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“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

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Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#121

Post by baddox »

npsimons wrote: post #119
baddox wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, one could say the same for a lot of open source software: it's great until it breaks. Your claim implies that broken proprietary software is bad because you can't access the source code, while mine implies that broken open source software is bad because there might be no company or organization dedicated to providing support.

Irrelevant; you can fix (or pay/trade/beg someone else to fix) FLOSS. You can't say the same for closed source.

For many things, that's only true as a technicality. Having access to the source code of a complicated piece of software doesn't instantly make it easy, or even remotely feasible, to fix it yourself.

For example, back when I ran a Linux desktop and had problems with my video card or video settings, there wasn't a chance that I could fix it myself. The odds of me being able to do so were roughly equivalent to the odds of being able to fix a broken closed-source video driver by opening the binary up in a hex editor. Technically possible, yes, but not remotely feasible.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#122

Post by npsimons »

stcredzero wrote: post #109

What if someone maintained an online "virtual museum" of old emulated machines and operating systems? This could be done as SaaS, with some value add tools for converting to modern formats thrown in.

Amusing, interesting for history's sake, and possibly useful, but licensing issues would kill it for closed source, and it's not needed for things with permissive licenses because you can already get the source for old versions and run it yourself.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#124

Post by ronaldx »

aroch wrote: post #7

The "files" are really a folder/bundle with richtext and image files inside it. Why doesn't OP just extract the actual data from inside the bundle by right click > package contents

Upvoted for useful information.

But this makes it even less clear why Apple can't support their own old formats. Because it's too tricky to be worth dedicate developer time?? Or because it's a deliberate policy? This is a fundamental requirement of the software.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#125

Post by Silhouette »

sosborn wrote: post #88
Silhouette wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it could be a very expensive business to get into if there are patent-encumbered formats involved. In the cases where it's most likely to be useful, it also seems least likely to happen.

>if there are patent-encumbered formats involved. Patents would not discourage manual conversion. I.E., a human looks at the old presentation and recreates it in the new software. I'm just not sure that there are any presentation worth this cost. God knows that most presentations I have been subjected to are not.

Even then I'm not convinced, without talking to a lawyer, that it would be safe to recreate in a patent-encumbered format.

Regardless of how well patents in general might or might not serve their original purpose, I tend to think that patents that are essentially just locking up data formats do not encourage progress in the way that they are supposed to. I think the US was onto something when it came to copyright and typeface designs, and a similar principle ought to apply to data formats.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#126

Post by nemothekid »

Touche wrote: post #89
teej wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world isn't so black and white. Document serialization is a rocky landscape that is rife with compromise. You have to balance document open time, document save time, file size, backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, recovery modes, interoperability, size in memory, parsing time, time to save to disk, proprietary embedded file formats, metadata support, and more. And those are just the development consid…

> Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago…

>Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

A counter argument to that, is I'm not sure if I want to live in a world where parsing an HTML document takes over 1,000,000 lines of unparallelizable C. You are sweeping a huge requirement that makes the rendering of that page possible in 2014. Ultimately it takes software to render that information, and the software that does render that, may have an expiration date.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#127

Post by TillE »

michaelt wrote: post #118
teej wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world isn't so black and white. Document serialization is a rocky landscape that is rife with compromise. You have to balance document open time, document save time, file size, backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, recovery modes, interoperability, size in memory, parsing time, time to save to disk, proprietary embedded file formats, metadata support, and more. And those are just the development consid…

Assume you work on Keynote, so you have access to all the code and documentation for the 09 format. On average computers are now faster and have more RAM. You don't need to write the format, only read it. Your users will tolerate 15 minute format conversion times and the loss some things like formatting and videos. Is it really so difficult to just not break a feature that was present in the last version of the softw…

Yeah, assuming your software is reasonably modular and you haven't completely rewritten everything from scratch in the new version, retaining support for old file formats shouldn't be a very big deal.

At worst (like in the case of iWork 13 which probably is completely new code), you get one programmer to spend a few days writing a converter which reuses most of the old code.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#128

Post by valarauca1 »

RyanZAG wrote: post #116
valarauca1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your acting like the read/write time to the hardware/FPGA is negligible which it isn't. When you access hardware on say a PCI bus (which you would in this scenario). Your call to the PCI bus does not take place WHEN you call for it to take place. You call the Kernel, which calls the scheduler, which calls the hardware manager, which calls the driver, which finally processes your request. Now your request is processed…

I get what you're saying about how it's definitely going to be slower, but I don't understand why the read/write time to the hardware matters if the hardware is buffering the last 100 timings or so. What I'm trying to point out is that you don't have to make your entire system down to the keyboard real time - you only need to make the tiny piece that is doing the physical process real time (with some very simple logi…

The only real time component of the software stack is the kernel. If you want another real time module your screwed because you need to run it in kernel space, but if you have a kernel you can't.

Or you run a real time OS which may have problems because they aren't developed with security but IO timing in mind.

It's a fundamental flaw of time shared OS's.

:.:.:

Second security works in a simple way.

Cost to secure vs money lost.

Lab equipment is expensive. The loss of an entire calibration bench could run into the $250,000 to $1million and beyond range.

But redeveloping and entire OS to do this? Your talking about spending 20 to 100x MORE on security then your losses. That's idiotic at best.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#129

Post by npsimons »

nknighthb wrote: post #95
Turing_Machine wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they say: "patches welcome". Do you also implement your own OS from scratch, or do you rely on others? Every FOSS OS I know of has patches coming out on near-daily basis.

"Patches welcome" is an aggressive, user-hostile, anti-social response to being told that the thing you suggested does not work . It's telling the user to fuck off because your own suggestion was flawed. clarry didn't run to HN and scream "pdf.js sucks!".

I think you're reading too much into that, or have a chip on your shoulder, or both. "Patches welcome" is an invitation, a smiling, friendly, we-think-you're-good-enough-and-want-your-help, open-handed gesture that is meant to encourage cooperation and evoke the deeply human drive to help others.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#130

Post by nemothekid »

npsimons wrote: post #119
baddox wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, one could say the same for a lot of open source software: it's great until it breaks. Your claim implies that broken proprietary software is bad because you can't access the source code, while mine implies that broken open source software is bad because there might be no company or organization dedicated to providing support.

Irrelevant; you can fix (or pay/trade/beg someone else to fix) FLOSS. You can't say the same for closed source.

How so? You could similarly beg or pay for Apple to fix the issue.

Consider OP's use case. Lets say hes a non-programmer and Keynote is open source, but similar in complexity to WebKit. Now he comes across the error - what can he do? Learning to program or finding someone with the time and knowhow of Keynotes (or WebKits) inner workings may take months.

On the time scale of months, he could also bitch enough at Apple that they may release a tool.

However in both cases, the most time efficient solution is to download Keynote 09.

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