugs are likely to be rare, or you can say that your internal use is something you can work around (e.g., if you want to use an open-source IDE, knock yourself out, if it breaks you can find another text editor). But you should explicitly consider that.
Also, the only reason open-source software works as well as it does is that someone else is investing in making it work. Oftentimes that's Red Hat and Oracle. If you're a $10B company and you're expecting open source to magically work with no investment, besides being a jerk, you're also the reason people keep saying "how do we solve the open source sustainability problem" - it's your own fault that support resources for your critical software don't exist.