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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”

#81

Post by Turing_Machine »

clarry wrote: post #70
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.

Do you also implement your own OS from scratch No, not today. Maybe in the future, who knows. But I try not to depend on too many things and people, if there's a way around it. I like to have control. That's freedom to me, and freedom gives me peace of mind. So, no, I don't see why I should waste my precious free time improving software support for a format that I find way overcomplicated and just plain silly. Why sh…

No one is telling you what to do.

If plain text does the job for you, great. If not, and you come up with something better than PDF, also great. I'll be happy to use it.

Complaining is always a lot easier than doing.

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

#82

Post by aroch »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72
aroch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I haven't and I do mean this in the most condescending way possible; he's complaining about the proprietary format not working and laments losing his stuff. He could easily solve his problems. It's not a "hack" to open a folder or do you reward yourself with a cookie every time you open a folder on your desktop? FFS, this is "HackerNews"... write a bash script to do it for you. Better yet, use some "super 1337 h4…

How about all non-hackers who don't know what a "file format" is, but may have important documents in decade-old formats? "Normal" people are not only not trained that they should keep upgrading lest they perish; they will ask you with bewilderment, "why I'm supposed to throw away that perfectly working machine after only 3 years?".

If they're not upgrading, they're not facing the horrible, insurmountable problem OP is.

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

#83

Post by bananas »

yuhong wrote: post #60
thatthatis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years is not a long time for information to be retrievable. By comparison, my current version of office easily allows saving (not just opening, but saving) in versions compatible with office '97. That's ~17 years of saving backward compatibility.

I think you can even save in Excel 5.0/95 format in current versions of Excel.

You can open wordperfect 5.1 (1989) in Office 2013 no problems.

Numbers can't even open ODS files at all, destroys iWork 09 documents and pretty much sticks a fork in most xslx documents.

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

#84

Post by cormullion »

tlrobinson wrote: post #22

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.

and they removed iPhoto Library sharing from the recent update, which we used all the time...

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

#85

Post by bananas »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #48
otterley wrote: post #10

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

I save my archival stuff in .HTML That's worked out fairly well so far. Stuff I wrote back in the 90s is still readable. Probably not that great if you're a designer, who needs something to look just so when printed. But for near enough everything I do, it's more than sufficient. Easy to convert too, since it's just tagged text.

This is the most sensible thing I've heard for years.

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

#86

Post by jkimmel »

nols wrote: post #26
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.

>lab equipment that's air-gapped because it only works on some obsolete OS that's horribly insecure.

Just to emphasize how prevalent this is, I work in a 5 story life sciences research center with hundreds of personnel. All of our lab computers are airgapped, many of them stuck on OS versions >10 years old.

I used OS X 10.1 the other day. That was certainly an experience.

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

#87

Post by RyanZAG »

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…

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 incompatibilities with old files becomes par. With the call-home DRM in post Microsoft platforms, there is also no guarantee you'll even be able to run an old Microsoft version either.

A better option is to stick to open standards. If your presentation is done in something like HTML, there is a 100% chance you will be able to view it in even 50 years as it is standardized and there are many implementations available for viewing it.

Of course, if your presentation depends on some javascript calculations or a remotely hosted jquery, those probably won't be working in 50 years time either..

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

#88

Post by sosborn »

Silhouette wrote: post #71
michaelfeathers wrote: post #43

Sadly, it seems like a business opportunity: "we'll convert formats for you when your vendor drops the ball."

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.

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

#89

Post by Touche »

teej wrote: post #80
Touche wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 can't be viewed on a new computer?

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

#90

Post by chimeracoder »

rakoo wrote: post #62
scrollaway wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF is an open spec since a few years. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html

Officially, OOXML (aka .docx and friends) is an open spec, too.

.docx (and co.) isn't really an open spec. Microsoft forced it through the standardization process, but it doesn't really deserve the title.

The "spec" is full of statements like "render this the way that it was done in Office 95".

The best solution would be to use ODF, which is supported by all office software.... except Apple's.

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