Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 217 posts

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

#201

Post by davidgerard »

yuhong wrote: post #11
mikeash wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, there's nothing inherent about open source that avoids this sort of problem. An open source project could decide on exactly the same sort of upgrade path, where they support current-minus-one versions and that's it. In theory, open source is better because the old code is still out there and you can get it up and running to upgrade your data. In practice, it can be pretty tough to get open source code t…

I think LibreOffice 4.0 abandoned support for the old StarOffice binary format for example.

And even Apache OpenOffice abandoned them. Basically the old binfilter was that horrible.

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

#202

Post by davidgerard »

LibreOffice, as part of its goal to open anything, has rudimentary Keynote support in LO 4.2. I expect they'd heartily welcome bug reports and example documents. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libetonyek/ is the library that does the work.

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

#203

Post by richardwhiuk »

upofadown wrote: post #145
Timmmmbob wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think ancient HTML was complicated enough to have quirks.

Really? Looking at the source of that page:

IMG tags with unquoted SRC attributes, and unquoted ALIGN attribute

BASE tag with default attribute - tag is: " rel="nofollow">http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/"> but should be " rel="nofollow">http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">

UL tags with no LI tags

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

#204

Post by derrida »

baddox wrote: post #121
npsimons wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You didn't have access to the source of the video driver. Not an example of having the source being & difficult to fix.

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

#205

Post by gpvos »

fredsted wrote: post #196
chris_wot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be joking. The amount of time that it takes a consumer to build a product is not the same amount of time a paid developer uses to build a software product, and take it through a QA process. It's ridiculous that you cannot open the previous version of a Pages file in the current version of Pages! What an absolute joke.

When I upgraded my iWorks to '13, it put the old versions in a folder. I can still access Pages '09, Keynote '09, etc. Did OP delete those old versions? I don't see what the problem is here.

> I do have an installation CD, but I don’t have a CD drive any more.

He got a new machine.

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

#206

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gpvos wrote: post #205
fredsted wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I upgraded my iWorks to '13, it put the old versions in a folder. I can still access Pages '09, Keynote '09, etc. Did OP delete those old versions? I don't see what the problem is here.

> I do have an installation CD, but I don’t have a CD drive any more. He got a new machine.

The lack of CD drive has several not very difficult solutions: Get a USB CD drive, use your old computer or a friend's computer make a dmg out of the CD, etc.

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

#207

Post by derrida »

nemothekid wrote: post #133
npsimons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nknighthb is completely right. It is user hostile. It even makes a huge assumption, that clarry is programmer in the first place. With "Patches welcome" you might as well be saying "If you don't like it, spend a year learning [Language] to fix this issue." How is that anything other than user hostile? If my mom can't open a pdf in pdf.js, I'm not going to tell her "Well mom, patches welcome."

"My mum writes optimizing compilers."

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

#208

Post by jmcqk6 »

Touche wrote: post #65
jakejake wrote: post #54

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.

All of this reminds me of _why

http://www.scribd.com/doc/136918361/Collected-PDFs-of-why

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

#209

Post by stefanu »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206
gpvos wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do have an installation CD, but I don’t have a CD drive any more. He got a new machine.

The lack of CD drive has several not very difficult solutions: Get a USB CD drive, use your old computer or a friend's computer make a dmg out of the CD, etc.

It's about the principle. I'm not saying that the problem has no solution, I can convert the files using someone else's computer as you are saying. Why should I get a USB CD drive that I will use only to convert documents that I expect to be readable anyways? Why should I spend time looking for someone with iWork'09 installation and use their time to convert my documents? It is just unacceptable from a company that is proud for user experience of its products. I should be able to do that from my chair, legally, with a download of a conversion tool or with an upload to a conversion service from Apple, not a third-party.

I would not mind buying a floppy drive and all necessary adapters, install Atari ST emulator and write Kamenicky encoding converter in Python to convert 1st World Plus documents from '89 if I had to convert documents of my parents. I would not be complaining about obsolescence of the format at all.

My problem is not technical, it is about user experience and productivity.

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

#210

Post by emacdona »

bluenose69 wrote: post #189

Advice: switch to latex with beamer. Latex has a fairly long life time. A friend found the 20-year old source for his thesis and thought it would be fun to see if it would still compile in latex. Sure enough, it did, after just a few header lines being changed (sometimes library names change).

And, even if it didn't compile (which is a big "if"), you'd still have a postscript or pdf file of the presentation. I have yet to find a non-DRM'ed pdf old enough to cause me trouble when trying to view it.
Post reply on HN