November 8th, 2004
From an email list.... (reformatted for readability)
[Poster #1:] Like Geoffrey, I downloaded and built mine from scratch. I'm currently using cups under Solaris 8 on a netra T1 as the main print server for all my sun boxen at the office (e5500, e5000, 6 Netra's, u5, 480r, 280r, plus more to come :) driving about 44 printers.
[Poster #2:] Woah that's a lot of printers. What do you do with so many?
[Poster #3:] Massively parallel printing - stripe your print jobs across 44 printers so they get done faster! Of course, collating is a drag. And you need a bot to run around to collect the output from the "printer array" if the printers are scattered throughout the building.
Or, you could put your printers on those robotic carts and use wireless cards so that they're mobile. Use LDAP to locate the user's office and SLP/Rendezvous to find an available printer, optimally one that's already fairly close. Print the job while the cart is on the way to deliver it.
Then, combine that with the email-to-mobile-espresso-machine gateway and you've really got something...