[luau] The open-sourcing of PriceBusters

[Ray Strode]

Hi Scott.
I was kind of confused by what Warren was saying and so I relooked over
the specification and found this paragraph that suddenly confused me:

> On the server end, peripheral devices can be defined.  That pole
> display showing the gum, let's say it was a serial port pole.  On the
> server end, a remote printer is defined where the pole is located.  
Why?

> In our case, because our register pc's run windows, that pole display
> is known to windows as a generic text serial printer.  It is shared.
So anytime a code is read from the bar code reader, it sends a sequence
from console input accross the telnet session to the server.  The server
then sends out the price back through the telnet session and it goes to
the cashier's display, and then with the MC/PC escape sequences it goes
to the pole display and the receipt printer (because they are hooked up
in the same parallel port and they are programmed to both know which
parts of the data stream are relevant for them).  So my question is,
when is this smb printer share getting used?  Everything seems to happen
through the telnet session and terminal emulator.

> We setup this remote windows printer on the server, usually name the
> queue with that register's number, and when the application gets your
> gum data stream, it knows to print the price data to the user defined
> printer.  
Wait.  If it's printing to the user-defined printer, then why are the
MC/PC escape sequences being used at all?

> In this case it is a remotely shared windows printer.  It can easily 
> be any printer.
This might be a good opportunity to experiment with cups' implementation
of Internet Printing Protocol.

--Ray