Microsoft's latest cloud innovation: Printing Universal Print, a new Microsoft Azure service now in private preview, allows printers to be registered with Azure Active Directory so users can print to them via the cloud. "Universal print moves key Windows Server print functionality to the Microsoft 365 cloud so organizations no longer need on-premises print servers and do …
This post has been deleted by its author
Oh Yes. That's the one that prevents me sending an e-mail to my child's school because the school's O365 Cloud bounces it as junk/spam.
At least they have more sense in Germany: German schools ban Microsoft Office 365 amid privacy concerns.
That's not necessarily O365's fault. Most installations use a third-party spam filtering system, such as Barracuda or SpamAssassin.
Face it, email - as a way to communicate with people you actually want to communicate with - is broken. It's been crushed by the sheer weight of spam. The only email addresses that have a reasonable chance of working are those that are never published, which means they must have been given to you privately.
Microsoft maintains their own, and all the big email players have moved to their own inhouse filtering/RBL. External filters and RBLs are only in use by companies that haven't migrated into one of the big players.
OOTH, Microsoft's Postmaster services actually can clear out blocks if you know how to work their system (which is draconianly difficult). As opposed to say, Google, which tosses their hands up in the air and say maybe it'll clear in a day, week, month, we dunno.
Anybody putting something in front of the Microsoft setup is probably not using it right as designed, which requires end users training it (ie. flagging SPAM, moving HAM out of SPAM folders, etc). Many users don't want to bother training their SPAM filter, so they throw something else in front.
I predict..
*ring ring*
User: Hi, I can't print I sent to the printer and it didn't work.
Support: Have you tried turning it on and off again?
User: Yes I turned the computer on and off again, I pressed the button on the screen.
Support: Okay please use the start menu to reboot....
10 minutes later.......
Okay now click print.
User: No page printed.
Support: ... yes it did.
User: I can't see it (looks under frantically printer like a mad man)
Support: No no no, I mean it printed here in India, next to me. Which printer did you click?
User: I clicked the one called Cloud, because my wallpaper has a picture of a cloud on it.
Support: Is that so? That's nice. Now please click the one that says ID 66, 6, which is your building and floor.
User: It worked!
Support: Your welcome, please enjoy your day, live long and prosper.
I have met the same with "printer pooling" where identical print devices are put in a single queue, and users pick up from one of them (obviously this requires a print room with all the devices in it). Enter a junior admin with a shiny new MCP (Server 2003). His train of thought was along the lines of:
I've got a printer in Mumbai...
Ooh, Aberdeen has the same make and model....
I can set up printer pooling....
The rest, as they say, is history.
(Icon just for the hell of it)
I am deploying a cloud based coffee service to eliminate elaborate on prem coffee production. Soon you will tap a coffee icon, and your cloud provider constructs and transports your preferred beverage to your desk. It will save so much money and energy, I might be able to sell carbon offsets.
To be serious for a moment, I am surprised Tassimo or Nespresso have not developed a solution to remote order a coffee from a machine.
It makes it as you walk over, tap your employee password and it is already made and ready.... or once every 30 minutes the designated delivery service agent brings it to your desk....
It was an idea that long pre-dated the new-fangled Web ...
Tresidder Union, Stanford, late 1976 or early 1977ish. CROMEMCO Cyclops camera "focused" on the coke machine. When the door was opened & closed a microswitch tripped and notified a computer (IMSAI? MITS? Heath? I can't remember. Something cheap & cheerful.). The computer waited a minute and then took a picture of the coke machine. This was to see if the "out of soda" LEDs were still lit under your cold fizzy of choice[0]. This image was sent automatically via FTP (over NCP, TCP/IP was still in the process of being invented) to every FTP host on the list. If you knew how, you could request an update at any time. This special request photo would only be sent to the FTP space of the requester.
Building this thing seemed to be a no-brainer at the time, hardly even worthy of being called a "hack". It didn't work worth a shit, because the resolution was so low. Once in a while, if you aligned it just right, you could see if an LED (or two) was on, meaning there was no soda in that slot. If the LED went out, the slot had been refilled ... or something had jiggled the camera. It was up to the user to figure out how to get their particular FTP host to notify them that an image was waiting ... and indeed how to convince their console of choice to display the image.
[0] Dr. Pepper was a favorite of the grad students at the time, and was nearly always sold out. When the camera reported it had been refilled there was a mad dash for the machine ... so I guess the silly kludge worked. It was only operational for a couple weeks.
See that wheel? Microsoft has just reinvented it (again)
Back in the day... and long before MS was even a wet dream to Bill Gates, we used to put jobs into Mainframe on Punched cards. Sometime later, the cards and the resulting printout was put into a tray for collection.
I see something like this happening in big organisations. The 'printer delivery person' will come round with your output hours (or days) later, get you to sign a chitty so that the cost can be properly allocated before handing over your output... only for you to find that it isn't yours or that there is a glaring error on the first page and you have to go through it all again. (or variances thereof)
Progress, isn't it wonderbar
Amdahl had a largish printing facility just off Central Expressway in Sunnyvale (Cupertino?) in the 1980s. Virtually every mainframe print-job generated within the company, world-wide, was printed at said facility, and then next-dayed to whatever office had requested the print job. They had several gawdawfulfast channel attached printers, and a fleet of trucks delivering & sending out paper. Was awesome to watch in full-swing, if you had adequate ear protection.
However ... it sounded daft then, and still sounds daft now.
Late 1992, Uni 3090 mainframe. I remember spooling my entire month's worth of quota in one go, 30000 lines! The printer admin usually would put it in pidgeon holes. All I had was a note to go and see him.
Quite scared, I did so. He handled me a massive stack of paper and said "I hope it was worth it".
Errmm, it wasn't. I had managed to print the entire contents of alt.sex.stories....
"allows printers to be registered with Azure Active Directory so users can print to them via the cloud."
How long until your "registered printer" either requires a SUBSCRIPTION FEE, or lets you RECEIVE JUNK FAXES...?
Yeah, register your COMPUTER on "Teh Intarweb" by logging in with Google or Microsoft Logon or some OTHER such "cloudy let you guys know what I'm diong right now" "service", which NOW includes YOUR PRINTER, which (I expect) CONVENIENTLY can be HIJACKED by a 3rd party that pays for (or steals) the knowledge about YOU and YOUR PRINTER, yotta yotta yotta.
Micro-shaft: Your past history with respect to OUR PRIVACY is already DISMAL. You want to ADD MORE TO THAT ???
[how about BUILD THE INTELLIGENCE INTO THE OS instead - NOT involving "cloudy ANYTHING"]
They did try and pour all of their intelligence into the OS, and that didn't really turn out so well. Whether it was a shortfall of intelligence, or something else, it became a hostile goo. A benefit of the Azure model is to use software that actually works without admitting it isn't theirs. This will only last until pride forces them to put host the print services on their own software, thus joining little pools of hostile goo into an ocean of it. Heady days.
You'd think they'd learn. Remember the debacle when they moved Hotmail from BSD to Redmond's own code?
Microsoft can't be trusted to build a decent desktop system, so what is it that makes anybody think they can do networking properly? Compatibility? I guess that's one answer ... if you're expecting shit to be compatible with more shit ...
Just a while ago we were dealing with malware that infected internet-accessible printers
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/15/hacking_printers_to_play_doom/
and more. Does anyone besides me remember?? So we are told to secure any unnecessarily internet-connected printers.
And now they want us to go back and drop those same machines back on the internet.
History always repeats itself because humans are STUPID.
.. and then download the data again to a local printer.
No. I hate all this inelegant "cloud" rubbish. Just stop.
Printers are enough of a pain in the arse without reliance on a sodding internet connection and some stupid Windows "cloud" service in the picture. I pretty much don't have to deal with printers at all these days, though.
You're right, but if you're moving your servers to the cloud, including DCs and print servers, you no longer have anything on-premises to manage the printers (as software devices) deploy and print queues.
Moreover they can process through AI all those documents you thought never left your local PC....
Just you can't any longer put printers in a network with no internet access.
There seems to be a trend for going backwards.... a long way.
Quite a few decades back (about 5) I worked for a Quantity Surveyor, we had a teletype machine in the basement, where I used to collate a load of paperwork for a contract and then type it in to London Uni. The company rented space and labour on their mainframe where calculations were made, things done and then the whole lot was sent back to our printer that would chatter away for a bit and produce a stack of dead tree stuff. Sounds reasonably similar to me.
A couple of times we ended up with piles of print that belonged to other people.
Can't they licence or reverse-engineer Apple's airprint?
Unbox printer
Remove about half a bin bag of proctective packaging stuff from it
Plug it into the mains
Plut it into the network switch
You have a working printer that you can print to.
I couldn't have put it better myself, Piro.
This is absolutely insane, so it is very typical of Microsoft. But what's the point?
Besides relieving you of the monthly subscription cash, the only real reason I can think of for this is that Microsoft want even more of your data to slurp.
There are more downsides than upsides to this. No doubt people will now be able to look forward to watching in horror as they can't do whatever they need to do because they will lose all print capability every time they lose their net connection... thanks Microsoft! Have MS learned nothing from the recent debacle on Windows 10 when local search broke because Bing was borked? And how is replacing a tiny local printer driver with a full blown local printer proxy application a better way of doing things?
It is no wonder manufacturers like Canon are interested though, they probably can't believe anyone would be daft enough to sign up and pay for this lunacy, but if it is successful Canon would be absolutely delighted to rent you their printer drivers on a monthly basis in the future - and for the rest of time! *shakes head*
"This is absolutely insane, so it is very typical of Microsoft. But what's the point?"
The point is to cater to "cloud first" businesses who already want everything running in the cloud. Allowing Azure AD to do more things without regular AD allows them to take servers off-prem, forcing you to subscribe to their service every month. Azure Site Recovery and OneDrive are amazing tools given the right use cases, but they have the same goal...remove anything that the end user can run by paying a license fee once.
At the office where I work there's a printer. I can print stuff (we're very technically orientated, you know) from my laptop, wander over to the print room, swipe my ID card on the printer, and it'll print what I sent it.
If this means I can send things (and stuff) from anywhere in the world without having to log on to the corporate network and have them waiting for me when I return - like travel compensation forms, for example - then I can see how this might benefit me personally.
Ours is very similar, with one difference - the print queue we print to is essentially a "cloud" print queue. Advantage: walk up to ANY printer, and print out from there. Disadvantages: external network or badge reader issues prevent printing, and I have to stand there waiting for the printer to wake up, log me in, manually select which print jobs I want to print (all of them, always!), warm up, and print instead of it finishing about the time I step up to the printer.
I really long for the days when I printed to the print queue of my choice, and simply grabbed the paper when it came out.
Having seen some print jobs from a training department 100+ page double sided documents 30 odd copies. It is obvious cloud printing will bring your internet link to such a slow rate that you won’t be able to watch cat videos!
Seriously what are these people on, just print to the devices up address and save on the infrastructure
This post has been deleted by its author
The death rate is less than SARS, MERS and some strains of flu, but its rate of spread is much faster. It appears to be far easier to get infected. A lot more people will catch it, so more people will die. The number of deaths is already higher than SARS.
So yes, if you get it you will probably survive unless you are old, already have health issues or are unlucky. This doesn't diminish from the fact though that thousands have already died, and thousands more are likely to.
COVID-19 has killed more people, in less than 3 months, than SARS and MERS put together managed in the past ten years. In what sense is that "less fatal"?
The Chinese are now saying that the mortality rate is about 2.3%, which is admittedly a lot lower than SARS, but the infection rate is way higher. And even that mortality rate doesn't seem to match the published stats, which put the ratio of deaths to recoveries at more like 6%.
Jake - the point of being careful about Covid19 is to avoid being partly responsible for the deaths of other, more vulnerable people. You may be as strong as an ox, and have no worry about catching it. I don't worry that much either. I worry about spreading it.
Technical note: it isn't the flu. And you really don't know enough biology to be spouitng an opinion on it.
Its Jake, he doesn't need to have any knowledge to rant on a subject or form an opinion he must state as fact.
And as one of those immuno compromised people, and having heard the same sort of shite from someone else, I had to fight a strong temptation to flush their head down a toilet repeatedly for being such selfish twats.
Nah, they usually only run to a few GB that way... the 10s of GBs are because people drag the file into a folder containing the file, into a folder containing the folder containing the folder containing the file, containing the HDD backups. (It's duplication all the way down......)
A company implements this where the directors have decide, over IT, that the failover line will be the same provider as the main line. Ignoring the point of the fucking failover. So when BT goes down, lets hop over to the failover line......OH....that's BT as well.
Not only can you now not use your cloud 365 solution, you also can't fucking print anything.
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
