171–180 of 567 posts
I for one am not going to miss this. It always struck me as a very poorly designed response to AirPrint that never worked right.
What’s the alternative for printing from Android devices?
This is just such a convenient feature: you can remotely print something on the go from your phone and your parents/spouse/kids at home can pick it up. Is there any open source alternatives?
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…
But there's lots of this out there. You can set it up on any machine you have - if you leave a desktop on all the time or have a NAS that lets you run VMs too you can put this functionality there too.
>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 just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment I would imagine very few, or else Google would be keeping it around. I would guess that Cloud Print basically didn't take with either consumers or enterprises, and as a result Google no longer wants to keep doing it.
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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Driverless printing has been "the future" for over a decade now (I remember hearing much about it back in 2006 or so), and a concept for two decades. Microsoft first filed the patent back in 1999 [0]. The only thing that's changed is the patent is now expired (as near as I can tell), thus opening the door a bit wider for adoption. But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it." [0] https://patents.google.c…
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My guess is these things are generally unprofitable because their internal costs are so used to operating as a near monopoly they simply can’t do anything on the cheap. Which ends up killing off seemingly viable products. It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
They might not be wrong. Engineers who could be maintaining mildly profitable products could be invented new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable. If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Driverless printing has been "the future" for over a decade now (I remember hearing much about it back in 2006 or so), and a concept for two decades. Microsoft first filed the patent back in 1999 [0]. The only thing that's changed is the patent is now expired (as near as I can tell), thus opening the door a bit wider for adoption. But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it." [0] https://patents.google.c…
"Driver" is merely the word we use for "protocol", when the protocol is ad-hoc, non-standard, or badly documented.