31–40 of 217 posts
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?
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's no formatting info in those. Why not just include a statically linked copy of xpdf? The x86 family will be around for a while, and if it goes away I'm sure there will be emulators.
What system does that statically linked thing run on? Is that system going to remain compatible for decades? Or emulators capable of running an old version of it?
Why overcomplicate matters when you can pick something you know just works.
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.)
For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.
Text formats should be readable forever. PDF, while generally excellent in this regard, has already broken backwards-comparability on several occasions (or rather: Acrobat has, which is not formally the same as the format doing so, but in practice there isn’t a whole lot of difference; you might as well just read the raw xml in an “unopenable” keynote document). Adobe’s marketing will tell you otherwise, of course. I…
In my opinion this is totally unacceptable, and fundamentally opposite their philosophy of solving hard usability problems to make the user's life easier. If they were so committed to that, then they would automatically read and update old files, and do so accurately.
More and more, Mac OS X is becoming a shell for other peoples (preferably open source) software that I actually trust :\
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
You basically have to pirate it in order to do these kinds of shenanigans.
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.
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 timing in computers is.
If you use lab equipment in say Linux, BSD, OSX, Windows. Your using a time shared, not Read-Time OS. So your I/O events aren't when the event happens, but when the scheduler is damn well ready to let you know the event happened.
The easiest example is a timing equipment I was using to count digital pulses form a quartz crystal. In a 'modern' secure OS I couldn't really get below 0.1% margin of error. Which wasn't acceptable for the equipment which wasn't low enough for our uses. I fall back to an older insecure real-time platform and bumped up to 0.005%.
Security is great. I attend security conferences in my spare time and try to stay up to date on the topic. The main problem is when you get into most this computing everything isn't running glibc and win32. Hacking isn't very easy unless you know the system to start with.
I don't see why it's reasonable to expect to be given software from the CD/DVD era as a digital download. It would be nice, yes, but Adobe will not give you a digital download of CS5 (I tried.) I'd be surprised if Microsoft would give you a digital download of Office 2003.
The inability to read old documents is shitty, yes, but Apple made a solution available. If you need 5-year-old software, then it's not unreasonable that you need some now-obsolete hardware.
AFAIK it's not necessary to buy Apple-branded drives - there are cheaper alternatives. You can also "share" the CD drive of any other modern Mac on the same WiFi network - I've used the family iMac to load Creative Suite onto my MBA. I bet they'd also let you use an optical drive at the Genius Bar, even if you're out of warranty.