Acrobat Post, or \"It's been a while...\"

...Since I really got my rage on.\n\nWarning....this shit's going to get ugly and fast. If you don't like profanity, you might want to leave the room. Unca John's in a motherfuckin' mood.\n\nAs we all know, Adobe released yet another patch for yet another fucking Javascript hole in their fucking PDF scripting implementation. (Is anyone surprised by this anymore? Acrobat is the new IE in this respect.)\n\nSo, Adobe releases the updates, and I start planning the update. Because I knew it would suck. Why? Because it's fucking Acrobat, and that team has their heads up their collective asses, and the idea of making applying critical security patches easy? HA! SCREW YOU HIPPIE!\n\nSigh. So I know this will suck because thanks to some idiotic decision made by some idiot, you can't run updates unless you're logged in as an administrator. Now, let me be clear about this:\n\nI am not saying you have to authenticate as an administrator to run/apply the updates. That would be normal and sensible.\n\nI am saying that you cannot even run the Adobe Updater application to check for updates unless you are logged in as an administrator. The \"Check for updates\" option doesn't even show up in the fucking help menu unless you're logged in as a fucking administrator.\n\nAs well, at least on the Mac, do you know how you remotely deploy Acrobat updates?\n\nYou rebuild the fucking installer. HA! SCREW YOU HIPPIE! That's right, even now, even fucking now, the gods-damned Acrobat updater is still not a fucking native install package. So you either spend a lot of money on third party tools to do the Acrobat team's job for them, you start snapshotting machines to create an installer, or you do it fucking manually. \n\nEven then, even when you do it manually, the goddamned chickenfuckers on the Acrobat team make sure you feel every goddamned hangnail on that fist as it goes up your ass. Installed CS 3 or 4 with Acrobat Pro? Ah, you're probably stupid enough to just run the updater application. \n\nHA! SCREW YOU HIPPIE!\n\nIt will update every.component.in.CS, but it will never, never update Acrobat. Because it doesn't know Acrobat is there. You may have installed Acrobat with CS, but just like a shitty reflection of Adobe's corporate structure, the only way to get the CS updater to know about Acrobat is to start Acrobat, then run the fucking updater from within Acrobat. After that, only after that will the updater know you installed a fucking application that was RIGHT FUCKING THERE IN THE INSTALLER YOU RAN INITIALLY. HOLY SHIT, WHAT KIND OF DEMENTED FUCKWIT THOUGHT THIS UP? WHAT KIND OF MENTALITY THINKS THAT THIS KIND OF VIRTUAL FUCKING CLEVELAND STEAMER OF AN UPDATE PROCESS IS GOOD? WHAT KIND OF DISEASED COPROPHILIAC DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO PUT PEOPLE THROUGH THIS?\n\n...we're not done yet.\n\nLike a lot of people, we have to keep CS3 and CS4 around for a little longer, for a variety of reasons. We're working on fixing that, but it's how things are for now. This means a lot of our machines have both Acrobat 8 and 9 on them. Yes, the thought of updating both is like getting sounded by an epileptic bodybuilder with bad gas in the middle of a grand mal. \n\nAcrobat 9 first. Huh, look at that. When I run the updater, (after figuring out that I had to start Acrobat first), I see what is, for Adobe, a fucking miracle. An honest to god fucking miracle. It's a combo update. It's huge mind you, but you go from Acrobat Pro 9.0 to 9.3 in one shining update. I almost weep for joy. This is cool, I'll just go download it from Adobe's site, and then I can speed up the overall update time. Clickety-click I go...\n\nHA! SCREW YOU HIPPIE!\n\nYou can't download a 9.3 cumulative update from Adobe. The 9.3 updater you download there can only update 9.2\n\nThe 9.2 updater can only update 9.1.3\n\nThe 9.1.3 updater can only update 9.1.2\n\nThe 9.1.2 updater can only update 9.1.1\n\nThe 9.1.1 updater can only update 9.1\n\nThe 9.1 updater updates 9.0\n\nSo if you want to do it outside of the Adobe updater in Acrobat, and you're going from 9.0 (which is not surprising, considering how insanely fucking tedious and stupid the Acrobat team has made this fucking process, because it never fucking occurs to them that having the application of patches be easy is A FUCKING GOOD THING), you have to download, and apply, in order, SIX PATCHES. MANUALLY! \n\nSo the only way to get WAIT, HOLD ON, HOLD FUCKING ON!\n\nI was wrong. There is no cumulative update for Acrobat 9. I can't even begin to see how I could have been so stupid as to think that the Acrobat team would even try to make their own lives easier. When you run that Acrobat 9.3 update, it downloads all the point updates as separate disk image files, then proceeds to, one at a time, mount and apply them.\n\nAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA\n\n<INHALE>\n\nAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHA!\n\nJust when I think there might be a scintilla of competence on the Acrobat team, they once again prove that if you replaced them all with diarrhetic lemurs, not one user of their product would know the fucking difference. What a complete fucking idiot collective.\n\nHold on, I think I soiled myself, I was laughing so hard. One sec. \n\nOkay, so yeah...you run the !cumulative updater, and every time the next stage of this asinine dance starts, you get asked about 'repairing' the installation. Yes, you may have already set this, but the installer wouldn't want you to be able to do anything else while it's running, so it makes sure you have to pay constant fucking attention to it. \n\nOf course, now that you've run it, next time, you only have to run the adobe updater, as it now knows that Acrobat is also on the machine.\n\nSo that was 9.0 to 9.3\n\n8.0 to 8.2 is actually worse, because not only do you have every.single.problem with the CS3/Acrobat 8 updater that you did with the necrotic lump of shambling shit that Acrobat 9's update process is, but, Acrobat 8 doesn't even get the !cumulative update.\n\nSo you have to re-run the installer. Over. and Over. and Over again.\n\nIt is appalling, no, it is far, far beyond appalling how bad this process is. To apply a CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATE on a supported platform, you either have to re-write Acrobat's gangrenous discharge into something usable, or you have to kick people off their machines to sit there and watch, either at their desk or via ARD/VNC/ACTC/Whatever.\n\nOf course, Adobe does have enterprise deployment tips...for Windows only. Because according to the Acrobat team, (and I've been told this by members of the Acrobat team in email, comments, and in person on multiple occasions), the only people using Acrobat on Macs are graphic designers, and so IT doesn't care about Acrobat on Macs, so why support it? IN fact, there is an Acrobat Enterprise Deployment page. Windows only, well except for the security administration guide. That mentions plists, well, it mentions the word \"plist\". You never actually see an example of a plist file in the entire thing, (404 fucking pages...how ironic in this case.) Why? Well, this bit of text on page 78 explains:\n

The tables and examples use the Windows registry. Most are applicable to Macintosh systems.

\nWoo-Fucking-Hoo.They can't even put a fucking screenshot of a plist configuration in this fucking document, that's how allergic the Acrobat team is to lifting a fucking finger for their Mac OS X-using customers. The attitude of the Acrobat team towards their customers is to wit: vomitous. Oh, and before I forget..\n\nHAH! SCREW YOU HIPPIE!\n\n(I know, I know, the hatred of Acrobat for the Mac is well-known, it shouldn't bother me. They've lied about why their Office integration sucks on the Mac for how long? Shouldn't bother me, but since it makes my life suck in so many little ways, it does bother me.)\n\nThe fact that a company who is, supposedly, the employer of smart people, and considered one of the fucking paragons of design, cannot, for any reason, create updates for CRITICAL SECURITY PROBLEMS THAT HAVE ACTIVE EXPLOITS IN THE WILD is almost negligent, and if I had the money and the lawyers, I would be seriously considering suing Adobe to recover the time, and therefore money, it's taken me to deal with the raging incompetence shown by the Acrobat team.\n\nNot a single one of Adobe's Acrobat customers did anything wrong. We didn't create the security holes, Adobe did. We didn't write the patch, Adobe did. Yet at no point, and in no way, is the Adobe Acrobat team trying, on any level in even the most pathetically simple manner to make it easy on people to install this patch on as many machines as possible in as little time as possible, and barring that, they can't even bring themselves to fucking APOLOGIZE for inflicting this effluvia of incompetence on the people who pay hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars to purchase Acrobat and its ilk.\n\nThe only, the only mistake we made was in thinking that maybe this time, the Acrobat team will do something right. That, dear readers, is our fault.\n\nI hope, with all my heart and soul, that I am alive the day that Acrobat as a product team is killed by something, from any other company, or open source. Because I will take whatever money I have, and pay for a big fucking truck. On the side of that truck, in the biggest possible letters will be written:\n\n\"NO ACROBAT, FUCK YOU\".\n\nThe fact that everyone on the Acrobat team isn't publicly and continuously apologizing for this debacle, the latest in a long line of Acrobat-driven debacles, is as shameful as anything else.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOh...and I haven't even started updating Adobe Reader...\n\n

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