
“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” - stefanu
https://plus.google.com/+StefanUrbanek/posts/LKkGeEoPUzA
======
jakejake
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
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.

~~~
teej
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.

~~~
Touche
> 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/](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?

~~~
Timmmmbob
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.

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

~~~
richardwhiuk
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:
<base="[http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">](http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">)
but should be <base
href="[http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">](http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">)

UL tags with no LI tags

------
valarauca1
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
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
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.

~~~
im3w1l
It would be so nice if programs could request a dedicated core for these kinds
of things.

~~~
MertsA
Under Linux you can. You can boot the kernel with the maxcpus argument set to
1 or the number of cores you want the Linux kernel to use and then on a quad
core machine you have 3 cores available all the time and setup to where Linux
won't ever need to handle interrupts on that core. Then you just start your
application and set the affinity to that unused core.

You can extend this further by doing things like mmaping in 4GB of memory
through the kernels hugepage support and lock the physical to virtual address
map so the kernel can't touch your physical block of ram you just allocated.
Then you can do things like talk directly to a pci device like a network card
and set up DMA directly from a NIC into a buffer in your applications memory.

All of this is done completely in userspace but you get all the performance
benefits of implementing everything like it was running in Ring 0 and the
kernel is not involved in anything apart from the initial setup and teardown.
You can build an extremely high performance application basically running on
bare metal but with the Linux kernel still running on a different core to
handle anything that doesn't directly involve your application and there
wouldn't need to be any syscalls between the two to service some request.

~~~
valarauca1
What I'm confused about. I'll likely just have to play around with this
feature at some point. I knew about APIC, but not completely sandboxing cores.

Is if you have bare metal operations do you still have access to kernel
functionality ala stdio and libc libraries? Normally when you hit bare metal
your on your own. I'm just wondering because the idea of writing my own
threading, and memory management libraries excites me to no end </sarcasm>.

Also if you can call these functions like your in userland then do they block
until execution has completed on the other 'kernel' cores? Also if you
creating P-Threads elsewhere but not managing their execution on the 'non-
kernel' core what happens?

>userspace but you get all the performance benefits of implementing everything
like it was running in Ring 0

Can you give any literature on this? these terms are contradictory.

~~~
MertsA
Sorry for the delay, I'm probably not the best person to answer this and I
know just enough on the subject to be dangerous so with that in mind I'll give
it a shot.

>Is if you have bare metal operations do you still have access to kernel
functionality ala stdio and libc libraries? Normally when you hit bare metal
your on your own.

That's just it, your process is just another Linux process. The difference is
that the scheduler will put it on lets say core 2 but everything else has an
affinity for core 1 and interrupts will also be handled by core 1 meaning your
application is never interrupted on core 2. You still get every feature that
you normally get in Linux.

>Also if you can call these functions like your in userland then do they block
until execution has completed on the other 'kernel' cores?

You are in userland, normal userland. Implementation details of syscalls are
black magic as far as I'm concerned so take this with a grain of salt but
apart from kthreads the kernel isn't running in some other thread waiting for
a syscall to service, a syscall is just your program calling int 80 which
jumps into the interrupt handler in kernel mode on the same core that was just
running int 80, does it's work figuring out what syscall you're making and
finishes handling the interrupt. So basically yes your thread "blocks" while
the syscall is in progress on your special isolated core, not core 1 like
everything else running on the system.

>Also if you creating P-Threads elsewhere but not managing their execution on
the 'non-kernel' core what happens?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, specifically "managing their
execution on the 'non-kernel' core". It's just a thread like a normal Linux
thread, but at first a new thread is going to have an affinity for only core 1
which you can change to core 2.

>Can you give any literature on this? these terms are contradictory.

What I meant was that generally if you want to do certain low level things
like talk directly to hardware you need to be running in kernel mode. But
really you don't need to be in kernel mode all of the time, just initially to
allow normal user mode code to talk to the hardware instead of having to use
the kernel like one big expensive proxy. As for why a user mode driver for a
network card would be such a huge performance gain there are a number of
reasons such as every syscall will be a context switch, whatever data you're
sending or receiving to the network card will need to be needlessly copied
to/from the buffer instead of reading and writing directly to it, you have to
go through the entire Linux TCP/IP stack when there's tons of functionality in
there that you might not need but have to have so it's just wasted cycles, and
the list goes on.

I did manage to find an old Hacker News comment on the subject for further
reading from someone much more well versed on the topic than I am.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5703632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5703632)

Also of interest might be Intel's DPDK which is basically what we're talking
about, moving the data plane out of the kernel completely for extreme
scalability.

------
lux
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
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.

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

------
FollowSteph3
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
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
I think LibreOffice 4.0 abandoned support for the old StarOffice binary format
for example.

~~~
ccozan
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.

------
yuhong
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.﻿

~~~
sz4kerto
'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.)

~~~
danielweber
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
You probably meant "support the old users", otherwise your two options are
pretty much the same :)

~~~
danielweber
Sheesh, it made sense 5 hours ago!

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

~~~
stephencanon
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 used to share an
office at Berkeley with Paulo Ney de Souza, who had a wonderful collection of
“legacy” pdf files that could no longer be opened in Acrobat that he would
trot out for the Adobe sales people when they came by (he was helping to get
MSP off the ground at that point).

PDF is probably the best choice for preserving “design”, but I wouldn’t trust
it for preserving content any more than any other format. Always keep a plain
text copy.

~~~
scrollaway
PDF is an open spec since a few years.

[http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html)

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

~~~
chimeracoder
.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.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, I mentioned it in my wishlist for Satya:
[http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-
leadership/...](http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-
leadership/#comment-14919)

------
dictum
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.

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

~~~
Silhouette
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.

~~~
sosborn
>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
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
I think this is a non-issue for the bulk of any business that does this. An
Microsoft or Apple is going to sue a business that upgrades documents in old
formats to their newer formats? Maybe, but I'd be surprised. If anything
there'd probably be licensing.

------
superuser2
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.

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

~~~
bananas
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.

------
cgore
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.

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

~~~
userbinator
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.

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

------
plg
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

------
RankingMember
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
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
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
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.

------
aroch
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
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
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+keynot...](https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+keynote+08+to+keynote+09)

~~~
stefanu
_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
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.

~~~
JeremyBanks
Your comparison is unhelpful. The expectations for broad-market consumer
software and obscure narrow-market scientific software are entirely different.

Apple leads users to expect an easy experience, and not to need to worry about
technical details. The cost of that strategy is that Apple should expect
criticism when those expectations aren't met.

------
natch
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...

------
hypertexthero
[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/))?

------
leni536
LaTeX with the Beamer package would be more futureproof.

------
eagsalazar2
Suggestion: Don't use Keynote. It is a royal POS.

------
bluenose69
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
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.

------
webjprgm
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).

------
ggchappell
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)

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

~~~
jessaustin
Who the hell is "We"? You're green.

------
dredmorbius
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
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.

------
blueskin_
Should have used {Open,Libre}Office.

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

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

------
Paul12345534
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.

~~~
jobu
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.

~~~
chasing
Keynote '09 works just fine on Mavericks.

~~~
jjoonathan
After installing an update. Before you install the update it crashes on
Mavericks.

~~~
stefan_kendall3
And you forgot Poland.

