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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”

#91

Post by RyanZAG »

valarauca1 wrote: post #39
nols wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Wouldn't it have been better to just stick a specialized piece of hardware/fpga to read directly from the crystal, buffer it, and pass it on? In fact that's what the timing equipment usually does for you. There's no reason to give up security when a few minor changes in architecture will give you performance, security and ease of maintenance and interconnectability.

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

#92

Post by yuhong »

chimeracoder wrote: post #90
rakoo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, I mentioned it in my wishlist for Satya: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

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

#93

Post by BashiBazouk »

aroch wrote: post #47
senorprogrammer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this in the nicest way, but you've rather missed the point. While your response might be technically accurate and true, the author speaks to a greater issue than a one-off hack will support.

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…

I agree. If it takes less time to google-fu and implement an answer than it does to write and publish a blog post about the problem, there is a high probability that the blog post was the real intention all along...

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

#94

Post by pgeorgi »

Touche wrote: post #89
teej wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That was one of the main reasons IE6 survived for so long.

So yes, under some circumstances, old formats are deprecated - even on the web. The world is better for it, but it still sucks for those who need that old stuff and are unable to move it forward.

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

#95

Post by nknighthb »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #51
clarry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

"Patches welcome" is an aggressive, user-hostile, anti-social response to being told that the thing you suggested does not work. It's telling the user to fuck off because your own suggestion was flawed. clarry didn't run to HN and scream "pdf.js sucks!".

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

#96

Post by aestra »

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…

Except compatibility mode is often not compatible. I've run into it a bunch of times where .doc, etc. files just don't render right on new copies of Office. I have had to install old versions of Office to work on certain documents. These documents often have VBA in them. They can't get everything to work properly 100% of the time.

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

#97

Post by banachtarski »

Touche wrote: post #89
teej wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's just not true. Data is software in it's own sense. For example, if you were to compare different binary serialization formats, you would find that you can do better than Google's protocol buffers but only because protobuffs value backwards compatibility.

Sure you could write software to migrate formats each step of the way but this is expensive and perhaps the company wanted to focus on the next thing.

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

#98

Post by mturmon »

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.

"Data should be eternal."

This is not a useful statement. If you convert the "should" to a "shall", and try to design a system around that requirement alone, it would prove very hard. Even designing a clock around that requirement is very hard (http://longnow.org/clock/).

If you back off from the "shall", then you are in the standard world of engineering tradeoffs, which is where you started.

What features do you want to give up for "eternal"?

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

#99

Post by markrages »

dalke wrote: post #77
itcmcgrath wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/proprietary// While I like non-proprietary software, there is nothing inherit that makes much of a difference for the lay person. As the complexity of the software goes up, so does the level of what is considered a 'lay person'. For any sufficiently complex software and non-pervasive problem - you're SOL in both cases. Standards help more than proprietary/non-proprietary. Lower complexity also helps more.

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.)

Uh.

  # modprobe binfmt_aout
  # uname -rv
  3.2.0-60-generic-pae #91-Ubuntu SMP Wed Feb 19 04:14:56 UTC 2014
Standards help a lot, that's why a.out still works on modern Linux.

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

#100

Post by jperks »

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…

Yeah, Microsoft is all that not too super cool and buggy but it's right in persevering the path. Not being able to open and work with old documents is frustrating. In a way it's like forgeting grandparents and parents. Not a good thing to do. Apple PR should hear our voices and make a move. They'll lose too much if they don't.
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