Dear Linux distributions: if I want to use a freaky super-intelligenteditor I am perfectly able to fire up emacs myself, or even type ' vim 'instead of ' vi ' (honest, the extra letter is not too much for me totype). I want vi . You know, the simple and predictable thing thatsystem administrators like because it behaves.

As an aid to your planning, here is a minimum feature for any editorcalled vi :

When I paste things into an alleged vi in insert

The Bourne shell's real problem for writing shell scripts is that itdoesn't have a real data structure for lists. This leads to puttinglists in strings, which leads to reparsing strings, which leads tohideous doom and all of those problems with filenames that havewhitespace in them.

(When lists are represented as strings, every string might be a list,so every time the Bourne shell expands a variable it must try to turnit into a list unless the expansion is specifically marked as not doingthat

This week, we:

• got 12,152 messages from 212 different IP addresses.
• handled 16,255 sessions from 790 different IP addresses.
• received 124,287 connections from at least 41,964 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 6 connections being checked at once.

This is down from last week . I don't expectit to stay that way, although I can hope that spammers take Augustvacations too. Speaking

I have to finally admit it: I have stopped complaining about spam. Moreprecisely, I've stopped writing and sending complaints about spam to theISPs that they come from.

This is because I've pretty much given up hoping that a complaint to thetheoretically responsible ISP is at all worth my time and will produceany meaningful results. I am tired of writing more or less form lettersto tell ISPs that they have yet another phish spammer, yet anotherclueless free webmail provider spewing advance fee fraud, yet