8 ms·

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

370 points by stefanu 13y ago

valarauca1 13y ago
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.
- nols 13y ago
  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.
  - valarauca1 13y ago
    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 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.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      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.
      - valarauca1 13y ago
        Your acting like the read/write time to the hardware/FPGA is negligible which it isn't. When you access hardware on say a PCI bus (which you would in this scenario). Your call to the PCI bus does not take place WHEN you call for it to take place. You call the Kernel, which calls the scheduler, which calls the hardware manager, which calls the driver, which finally processes your request. Now your request is processed all this is dumped and something else runs while the processor waits to hear back from the PCI bus with the response because this takes ages in processor time. Finally an interrupt arrives, is made sense of, the appropriate driver is called, then it gives your information back to your process and you back on your merry little way. :.:.: The problem is when you called OS to start this long chain of events the real world didn't stop. Your real time module is still counting the 32,600,000 pulses per second. This is where you'll get errors. Because often its easy to think things in a computer happen instantly, or so blindingly fast you don't care what happens, order or speed. The situation you described is what originally gave me 0.1% error. Eventually I switched to a more aggressive tact of polling asynchronously in a separate thread and when a process called for the time responding with the latest received time. This got me down to 0.07% error. Still not acceptable. :.:.: Its nice to be starry eyed and think there is no reason to give up security. But sometimes secure software can't do what you need it to do. The more crap you put between you and the metal the more time it'll take to execute. This is logically provable. If you take process A and B. Both are the optimal way to do something. There is no faster way to do this task. Therefore one can assume A and B's execution time are equal. Yet B operates in a secure sand-boxed environment with a time sharing OS. Therefore B's true execution is B+C+D. We know A = B, but for A = (B+C+D) C and D must be Zero, which they can never be in the real world.
  - jkimmel 13y ago
    >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.
    - scholia 13y ago
      Mac OS X 10.1 is roughly as old as Windows XP, isn't it?
- itcmcgrath 13y ago
  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.
  - dalke 13y ago
    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.)
    - markrages 13y ago
      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.
    - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      I'd imagine if it doesn't work though, in contrast to the OP's situation, you could spin up a virtual machine with a pre-1.2 version of Linux and run the code without having to pay anything to do so. Also this is a quite different situation to reading a document.
      - voltagex_ 13y ago
        I'm having trouble locating a (floppy?) image that old but I'd love to try - AFAICT VirtualBox was written with kernel 2.6+ in mind. Edit: Debian: http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-0.93R6/disks/ http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-0.93R6/disks/ RedHat: http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/1.0/en/os/i386/rootdisks/ http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/1.0/en/o...
    - npsimons 13y ago
- baddox 13y ago
  To play devil's advocate, one could say the same for a lot of open source software: it's great until it breaks. Your claim implies that broken proprietary software is bad because you can't access the source code, while mine implies that broken open source software is bad because there might be no company or organization dedicated to providing support.
  - valarauca1 13y ago
    But dealing with real life probabilities the likelihood of the event occurring (Unless your approaching the fringe of newer/locked down hardware) is slim.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    Irrelevant; you can fix (or pay/trade/beg someone else to fix) FLOSS. You can't say the same for closed source.
    - baddox 13y ago
      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 of being able to fix a broken closed-source video driver by opening the binary up in a hex editor. Technically possible, yes, but not remotely feasible.
      - derrida 13y ago
        You didn't have access to the source of the video driver. Not an example of having the source being & difficult to fix.
    - nemothekid 13y ago
      How so? You could similarly beg or pay for Apple to fix the issue. Consider OP's use case. Lets say hes a non-programmer and Keynote is open source, but similar in complexity to WebKit. Now he comes across the error - what can he do? Learning to program or finding someone with the time and knowhow of Keynotes (or WebKits) inner workings may take months. On the time scale of months, he could also bitch enough at Apple that they may release a tool. However in both cases, the most time efficient solution is to download Keynote 09.
- npsimons 13y ago
  In a similar vein, I'm now accelerating my plans to move to something like this: http://phpmygpx.tuxfamily.org/phpmygpx.php http://phpmygpx.tuxfamily.org/phpmygpx.php because Google has made Maps where I can no longer just paste a URL to a KMZ on another server and have it popup in maps, shareable with friends and family. It's not lockin, but it's a similar symptom of relying on software that you have no control over (closed source). I distinctly remember similar grumblings when Google shutdown Reader . . . .
yuhong 13y ago
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.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  Apple is also better at supporting old MS formats. I found some old recipes I wrote in Word 6.0.1 in 1998, which opened fine in OS X Mavericks's TextEdit.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  '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.)
  - NegativeK 13y ago
    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 http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html
  - danielweber 13y ago
    At Microsoft, if there is a design choice between "abandon the old user" or "let's forget them to make the current product better," they nearly always choose #1. Apple nearly always chooses #2. (I still remember DOS 3.2 to DOS 3.3.)
    - laurent123456 13y ago
      You probably meant "support the old users", otherwise your two options are pretty much the same :)
      - 13y ago
FollowSteph3 13y ago
This is NOT true of all proprietary software. It's just that with apple either you keep upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time or you will have problems. Apple has its pros and cons, and one of those is that you have to keep upgrading regularly. Most proprietary software will offer upgrade paths from older versions.
- mikeash 13y ago
  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 that hasn't been maintained in years to build and run properly on a current OS install.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    I think LibreOffice 4.0 abandoned support for the old StarOffice binary format for example.
    - ccozan 13y ago
      Yes, but you can download and install at minimal cost any old version of Libre/Openoffice and read your Staroffice documents. You are not quite left stranded. And also I assume the code to read that format still resides in a repository, cann be pulled and reused at will. Not the same happens with proprietary software.
    - davidgerard 13y ago
      And even Apache OpenOffice abandoned them. Basically the old binfilter was that horrible.
  - laurent123456 13y ago
    It's relatively easy to install an old version of XP or Debian on VirtualBox to run the old software though, and that would be enough to export the documents to a newer format. In comparison, OSX is generally hard to get running on VirtualBox.
skimmas 13y ago
the guy is clearly living in the past. 2008 ain't sexy anymore...
Paul12345534 13y ago
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 longevity now can easily use their XML formats.
- stefanu 13y ago
  You are right, I can get all the necessary hardware for that. That is not a problem, problem is that I can't have that when I need it. Imagine you go to a meetup and would like to show some older presentations and you are not aware of the issue. Well, bad luck - nothing to show, no quick fix by downloading a conversion tool or older version of the software. I'm not saying that it is permanent problem, there is solution for it for sure. It is just unnecessarily cumbersome and mostly unexpected: I can imagine dropping support for files from 1995 not for files from 2008.
  - FollowSteph3 13y ago
    I think that's the key most people are forgetting here. You're talkng maybe 5 years ago, even more recent. When you go back 10+ years it's not unreasonable to expect some drop in support. But 2 versions is way way too quick!!
- jobu 13y ago
  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.
  - fredoralive 13y ago
    iWork '09 works on Mavericks.
aroch 13y ago
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
- senorprogrammer 13y ago
  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.
  - aroch 13y ago
    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 h4x0r google-fu" and search "convert keynote 08 to keynote 09" and you'll find a bash script to do it in 5 seconds[1]. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+keynote+08+to+keynote+09 https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+keynote+08+to+keynot...
    - stefanu 13y ago
      FFS, this is "HackerNews"... write a bash script to do it for you. I have written quite a few bash scripts, python scripts and long ago ruby and smalltalk scripts to do things for me, that bothered me. My point is, this is a software I am paying for (and I've already mentioned that 2008 should not be considered as old) and I would rather spend my time writing the "super 1337 h4x0r" bash and python scripts for something that I can't do otherwise.
      - aroch 13y ago
        You really don't get to complain about a proprietary format being retired due to age or even just disappearing off the face of the Earth. There's an astounding amount of software written for the sciences that uses proprietary binaries that are depreciated two years later. We all realized long ago that if you want to preserve something, export it as an 'open' or standardized format. That's why every image producing/editing software supports `tiff` encoding.
otterley 13y ago
For archival purposes, I strongly recommend saving extra versions of documents in PDF format. Those should be readable forever.
- clarry 13y ago
  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?
  - Turing_Machine 13y ago
    There are FOSS implementations of PDF. Mozilla has one, I think. Edit: yep. http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
    - clarry 13y ago
      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?
      - Turing_Machine 13y ago
        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.
        clarry 13y ago
        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 should I?
dictum 13y ago
I have many Pages/Keynote/Numbers documents from 2005-2008, and I remember wondering if they'd ever become unreadable with future technology. The date came sooner than expected.
tlrobinson 13y ago
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.
- cormullion 13y ago
  and they removed iPhoto Library sharing from the recent update, which we used all the time...
- dTal 13y ago
  Sounds like they played it pretty well.
hypertexthero 13y ago
[What the hell are you using to give presentations](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2011/11/dont-use-powerpoint/ http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2011/11/dont-use-powerpoint...)?
slideshare 13y ago
Hi there - We are looking into this, and will get back to you soon. Thanks for your patience!
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Who the hell is "We"? You're green.
- marquis 13y ago
  Assuming you are slideshare.net. This was my first question, isn't there an online service to do conversion? Surely for old file formats someone would happily pay a few dollars if it's an important doc. I would have tried Google Docs first too but a quick search shows nothing.
lux 13y ago
They made a similar break in the latest GarageBand where the format changed but also 32-bit plugins no longer work, and there's no way to download the old version of GarageBand on a new Mavericks machine. While it will open and update old files, it loses certain settings, sound clips, etc. so I have several "updated" files that are not what I recorded. 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 :\
phillmv 13y ago
I'm more concerned as to how it's increasingly impossible to buy an old copy and install it; the app store will only show you the latest version (and even for only the latest OS version), and the installer might even refuse to install, having detected a more recent version. You basically have to pirate it in order to do these kinds of shenanigans.
superuser2 13y ago
When I reinstalled my OS and neglected to save iWork '09, I called Apple and they overnighted me an install disk for free without even checking that I actually owned an iWork license. 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.
- abat 13y ago
  The core complaint is not you need to use a cd run iWork '09, it's that you need iWork '09 in the first place. The commentary on the need for cd drive is to emphasize how unreasonable it is to require iWork '09 to open several year old files.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  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.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    I think you can even save in Excel 5.0/95 format in current versions of Excel.
    - bananas 13y ago
      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.
michaelfeathers 13y ago
Sadly, it seems like a business opportunity: "we'll convert formats for you when your vendor drops the ball."
- avdempsey 13y ago
  Could this be packaged as an insurance product?
- Silhouette 13y ago
  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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - sosborn 13y ago
    >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.
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      Even then I'm not convinced, without talking to a lawyer, that it would be safe to recreate in a patent-encumbered format. Regardless of how well patents in general might or might not serve their original purpose, I tend to think that patents that are essentially just locking up data formats do not encourage progress in the way that they are supposed to. I think the US was onto something when it came to copyright and typeface designs, and a similar principle ought to apply to data formats.
      - michaelfeathers 13y ago
jakejake 13y ago
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 bold and innovative changes. The downside of course is that you and your files sometimes get left behind. Both are valid strategies in my opinion and appeal to different customers. If you feel like backwards compatibility is a really important feature then whether you want to admit it or not, you probably would be happy as a Microsoft customer.
- Touche 13y ago
  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.
  - 345723 13y ago
    It is eternal, as long as you have the system and the software that it was created with. This can be said for all sorts of things, from the Commodore 64 to Keynote. If you want to be able to access the data on an NES cartridge you are going to need special hardware and software. Yes the ROMS are available now online, but that's only because someone with the hardware and software made it available to others. This is the nature of proprietary formats.
    - pif 13y ago
      > This is the nature of proprietary formats. Indeed. When you choose to save your work in a not-public format, you are decidîng not to care about its lifespan: complaining later is just useless, unfortunately.
  - teej 13y ago
    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 considerations. You also have to think about upgrade cycle, time-to-market, third party integrations, and what will help you win marketshare and sell copies. 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. As the grandparent points out, Microsoft values backwards compatibility. If you value that too, buy Microsoft.
webjprgm 13y ago
This has long been true of Apple and ever since Apple acquired Claris Works I've made sure I can open my old files or else keep around some emulation layer to do so. (E.g. SheepShaver to run Mac OS 9 and AppleWorks 5 which could open all the old Claris Works documents).
yungether 13y ago
What is this plus.google? Is this some sort of clickjacking scheme?
RankingMember 13y ago
For some reason having those hashtags at the bottom of the article makes me feel dumb, as though the author thought I'd need Cliff Notes for the article. I know that's not the point of hashtags. Maybe it's #fail that flipped my switch. #Apple #iWork #fail #proprietary #OpenOffice
stcredzero 13y ago
What if someone maintained an online "virtual museum" of old emulated machines and operating systems? This could be done as SaaS, with some value add tools for converting to modern formats thrown in.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Amusing, interesting for history's sake, and possibly useful, but licensing issues would kill it for closed source, and it's not needed for things with permissive licenses because you can already get the source for old versions and run it yourself.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    Some people would pay for something already set up for them. Microsoft might like the idea and support it, as it furthers their backwards compatibility story.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
leni536 13y ago
LaTeX with the Beamer package would be more futureproof.
cgore 13y ago
I learned my lesson a long time ago, back when WordStar died. I never moved to WordPerfect, and I never moved to Microsoft Word. I do anything I really care about in LaTeX or HTML these days. I can still get to my WordStar documents though, thanks to DOSbox.
plg 13y ago
It's just amazing. I found the same thing with "old" Pages documents (from 2008 as well). What am I supposed to do now? It does not make me feel like continuing to put all of my work in iWork format. If one were to go Microsoft on the Mac, what are my choices? Office 2011? (it's 2014 now after all) I know there's OpenOffice too
ggchappell 13y ago
This is curious, because not long ago, I found myself needing to look at an old AppleWorks[1] file. It opened in Pages without a hitch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appleworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appleworks
knodi 13y ago
Hey look another thing Apple "simplified". Really not happy with this trend of dropping support/feature and calling it "we simplified it".
- userbinator 13y ago
  The other thing to note is that hardware is still continuing to get faster and bigger (although that's slowed down a little most recently), while people are slowly being able to do less with new software that consumes more resources than their predecessors. "Do less with more"? I think we've reached the point where computers have become much more than powerful enough for a lot of the common tasks people use them for. The rest is just marketing with an aggressive "newer is better" campaign. IMHO "forced deprecation" is nearly never a good thing. Change in software (and hardware) should be an evolution, not a revolution. Fix bugs and add features, don't take away what was there before. I think a lot more people value stability over "latest fashion" than what companies and the like would want you to think, so they can keep you consuming.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Surprised nobody's mentioned SliTeX either here or on G+. Source is plain ASCII. Output is PDF. Interpreter is TeX. All three are very, very robust for backward compatibility. That Microsoft is being promoted for backwards (and forwards) compatibility strikes me as ... comical.
tomrod 13y ago
I ran into this issue with a Visual Fox Pro database setup used by FERC. In 2013, documents are STILL being produced into a proprietary format that nothing open source can read (directly) a decade later. This is why I love Python and Perl for data munging.
eagsalazar2 13y ago
Suggestion: Don't use Keynote. It is a royal POS.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Should have used {Open,Libre}Office.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  Apache OpenOffice doesn't open Keynote docs - but LibreOffice tries to (libetonyek).
bluenose69 13y ago
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).
- emacdona 13y ago
  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.
davidgerard 13y ago
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/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libetonyek/ is the library that does the work.
natch 13y ago
A couple of things here: 1) "Fresh Mavericks install." He should run Software Update and tell us he has done so, if he's going to write a blog post about whether stuff works. 2) He should file a radar (Apple's umbrella term for bug report / feature request) and share the radar number with us so we know he's at least going through the channels Apple has provided for concerns like this. http://radar.apple.com/ http://radar.apple.com/ Or... he could just write a blog post, but I'm saying it would likely be more effective if he also did these two things, in addition to his blog post. Wait, he shouldn't have to file a radar? True, in an ideal world, he shouldn't have to. But you know what they say about ideal worlds...

370 points by stefanu 13y ago

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.

nols 13y ago
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.
- valarauca1 13y ago
  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 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.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    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.
    - valarauca1 13y ago
      Your acting like the read/write time to the hardware/FPGA is negligible which it isn't. When you access hardware on say a PCI bus (which you would in this scenario). Your call to the PCI bus does not take place WHEN you call for it to take place. You call the Kernel, which calls the scheduler, which calls the hardware manager, which calls the driver, which finally processes your request. Now your request is processed all this is dumped and something else runs while the processor waits to hear back from the PCI bus with the response because this takes ages in processor time. Finally an interrupt arrives, is made sense of, the appropriate driver is called, then it gives your information back to your process and you back on your merry little way. :.:.: The problem is when you called OS to start this long chain of events the real world didn't stop. Your real time module is still counting the 32,600,000 pulses per second. This is where you'll get errors. Because often its easy to think things in a computer happen instantly, or so blindingly fast you don't care what happens, order or speed. The situation you described is what originally gave me 0.1% error. Eventually I switched to a more aggressive tact of polling asynchronously in a separate thread and when a process called for the time responding with the latest received time. This got me down to 0.07% error. Still not acceptable. :.:.: Its nice to be starry eyed and think there is no reason to give up security. But sometimes secure software can't do what you need it to do. The more crap you put between you and the metal the more time it'll take to execute. This is logically provable. If you take process A and B. Both are the optimal way to do something. There is no faster way to do this task. Therefore one can assume A and B's execution time are equal. Yet B operates in a secure sand-boxed environment with a time sharing OS. Therefore B's true execution is B+C+D. We know A = B, but for A = (B+C+D) C and D must be Zero, which they can never be in the real world.
- jkimmel 13y ago
  >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.
  - scholia 13y ago
    Mac OS X 10.1 is roughly as old as Windows XP, isn't it?
itcmcgrath 13y ago
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.
- dalke 13y ago
  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.)
  - markrages 13y ago
    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.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    I'd imagine if it doesn't work though, in contrast to the OP's situation, you could spin up a virtual machine with a pre-1.2 version of Linux and run the code without having to pay anything to do so. Also this is a quite different situation to reading a document.
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
      I'm having trouble locating a (floppy?) image that old but I'd love to try - AFAICT VirtualBox was written with kernel 2.6+ in mind. Edit: Debian: http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-0.93R6/disks/ http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-0.93R6/disks/ RedHat: http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/1.0/en/os/i386/rootdisks/ http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/1.0/en/o...
  - npsimons 13y ago
baddox 13y ago
To play devil's advocate, one could say the same for a lot of open source software: it's great until it breaks. Your claim implies that broken proprietary software is bad because you can't access the source code, while mine implies that broken open source software is bad because there might be no company or organization dedicated to providing support.
- valarauca1 13y ago
  But dealing with real life probabilities the likelihood of the event occurring (Unless your approaching the fringe of newer/locked down hardware) is slim.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Irrelevant; you can fix (or pay/trade/beg someone else to fix) FLOSS. You can't say the same for closed source.
  - baddox 13y ago
    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 of being able to fix a broken closed-source video driver by opening the binary up in a hex editor. Technically possible, yes, but not remotely feasible.
    - derrida 13y ago
      You didn't have access to the source of the video driver. Not an example of having the source being & difficult to fix.
  - nemothekid 13y ago
    How so? You could similarly beg or pay for Apple to fix the issue. Consider OP's use case. Lets say hes a non-programmer and Keynote is open source, but similar in complexity to WebKit. Now he comes across the error - what can he do? Learning to program or finding someone with the time and knowhow of Keynotes (or WebKits) inner workings may take months. On the time scale of months, he could also bitch enough at Apple that they may release a tool. However in both cases, the most time efficient solution is to download Keynote 09.
npsimons 13y ago
In a similar vein, I'm now accelerating my plans to move to something like this: http://phpmygpx.tuxfamily.org/phpmygpx.php http://phpmygpx.tuxfamily.org/phpmygpx.php because Google has made Maps where I can no longer just paste a URL to a KMZ on another server and have it popup in maps, shareable with friends and family. It's not lockin, but it's a similar symptom of relying on software that you have no control over (closed source). I distinctly remember similar grumblings when Google shutdown Reader . . . .

yuhong 13y ago

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.

kalleboo 13y ago
Apple is also better at supporting old MS formats. I found some old recipes I wrote in Word 6.0.1 in 1998, which opened fine in OS X Mavericks's TextEdit.
sz4kerto 13y ago
'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.)
- NegativeK 13y ago
  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 http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/software.html
- danielweber 13y ago
  At Microsoft, if there is a design choice between "abandon the old user" or "let's forget them to make the current product better," they nearly always choose #1. Apple nearly always chooses #2. (I still remember DOS 3.2 to DOS 3.3.)
  - laurent123456 13y ago
    You probably meant "support the old users", otherwise your two options are pretty much the same :)
    - 13y ago

FollowSteph3 13y ago

This is NOT true of all proprietary software. It's just that with apple either you keep upgrading to the latest and greatest all the time or you will have problems. Apple has its pros and cons, and one of those is that you have to keep upgrading regularly. Most proprietary software will offer upgrade paths from older versions.

mikeash 13y ago
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 that hasn't been maintained in years to build and run properly on a current OS install.
- yuhong 13y ago
  I think LibreOffice 4.0 abandoned support for the old StarOffice binary format for example.
  - ccozan 13y ago
    Yes, but you can download and install at minimal cost any old version of Libre/Openoffice and read your Staroffice documents. You are not quite left stranded. And also I assume the code to read that format still resides in a repository, cann be pulled and reused at will. Not the same happens with proprietary software.
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    And even Apache OpenOffice abandoned them. Basically the old binfilter was that horrible.
- laurent123456 13y ago
  It's relatively easy to install an old version of XP or Debian on VirtualBox to run the old software though, and that would be enough to export the documents to a newer format. In comparison, OSX is generally hard to get running on VirtualBox.

skimmas 13y ago

the guy is clearly living in the past. 2008 ain't sexy anymore...

Paul12345534 13y ago

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 longevity now can easily use their XML formats.

stefanu 13y ago
You are right, I can get all the necessary hardware for that. That is not a problem, problem is that I can't have that when I need it. Imagine you go to a meetup and would like to show some older presentations and you are not aware of the issue. Well, bad luck - nothing to show, no quick fix by downloading a conversion tool or older version of the software. I'm not saying that it is permanent problem, there is solution for it for sure. It is just unnecessarily cumbersome and mostly unexpected: I can imagine dropping support for files from 1995 not for files from 2008.
- FollowSteph3 13y ago
  I think that's the key most people are forgetting here. You're talkng maybe 5 years ago, even more recent. When you go back 10+ years it's not unreasonable to expect some drop in support. But 2 versions is way way too quick!!
jobu 13y ago
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.
- fredoralive 13y ago
  iWork '09 works on Mavericks.

aroch 13y ago

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

senorprogrammer 13y ago
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.
- aroch 13y ago
  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 h4x0r google-fu" and search "convert keynote 08 to keynote 09" and you'll find a bash script to do it in 5 seconds[1]. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+keynote+08+to+keynote+09 https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+keynote+08+to+keynot...
  - stefanu 13y ago
    FFS, this is "HackerNews"... write a bash script to do it for you. I have written quite a few bash scripts, python scripts and long ago ruby and smalltalk scripts to do things for me, that bothered me. My point is, this is a software I am paying for (and I've already mentioned that 2008 should not be considered as old) and I would rather spend my time writing the "super 1337 h4x0r" bash and python scripts for something that I can't do otherwise.
    - aroch 13y ago
      You really don't get to complain about a proprietary format being retired due to age or even just disappearing off the face of the Earth. There's an astounding amount of software written for the sciences that uses proprietary binaries that are depreciated two years later. We all realized long ago that if you want to preserve something, export it as an 'open' or standardized format. That's why every image producing/editing software supports `tiff` encoding.

otterley 13y ago

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

clarry 13y ago
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?
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  There are FOSS implementations of PDF. Mozilla has one, I think. Edit: yep. http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
  - clarry 13y ago
    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?
    - Turing_Machine 13y ago
      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.
      - clarry 13y ago
        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 should I?

dictum 13y ago

I have many Pages/Keynote/Numbers documents from 2005-2008, and I remember wondering if they'd ever become unreadable with future technology. The date came sooner than expected.

tlrobinson 13y ago

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.

cormullion 13y ago
and they removed iPhoto Library sharing from the recent update, which we used all the time...
dTal 13y ago
Sounds like they played it pretty well.

hypertexthero 13y ago

[What the hell are you using to give presentations](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2011/11/dont-use-powerpoint/ http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2011/11/dont-use-powerpoint...)?

slideshare 13y ago

Hi there - We are looking into this, and will get back to you soon. Thanks for your patience!

jessaustin 13y ago
Who the hell is "We"? You're green.
marquis 13y ago
Assuming you are slideshare.net. This was my first question, isn't there an online service to do conversion? Surely for old file formats someone would happily pay a few dollars if it's an important doc. I would have tried Google Docs first too but a quick search shows nothing.

lux 13y ago

They made a similar break in the latest GarageBand where the format changed but also 32-bit plugins no longer work, and there's no way to download the old version of GarageBand on a new Mavericks machine. While it will open and update old files, it loses certain settings, sound clips, etc. so I have several "updated" files that are not what I recorded. 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 :\

phillmv 13y ago

I'm more concerned as to how it's increasingly impossible to buy an old copy and install it; the app store will only show you the latest version (and even for only the latest OS version), and the installer might even refuse to install, having detected a more recent version. You basically have to pirate it in order to do these kinds of shenanigans.

superuser2 13y ago

When I reinstalled my OS and neglected to save iWork '09, I called Apple and they overnighted me an install disk for free without even checking that I actually owned an iWork license. 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.

abat 13y ago
The core complaint is not you need to use a cd run iWork '09, it's that you need iWork '09 in the first place. The commentary on the need for cd drive is to emphasize how unreasonable it is to require iWork '09 to open several year old files.
thatthatis 13y ago
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.
- yuhong 13y ago
  I think you can even save in Excel 5.0/95 format in current versions of Excel.
  - bananas 13y ago
    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.

michaelfeathers 13y ago

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

avdempsey 13y ago
Could this be packaged as an insurance product?
Silhouette 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- sosborn 13y ago
  >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.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    Even then I'm not convinced, without talking to a lawyer, that it would be safe to recreate in a patent-encumbered format. Regardless of how well patents in general might or might not serve their original purpose, I tend to think that patents that are essentially just locking up data formats do not encourage progress in the way that they are supposed to. I think the US was onto something when it came to copyright and typeface designs, and a similar principle ought to apply to data formats.
    - michaelfeathers 13y ago

jakejake 13y ago

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 bold and innovative changes. The downside of course is that you and your files sometimes get left behind. Both are valid strategies in my opinion and appeal to different customers. If you feel like backwards compatibility is a really important feature then whether you want to admit it or not, you probably would be happy as a Microsoft customer.

Touche 13y ago
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.
- 345723 13y ago
  It is eternal, as long as you have the system and the software that it was created with. This can be said for all sorts of things, from the Commodore 64 to Keynote. If you want to be able to access the data on an NES cartridge you are going to need special hardware and software. Yes the ROMS are available now online, but that's only because someone with the hardware and software made it available to others. This is the nature of proprietary formats.
  - pif 13y ago
    > This is the nature of proprietary formats. Indeed. When you choose to save your work in a not-public format, you are decidîng not to care about its lifespan: complaining later is just useless, unfortunately.
- teej 13y ago
  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 considerations. You also have to think about upgrade cycle, time-to-market, third party integrations, and what will help you win marketshare and sell copies. 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. As the grandparent points out, Microsoft values backwards compatibility. If you value that too, buy Microsoft.

webjprgm 13y ago

This has long been true of Apple and ever since Apple acquired Claris Works I've made sure I can open my old files or else keep around some emulation layer to do so. (E.g. SheepShaver to run Mac OS 9 and AppleWorks 5 which could open all the old Claris Works documents).

yungether 13y ago

What is this plus.google? Is this some sort of clickjacking scheme?

RankingMember 13y ago

For some reason having those hashtags at the bottom of the article makes me feel dumb, as though the author thought I'd need Cliff Notes for the article. I know that's not the point of hashtags. Maybe it's #fail that flipped my switch. #Apple #iWork #fail #proprietary #OpenOffice

stcredzero 13y ago

What if someone maintained an online "virtual museum" of old emulated machines and operating systems? This could be done as SaaS, with some value add tools for converting to modern formats thrown in.

npsimons 13y ago
Amusing, interesting for history's sake, and possibly useful, but licensing issues would kill it for closed source, and it's not needed for things with permissive licenses because you can already get the source for old versions and run it yourself.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  Some people would pay for something already set up for them. Microsoft might like the idea and support it, as it furthers their backwards compatibility story.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

leni536 13y ago

LaTeX with the Beamer package would be more futureproof.

cgore 13y ago

I learned my lesson a long time ago, back when WordStar died. I never moved to WordPerfect, and I never moved to Microsoft Word. I do anything I really care about in LaTeX or HTML these days. I can still get to my WordStar documents though, thanks to DOSbox.

plg 13y ago

It's just amazing. I found the same thing with "old" Pages documents (from 2008 as well). What am I supposed to do now? It does not make me feel like continuing to put all of my work in iWork format. If one were to go Microsoft on the Mac, what are my choices? Office 2011? (it's 2014 now after all) I know there's OpenOffice too

ggchappell 13y ago

This is curious, because not long ago, I found myself needing to look at an old AppleWorks[1] file. It opened in Pages without a hitch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appleworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appleworks

knodi 13y ago

Hey look another thing Apple "simplified". Really not happy with this trend of dropping support/feature and calling it "we simplified it".

userbinator 13y ago
The other thing to note is that hardware is still continuing to get faster and bigger (although that's slowed down a little most recently), while people are slowly being able to do less with new software that consumes more resources than their predecessors. "Do less with more"? I think we've reached the point where computers have become much more than powerful enough for a lot of the common tasks people use them for. The rest is just marketing with an aggressive "newer is better" campaign. IMHO "forced deprecation" is nearly never a good thing. Change in software (and hardware) should be an evolution, not a revolution. Fix bugs and add features, don't take away what was there before. I think a lot more people value stability over "latest fashion" than what companies and the like would want you to think, so they can keep you consuming.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Surprised nobody's mentioned SliTeX either here or on G+. Source is plain ASCII. Output is PDF. Interpreter is TeX. All three are very, very robust for backward compatibility. That Microsoft is being promoted for backwards (and forwards) compatibility strikes me as ... comical.

tomrod 13y ago

I ran into this issue with a Visual Fox Pro database setup used by FERC. In 2013, documents are STILL being produced into a proprietary format that nothing open source can read (directly) a decade later. This is why I love Python and Perl for data munging.

eagsalazar2 13y ago

Suggestion: Don't use Keynote. It is a royal POS.

blueskin_ 13y ago

Should have used {Open,Libre}Office.

davidgerard 13y ago
Apache OpenOffice doesn't open Keynote docs - but LibreOffice tries to (libetonyek).

bluenose69 13y ago

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).

emacdona 13y ago
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.

davidgerard 13y ago

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/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libetonyek/ is the library that does the work.

natch 13y ago

A couple of things here: 1) "Fresh Mavericks install." He should run Software Update and tell us he has done so, if he's going to write a blog post about whether stuff works. 2) He should file a radar (Apple's umbrella term for bug report / feature request) and share the radar number with us so we know he's at least going through the channels Apple has provided for concerns like this. http://radar.apple.com/ http://radar.apple.com/ Or... he could just write a blog post, but I'm saying it would likely be more effective if he also did these two things, in addition to his blog post. Wait, he shouldn't have to file a radar? True, in an ideal world, he shouldn't have to. But you know what they say about ideal worlds...