HP taps Google's print server in the sky HP has announced that its ePrint printers are the first to support Google Cloud Print, a service that lets print via the interwebs. "With HP ePrint and cloud-aware printers, you get the best experience printing via Google Cloud Print," crowed Stephen Nigro headman of HP's Imaging and Printing Group in a canned statement. …
Teamviewer serves as "remote desktop for those who can't open a firewall port for RDP." It's slower, not as feature rich...but gets the job done. This seems similar.
Internet printing protocol has been around for ages, but you needed to know things like your IP. You also had to have the appropriate ports open to enable it. Here now, you can "bounce" your IPP off a cloud.
Useful for some, I suppose...but really, outside of office archival requirements...who prints?
I think you're taking an article seriously that isn't meant to be taken seriously.
What I want to know is how you find a cloud printer once you've used it...someone really ought to do a mashup and then it'd really be Web 2.0 compliant.
(Of course, there is something to be said for a printer that the users can't find, because if they can't find it, they are a lot less likely to break it by pushing buttons and hoping for a miracle.)
"While cloud printing is possible with any printer that is connected to a PC..."
In the old days, we used to use a Centronics cable to print with a printer connected to a PC.
Granted, it was quaint... but it worked... and didn't depend on Google taking an unlicenced copy of anything you wanted to print and selling it to someone else as 'intelligence'.
This surely has to be an April fool, but noting the date on the press release and the obvious appeal of cloud computing to idiots in technology marketing... somehow I fear it isn't.
Please, someone tell me why you'd want to do this?
Maybe it's just me, but, I only print things out when I actually need a physical piece of paper in my hand, meaning that I am generally within a few feet of the printer I'm using. What's the point of me printing off a document whilst at work, so it can sit on the printer 30 miles away until I go home and pick it up?
Wireless printing works just fine, so, no need for my documents to disappear off to a server only to then come back again before being sent to the printer in the next room.
Finally, what do you do when you run out of paper/ink/toner or there's the inevitable paper jam?
Oh, and I always turn my printer off unless I actually need it.
A solution looking for a problem.
You got to look at it from all points of view.
What do Google get out of cloud printing? 1) They get to catalogue everything you print. 2) Chrome OS doesn't need any printer drivers which eases the uptake of Chrome OS and so Google gets to catalogue everything you do on your OS.
What do HP get out of cloud printing? They get to sell more ink because of all the junk shots that start to appear as soon as your printer is registered with someone else' print server. This has been well covered in previous ‘Reg threads on cloud printing
What do consumers get out of cloud printing? Well, there is an opportunity to brag to your 'mates' down the pub that you've deployed a cloud computing architecture at home and leveraged an HP ePrint solution blah blah blah. Nothing of value in other words.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
