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Google Drafts Cloud Printing Plan For Chrome OS
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.'"
It seems like what they have re-invented is the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). Like the new Google Cloud Print, CUPS encapsulates the drivers for printers, filters and converts jobs based on the type of printing needed, sets classes of printers where the first available will be used, and much more. You can read a summary of some of the top features at its Wikipedia page.
It's also open-source, licensed under the GPL and LGPL, and has been used in Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X, and several Linux variants for years.
Sapere aude!
While zerconf is nice(and seems to have been made more broadly useful than uPNP, which largely confines itself to reconfiguring NAT routers at the behest of bittorrent clients), it doesn't really match Google's use case all that well. Consider a few points:
.edu lab where they are resigned to rolling the print costs into student fees(or, incidentally, it is totally possible that their crack team of MCSEs connected the printer to the printserver, and locked down the printserver permissions, and then walked away, leaving zeroconf and IPP wide open. Back in the day, that was what usually happened to the various workhorse HPs you'd see in uni labs. They'd be connected to some proprietary print billing system, that either took coins or integrated with student accounts; but FTP and telnet would be wide open, and you could dump jobs to them that way). In any case, zeroconf makes it easy to find stuff; but it only makes access easy if you adopt a totally naive "trust all" model.
Authentication: zeroconfing stuff works fine in a trusted home environment, or in an
The interwebs: Zeroconf, Apple's flavor at least, depends on multicast working properly and plays various DNS tricks. No big deal on a little LAN, not so much with the working across the internet, barring pretty major changes.
In a number of cases, that just isn't good enough(though it is nice to have, when you are on your friendly LAN). If I am sitting offsite somewhere, having to establish a VPN connection to my home LAN to print something pretty much immediately rules out anybody who isn't a gearhead, or a corporate type with their laptop set up for them. If it doesn't work over the internet, it doesn't work(Google, of course, has the additional motivation that it'd be really handy for them to be able to send a print job, on your behalf, directly from Docs to your printer, without you having to download it. That is merely convenient on the desktop; but it is downright valuable if you are trying to work from some resource constrained phone or something). Or, with the proliferation of cellular connections, I might be sitting right next to the printer; but, logically speaking, be far, far away across the internet from it. Yeah, if I understand what I'm doing, I can switch over to LAN, and do my thing; but if reasonably simple technology can spare me the effort, all the better.
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...
Liberty in your lifetime
If you were to say that cups is the best solution we have today, I might agree with you, but posts like this one http://weblog.zamazal.org/cups-sucks.html are pretty common for cups, and printing is at least as bad on other platforms.
The big problem with cups is the UI and the ablity to secure it so you can safely put your print server on the net, without random spammers printing their ads on your printer.
Cups is a good start, but there is a long ways to go.
Shouldn't you be able to print your report for the office from home or on the road on a laptop?
Cups could get there, but right now it is a long ways from being easy.
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