Saturday, June 18, 2016

Software That Tieing A Pork Chop Around Would Not Help

     It's kind of sad and pitiful, the degree to which Adobe Acrobat updates keep popping up and asking me to download them.  Like a little lost dog...like a little lost incontinent dog that can't stop rolling in very dead things, and trying to drag them home, but still, it's not like it knows any better....

     I ditched Acrobat for Foxit years ago and I don't miss the ...e x t r e m e...s l o w n e s s... of Acrobat, nor the lovely way they started trying to sneak opt-out crapware into the update downloads.  For all I know Foxit could be sending copies of everything I open off to the Red Chinese or the Californian shadow-government of reptiloids (highly unlikely), but at least it does so while opening PDFs with speed and ease.  Good luck with the old-radio schematics and cat memes, you hideous things from another world and/or Beijing!

     Oh, look, there's Adobe Acrobat again, whining at the door and trying not to stink. Shoo!  Shoo!

7 comments:

Eric Wilner said...

I'm still stuck with Acrobelfry, mainly because there doesn't seem to be anything else on Linux that handles many PDFs open in tabs (which is important, because I tend to have a bunch of datasheets open at once, and having one-window-per is highly inconvenient).
For extra annoyance, it has some weird memory-leak-like bug, whereby after it's been in use for a while it gets horribly slow about bringing up dialog boxes (open file, print, and so on). It's not using significant CPU time during the delay, so... what exactly is it doing while it's not filling in the dialog box?
Some day, it may get annoying enough for me to learn the libraries and throw together my own tabbed PDF reader for Linux. Or maybe someone else will.

Countglockula said...

Roberta, your prescience amazes me!

In my previous stop at an unnamed 'news' site, I clicked on a story of interest and was (surprisingly) gifted with the Adobe popup. After I leave here, I'm going to clean the binary house and remove all vestiges of Adobe Reader. I'm partial to Skim anyway, and will make it the reader of choice from now on.

Synchronicity, ain't it cool!

Raz

Anonymous said...

bobbie, thank you so much for this article..
my hate for a-dope-e goes back more years than i can remember.
this is great!

rickn8or said...

Okay, based on your recommendation, I'll give it a try.

Loki1776 said...

That's a lot like my recent (the last 6 months) experience with Adobe Flash. Every few weeks it says it's vulnerable and must be updated. The update is a stub rather than the full download. The stub won't run (connection error) because Flash isn't activated, and I can't activate it because it needs to be updated. There's a page with the full download, but they've disabled that.

Two months ago I gave up and told it to automatically update itself. It loaded a bunch of [****] on my computer, and also changed my home page and search engine to Yahoo. WTF?

Roberta X said...

These days, Adobe is rather heavy on WTF. It's a Croseley refrigerator of a product, from an American Motors of a company.

Anonymous said...

Curious where you run into this so often? I'm often stuck as unofficial tech support for several people so it'd be useful info for me.

I haven't run into that, but I suspect my setups are different, most of my machines are setup for high levels of privacy & security, and I don't have to accommodate any employer's legacy software currently. My primary OS's are Mac Yosemite, Google's Chrome (i.e. Chromebook), & iOS, though I use Windows 8.1 for gaming & have Windows 7 on old Core 2 duo (though I've been fighting with the Win 7 update issues, may just put Debian on that machine).

Almost everyone I do tech support for though is running Windows, Android, & iOS. I've been trying to move all of them to Chrome OS or iOS unless they really need Windows for somethings.

If one wants less hassle with Flash use Chrome browser for Flash needs, Google does their own variant so it's generally as pain free as possible.

Drat, know I have good link to basic explanation of Pepper flash but can't find it right now, these are best could find quickly.

https://wiki.debian.org/PepperFlashPlayer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client#Pepper


Chrome OS (Chromebooks)
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os

Security
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9WVmNfgjtQ

~Glamdring