141–150 of 217 posts
If one were to go Microsoft on the Mac, what are my choices? Office 2011? (it's 2014 now after all)
I know there's OpenOffice too
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The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (st…
#2 isn't viable because it breaks the primary design goal and the entire purpose of Keynote '13--that every presentation opens the same way across desktop, web, and mobile. The Keynote '09 source code does not and never has compiled for ARM, and so you would be faced with exactly the same dialog you have now, except instead of on your Mac it's on your iPad and instead of asking you to find an old version of keynote i…
It's ridiculous that you cannot open the previous version of a Pages file in the current version of Pages! What an absolute joke.
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The problem with airgap test equipment (I work on this kinda of stuff professionally). Is often the redevelopment of real time software for lab and calibration equipment is very expensive. Its easy to think, "Why don't they use [New Hotness Software ]?" Which on the surface seems to be a good idea. Until you absolutely need sub-millisecond precision I/O, then you kinda start to cry when you realize how hard precise t…
It would be so nice if programs could request a dedicated core for these kinds of things.
You have to build an entire OS with real time I/O at heart. They do exist, some are secure (Blackberry's platform) but they aren't deployed to the test industry. The most likely version is licensing fees, nobody writings Data Acquisitions for them.
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> 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…
Yeah but "information" generally requires software to view it. The only reason that web page still works in modern browsers is because they've gone to all the effort to account for quirks in ancient HTML. Apple clearly didn't think it was worth the effort in this case. Also worth pointing out it's much easier to display old formats than it is to make them editable.
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Not sure I agree entirely here - Microsoft is definitely a far better bet than Apple for this kind of stuff, but it's still not a perfect bet. As Microsoft has shown with their Win8/phone platform, they are trying to transition away from their old platforms (although the market currently won't let them). It's almost a guarantee that eventually old Office versions will fail to run and after that running into data inco…
Saying Microsoft isn't perfect at backwards compatibility is nit picking to say the least! They are far far ahead of any competition in terms of backwards compatibility. It's practically measured in decades whereas Apple can't manage 5 years.
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Saying Microsoft isn't perfect at backwards compatibility is nit picking to say the least! They are far far ahead of any competition in terms of backwards compatibility. It's practically measured in decades whereas Apple can't manage 5 years.
Silverlight didn't last decades.
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The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (st…
This is just the way Apple has always been. Keep up or fall behind. They're not focused on providing backwards compatibility. They leave the door open to losing customers to companies like Microsoft with these kinds of decisions. But that's the choice they made.
I can keep up with my system and applications just fine, but are you saying that I have to re-visit my archive of past documents with each new keynote version, and re-open & re-save them all?
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For example, if you had your own compiler which generated a.out output, then the Linux 1.2 switch to ELF would have broken the code in a similar backward incompatible way, despite there being no proprietary code involved. (Standards wouldn't have helped either.)
I'm calling your bluff: https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L... Specifically, Alan Cox's comment that he can still run an a.out rogue binary from 1992 on a 3.6 version of the Linux kernel. Linux 1.2 was released March 1995.
Looking around, it requires a bit of work (see for example http://www.ru.j-npcs.org/usoft/WWW/www_debian.org/FAQ/debian... ).
Here's a recent (2014) report of success: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/running...
rogue is text only. According to a report from 2009 at https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/linux-binary-compati... :
> A Mosaic binary from 1994 just segfaults, as well as all the other ZMAGIC binaries (1994-1995) I have lying around.
but OTOH that may be because of the setting of noexec and other flags.
The author might consider using Microsoft products because they are obsessive about providing backwards compatibility. That's one of the positive things about Microsoft products. The downside is that they have to deal with a lot of old baggage as a result. Apple, on the other hand is almost the opposite. They're obsessive about upgrading everyone and leaving the past behind. That's great because they're free to make…
Files are data. Data should be eternal. You should be able to convert a presentation you make today 30 years from now to a newer format. Making software not-backwards compatible is fine and normal but if files expire in a few years Apple is saying that the things you do on their computers are disposable.