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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”

#21

Post by nsxwolf »

Paul12345534 wrote: post #6

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them. As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longe…

Let's admit that is a terrible user experience. Buy a piece of obsolete hardware you will use only once, just because Apple didn't make an installer available for an old version - or better yet, a conversion tool - either stand alone or built into the "Open..." action of the new version of the application.

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

#22

Post by tlrobinson »

Apple is pretty obnoxious about this sort of thing. They recently stopped printing photo books for the version of iPhoto my mom used, with no warning at all. I had to upgrade her iPhoto, which required I upgrade to Mavericks, which required I add more RAM to her computer.

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

#23

Post by Turing_Machine »

clarry wrote: post #16
otterley wrote: post #10

For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.

I'd rather bet on something you can implement all by yourself without needing to wade through a thousand page spec. How about plain uncompressed text and netp[bgp]m for images?

There are FOSS implementations of PDF. Mozilla has one, I think.

Edit: yep.

http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/

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

#24

Post by badman_ting »

otterley wrote: post #10

For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.

I was recently asked for my resume, a document which I created in Pages and then exported to PDF. So sure, what I had was readable, but it was out of date. Thus began the painful cycle of getting Pages (09) back on my machine - for some reason I had deleted it in the interim. Boy was that a mistake. I'm just lucky I still had a disk image of the old iWork - without that I would have been hosed.

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

#25

Post by sz4kerto »

yuhong wrote: post #3

I think even MS is better than this at supporting old Office binary formats. Only PowerPoint has completely removed the support for pre-97 formats. With Word/Excel you can generally unblock support for older formats even if by default they will not open.

'even MS'

MS is one of the best in supporting old formats. That's part of how and why the managed to keep their monopoly on the desktop. There's not many OSs out there where you can start a 20 year old software and it runs almost always perfectly. (Try that on Linux or OSX.)

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

#26

Post by nols »

valarauca1 wrote: post #2

A lot of people have absolutely no problem with proprietary software until it breaks. The problem is you never know when it will break, and what it'll take down with it. I'm not saying 'go full Stallman'. I'm just saying think that when ever you hand over your data to a private company if they consider it as important as you consider it.

It's like the news that majority of the world's ATMs run on Windows XP or earlier. Or lab equipment that's air-gapped because it only works on some obsolete OS that's horribly insecure.

Proprietary software is fine, but if long-lasting hardware is dependent on it bad things happen when that software company decides it's no longer worth supporting.

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

#28

Post by NegativeK »

sz4kerto wrote: post #25
yuhong wrote: post #3

I think even MS is better than this at supporting old Office binary formats. Only PowerPoint has completely removed the support for pre-97 formats. With Word/Excel you can generally unblock support for older formats even if by default they will not open.

'even MS' MS is one of the best in supporting old formats. That's part of how and why the managed to keep their monopoly on the desktop. There's not many OSs out there where you can start a 20 year old software and it runs almost always perfectly. (Try that on Linux or OSX.)

I spin up xspringies[1] every once in a while to waste some time. It's well over 20 years old and runs like a charm.

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html

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

#29

Post by chasing »

jobu wrote: post #14
Paul12345534 wrote: post #6

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them. As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longe…

I would be very surprised if Keynote '09' would even run in Mavericks. When I upgraded to Lion a couple years back I couldn't use any of the iWork suite that came with the computer. Fortunately I had only made a couple throwaway presentations and documents at that point, but it taught me a lesson about Apple's approach to planned obsolescence.

Keynote '09 works just fine on Mavericks.

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

#30

Post by clarry »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #23
clarry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather bet on something you can implement all by yourself without needing to wade through a thousand page spec. How about plain uncompressed text and netp[bgp]m for images?

There are FOSS implementations of PDF. Mozilla has one, I think. Edit: yep. http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/

Yeah, that's the one that always bitched and moaned about not being able to display the document correctly. I got tired of it and disabled the thing.

I've used other PDF viewers (Evince, xpdf, gs, mupdf), and tell you what.. I've come across PDFs they cannot display properly.

If I have to rely on others implementing things for me, and there is concrete evidence that others have trouble doing it, why would I rely on such a format?

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