Mad Dog 21/21: Drivers Of The Purple Sage

Mad Dog 21/21: Drivers Of The Purple Sage In the old days, to print a document you had to have driver software on your computer that matched an attached or nearby printer. For the most part, they aren't. New applications, new types of documents, new clients, or new printers meant finding new paths through the thicket of operating systems, networks, drivers, and page description languages. You can even consider tossing out those persnickety PCs and riding out on the new frontier where the mobile customers range. Some of the inspiration for this change in document processing came from the consumer market, where the companies that make digital cameras, photo printers, and particularly the ones that make both figured out that a little digital magic could give a big boost to family photography and its stimulating impact on the sale of gadgets and ink cartridges. And then there's always a means to hook a tablet or a smartphone to a PC on the same local network and then go out to that PC's printers using the drivers already on the PC. But if you are trying to run a company or even an office full of different users with different computing needs and way too many different types of printers, what is a feast for the home office hotshot ends up resembling the kind of meal the French give their fat-liver geese. So it's no wonder a lot of IT folk who, among other things, have to support a mob of end users, have been cheered up by the super friendly printing apps that first showed up on smartphones and now are becoming available for Windows, Mac OS and, if the dozing server vendors, which might be more than 50 % of them, wake up, on Linux, Unix variants, and even proprietary operating systems like IBM i and the mainframe environments. Basically, a customer, anything from a smartphone to a PC today and possibly anything at all, from a building's HVAC hub to a glass house server tomorrow, sends a document to a printer via a cloud server. The cloud server knows the printer's email address and the printer is always checking its email so it can spot, download, and print anything that's thrown at it. There's also software which provides a variation on this theme for road warriors. It's not a dead or even a dying concept. In fact, the smarter and more versatile printers are just like the machines in the prior generation except for a little extra in the IQ department that turns out to add nothing to manufacturing cost. That means a whole new or recent model from a progressive vendor, but it doesn'tnecessarily mean an expensive machine. One of these requires a network printer programmed to talk to cloud servers along with local customer devices. The server figures out what printer driver to use and processes the document into a printer data stream that goes back to the sending customer, which ships the stream to a special port on the network-attached printer. The only advantage this scheme offers over the first one is that it can work with a zillion network-attached printers sold and installed before the brainier method above made it to the marketplace. In practice, the process is within a couple of seconds but the client has to be in touch with the printer until the whole job is done, that can be a drawback. Some of the big consumer electronics companies also make mobile phones and portable computers (some with keyboards, some with touchie-feelie). The same evolutionary process added wireless connectivity to schemes that a few years ago involved hooking machines along with cables or moving flash memory cards from one socket to another. Somewhere in this region there's Google cloud printing, but so far it's been a nonstarter in business circles because it's type of tied to Google's Chrome browser and some other things that corporate computing folk simply find unattractive. This is a really old-style idea but it fits well in some settings because it does give the user organization a lot more privacy, security, and immunity from Internet connectivity issues. These days a lightweight, pared-down version of Linux is probably running inside every printer in your office, every router on your network, and every cable or DSL modem you use. Pricing varies as this new service seeks a practical balance between the high value of convenience and the low value people want to pay for ink-smeared paper. The second theme, a slightly simpler one than the first, involves two major conversations, one between the customer machine and a cloud server, the other between the customer machine and the target printer. Like just about everything else with a digital soul, printers, even low-end models, have whole computers in them. The smartphones and tablets you see around you also run either the Android cousin of Linux or the iOS offspring of BSD and Darwin. I think it's a dead app walking, but there are so many smart people inside Google that it's possible one of them gets put on this dreadful project. Before I take a look at a number of the apps being offeredby printer vendors, it's probably important to say that there are apps for phones and tablets from outfits that do not make printers but do provide a printing or formatting service. The issue isn't that the issues that arise are so hard to solve. It's just not the thing that is grabbing huge mindshare right now. Windows Professional and the other rich versions of PC software include or have access to innumerable printer drives. That's a nice thing and if you were on a high tech desert island, that's how you would want it. Mad Dog 21/21: Drivers Of The Purple Sage Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 24/04/2012