Google Drafts Cloud Printing Plan For Chrome OS 126
snydeq writes "Google is unveiling early-stage designs, software code, and documentation for a project whose goal is to let users of the company's Chrome OS print documents to any printer from any application. Called Google Cloud Print, the technology would dispense with the need to install printer drivers by routing print jobs from Web, desktop, and mobile applications via a Chrome OS Web-hosted broker. 'Rather than rely on the local operating system — or drivers — to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.'"
ahahahaha (Score:1, Insightful)
How can anyone take Google seriously outside the search engine market? What won't it do to convince you that you need to do something half way across the world using systems under their control, what you once did perfectly in your office? "We know what you search for, we must see what you print too!" Stop allowing the creation of the next Microsoft, guys. Especially one with far more control and access to your stuff than MS planned for.
What will they do next. .... (Score:5, Insightful)
make it work when the internet goes out?
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:3, Insightful)
So Google invented a print server.
Indeed they did ...
What they need to do is not send print jobs to the cloud just so they can come back "down to earth". Get together with the major printer manufactures, develop a common intermediate print-job description language and print all ChromiumOS jobs in that PDL. The manufactures can implement their own drivers in the firmware of their printers. This gives us true plug & play, eliminates the need of installing drivers and lets everyone print on any printer they encounter that supports this technology.
It goes without saying that this should be open source and available on all other platforms as well.
Fine! (Score:5, Insightful)
I work as teacher, mostly for fun, and got suckered into supposedly being admin for the school network. In reality I'm a general janitor / IT-support though. I have next to no time to spend on actually setting infrastructure. If anybody gives me a simple solution for printing any document, from any operating system on any computer easily to our public printers I'd give them a big, wet kiss. I certainly don't know any easy way of doing it now, because adding printers to students laptops is a f***king bother, and there's always some weird problem.
I'm certainly sure there's lots of other uses for this, aswell as lots of places it won't be usefull.
Re:No. Hell No. (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess I would have more faith in it if it does the equivalent of creating the print file, sending that back to your Chrome device, then your chrome device does the equivalent of the old ability to just copy formatted print file to a printer. So nothing on your network gets exposed. But certainly there would need to be a very stringent policy on what Google could do with your print file and how long they could store it (0 seconds!).
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as your printer is exposed to the internet (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure it will allow you to print to any printer...that can be accessed via the internet. I'd wager that's a step a large number of people haven't taken when it comes to their home networks.
No local drivers for remote printers--good idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
I always thought it was a terrible design to require installation of hardware-specific drivers for a remote printer. You know how you get some crummy nonstandard print status window popping up when you print? Like it will be this hyperbranded thing with a zazzy, colorful diagram of your printer and "buy toner online now" button on it. Almost indistinguishable from a pop-up advertisement except that there is a progress bar showing your print job going through. As far as I can tell, that is the only reason for there to be local drivers for remote printers--so manufacturers can bring up their fancy nonstandard dialogs out of some paranoid necessity to convince you your printer is not a commodity item. In fact, they would probably prefer you called it something other than a "printer", i.e. your "HP-SmartPaperDuplicator TM".
So, yes, this is one thing Google seems to be getting right--a standard print dialog with no local drivers for remote printers.
Yes and No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Even for comparatively small organizations, being able to ditch the ghastly nuisance of driver-shuffling and the more-or-less-strictly-LAN-bound world of SMB printer sharing, for a system that will work on any device with internet access to the organization's print host and the ability to spit out a PDF would be great. Google's approach may or may not be the best approach to the reinvention of the print server; but it has strong potential to be good enough quite easily amenable to 3rd-party implementation, build largely on standardized components(HTTP, PDF, PPD, bit of XMPP, etc.) and Google's support might help it reach critical mass.
Re:Fine! (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone mentioned "postscript" a while back.
This is all you really need.
Set a language standard for the printing and have the network & print queue sort it all out.
All Google is doing is dressing up an ancient Unix idea and giving it a lot of unecessary added complexity.
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Postscript? It doesn't control the paper handling, as you point out, but there are a lot of different solutions on offer along these lines. Xerox printer/copiers run a web server that allow you to upload print jobs through a web interface and set paper handling/stapling/job deferment/billing etc. through an HTML form. A generalization of this would be nice, but what's the difference between typing the IP address of the nearby printer to submit a job and typing http://print.google.com/ [google.com] to submit a job, fundamentally?
I don't know what you're doing wrong or right, but CUPS is excellent.
This is a client issue, not a printer issue. The printer should treat all information as semantically neutral, letting the client know what the page geometry is and making its own adjustments accordingly.
ColorSync. Again, the technology for all of this stuff has been around since the 80s. The only real difference here is Google is trying to commoditize it over the WAN, since making it easier to run is an important part of making Google app/Chrome TCO lower, demand higher, thus ad revenues higher.
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hear, hear. It never ceases to amaze me how virtually every new Google "service" further erodes people's concept of privacy. And people just eat it up. If someone ever wanted to intentionally socially engineer away the concept of "privacy" to begin with, this is how to do it. Makes you wonder...
Presumably, every document being printed on Chrome OS already exists in "the cloud". What additional erosion of privacy is created by adding the ability to take those documents and send them to a printer? If you're using Google's cloud, they already have the data. If you're using someone else's "cloud", I think the idea is that they'd implement their own printing service. None of your data should be shuttled around the Internet promiscuously except to your printer. Am I missing something?
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your concerns have nothing to do with the Cloud Print service and everything to do with storing your data in the cloud. If you don't want to store your data in the cloud, neither Chrome OS nor the services associated with it are for you.
For those that are OK adopting this model, your data already exists in the cloud, so adding the ability to send that data to a printer doesn't do anything to reduce your privacy.