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.

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.

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.

I'm the developer who build their related Long Bets project (http://longbets.org/) and I think "data should be eternal" is a perfectly reasonable standard. That was certainly my goal in designing Long Bets.

If you start with that as a principle, I don't think it imposes particularly large engineering burdens, especially if you accept some potential degradation as a consequence.

For example here, instead of a "fuck you" dialog box, they could have imported the core of a presentation: text and images positioned on a sequence of frames.

An analogy is HTML. It's basically zero engineering effort to just suck the text out of a page. It is only modestly more effort to pull out some of the semantic markup, like headings, lists, and emphasis. And that's the part that really hurts to lose, not which precise shade of blue you used in your footer text.

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.

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

What system does that statically linked thing run on? Is that system going to remain compatible for decades? Or emulators capable of running an old version of it?

Why overcomplicate matters when you can pick something you know just works.

https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L...

Specifically, Alan Cox's comment that he can still run an a.out rogue binary from 1992 on a 3.6 version of the Linux kernel. Linux 1.2 was released March 1995.

  # modprobe binfmt_aout
  # uname -rv
  3.2.0-60-generic-pae #91-Ubuntu SMP Wed Feb 19 04:14:56 UTC 2014

something poetic about that...

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.

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?

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.

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.

I can keep up with my system and applications just fine, but are you saying that I have to re-visit my archive of past documents with each new keynote version, and re-open & re-save them all?

Case in point: we have an iPad here that is still on the iOS 5 generation it came with. It has been widely reported that iOS 6 was slower (as well as breaking things like Google Maps), iOS 7 was slower still (as well as making various visual styling changes we don't like) and both iOS 6 and iOS 7 have suffered at least one severe security flaw that iOS 5 did not have. In short, there appears to be no rational reason we would "upgrade" this device as we are repeatedly prompted to do.

Recently, Apple appears to have changed the rules for app developers so new things going into the app store have to aim primarily at iOS 7. At some point we upgraded an app we'd bought a while ago to get some much-plugged new feature that someone thought was interesting. Aside from the fact that the new feature itself turned out to be paywalled anyway, so the upgrade invitation for the app was basically just spam abusing the app store mechanism, the "upgraded" app also had a horribly glitchy UI where previously it had been smooth as silk drawing exactly the same screens.

Can we "downgrade" that app back to something that works, which we already had before, via the app store or otherwise? No, it doesn't seem so.

If we "upgraded" iOS itself, as suggested to fix the app (though we've seen no reports that doing so does in fact fix this app), could we then "downgrade" again if we didn't like it? Also no, as far as we can tell.

As it happens, we need to have Apple devices around for testing our web stuff, so we're stuck with spending some of our company money on new gear now and then for as long as our customers are doing the same, and we're stuck with using more recent versions of iOS on some devices for the same reason. But at this point, nothing would ever convince me to spend my own money on an iSomething. I was always suspicious of the lock-in and kindergarten UI, and seeing it in action, the results are at least as bad as I expected.

What is possibly more interesting is that it seems average users are getting fed up as well. Not so long ago, mobile visits to a site I run that isn't particularly geek-related were utterly dominated by iOS devices. Today, while iOS still represents a clear majority, it is a much closer balance between iOS and Android, and the trend is strongly in the latter's direction. I can't help wondering whether this is people who've now been not-upgraded to more recent versions one time too many, or who've been forced to dump expensive and otherwise working hardware for artificial software reasons, starting to vote with their wallets.

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

Complaining is always a lot easier than doing.

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.

You have to build an entire OS with real time I/O at heart. They do exist, some are secure (Blackberry's platform) but they aren't deployed to the test industry. The most likely version is licensing fees, nobody writings Data Acquisitions for them.

>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

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.

I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

Is it really so difficult to just not break a feature that was present in the last version of the software?

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/"> but should be <base href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">

UL tags with no LI tags

It's ridiculous that you cannot open the previous version of a Pages file in the current version of Pages! What an absolute joke.

That would violate the Keynote license agreement. So, we're back to needing Apple to help out here.

edit: from Section 2A, Permitted License Uses and Restrictions... i) to download, install, use and run for personal, non-commercial use, one (1) copy of the Apple Software directly on each Apple-branded computer running OS X (“Mac Computer”) that you own or control; and (ii) if you are a commercial enterprise or educational institution, to download, install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software for use either: (a) by a single individual on each of the Mac Computer(s) that you own or control, or (b) by multiple individuals on a single shared Mac Computer that you own or control. For example, a single employee may use the Apple Software on both the employee’s desktop Mac Computer and laptop Mac Computer, or multiple students may serially use the Apple Software on a single Mac Computer located at a resource center or library.

Except, right now, it doesn't. If that was their primary design goal, than it has not been achieved, because their web version still lacks features that are front and center on the desktop. So, you can't use that as an excuse.

It's the whole point of FOSS. If it doesn't work for you, fix it.

This criticism is especially off-base given that the OP said he wanted something he could control. Use the source, Luke!

Or you run a real time OS which may have problems because they aren't developed with security but IO timing in mind.

It's a fundamental flaw of time shared OS's.

:.:.:

Second security works in a simple way.

Cost to secure vs money lost.

Lab equipment is expensive. The loss of an entire calibration bench could run into the $250,000 to $1million and beyond range.

But redeveloping and entire OS to do this? Your talking about spending 20 to 100x MORE on security then your losses. That's idiotic at best.