Some of these wonky new vi's with their fancy colouring and extra modes which coincide with legacy vi commands are evil.

Er, and which ones are those?

I've used vi, nvi, vile, and vim. By far, vim is the most popular (and powerful) of those. And it does not have any modes or commands that coincide with standard vi in compatible mode; there are a few minor differences in non-compatible mode, but nothing that's likely to trip up even seasoned vi-ers (and yes, I used vi for nearly a decade before any of the others, and still use vi from time to time when I get on a box w/o vim).

If you're using vim and don't like color, disable it. In fact, it's disabled by default in compatible mode (which vim defaults to unless you have a .vimrc). If you find the colors "hard to read" then it's because you aren't using a real xterm and vim cannot properly detect your background -- do a :set bg=light or :set bg=dark for a light/dark background and the colors will become much better. Or use one of a few hundred different colorschemes that are available (for anything from 8/16 color standard consoles to 256 color enabled xterms; if you have no color, just :syntax off and go on your way).

vim is a vast improvement over vi -- and not for the coloring, but rather for the buffer management, the filetype capabilities (smarter indenting is the tip of the iceberg), text objects (daB to delete an entire block delimited by {['s is one example; objects exists for words/WORDS, sentences, paragraphs, tags, etc), and macros. There's much, much more, of course, but those are the big ones in my book. I personally don't care much about windows and the vim7 tabs are misnamed and misunderstood, but some love them. I have a strong vi background, and I think the things I mentioned are more relevant to others with a similar background than those other items are.

Dear Corporate America,

Want to lose me as a customer? Try and market to (abuse) me while you have me as a "captive audience". This is what I think of you and your "products":

1. Television - No more. Obvious reasons.
2. Movie Theatres - Harkins, AMC, other sell-outs? No thank you. If I want to *pay* to be shown commercials...well, see #1. Thankfully I live in the vicinity of a Madstone Theatre! http://www.madstonetheatres.com (No commercials, *real* food, wine, beer, and quality flicks!)
3. Phone service - QWest? Sorry guys, the RJ-11 in my home lies dead because the money I paid you for service wasn't enough. You felt it was necessary to sell my info to telemarketers and then turn around and push "caller-id" up my arse.
4. Pop-up ads - How rude...wallpaper your site with banners if you wish, but why would you want to piss-off someone you are trying to sell to? Mad props to the folks who make things like http://www.proxomitron.org and http://www.mozilla.org happen!
5. AdWare/SpyWare - One question for you folks "Where do you buy your crack?"
6. 
   
   And last but not least:
   
   
7. ArseWare(Demo-versions that install/uninstall poorly or not at all, try and sneak a proprietary format into the mainstream and/or come along with heavy handed EULA's) - As the name implies, you know where to put it.

I must say, its amazing. Real Networks wins the ArseWare Prize time and again and yet they're still in business. How? They're products are bloated, slow, expensive and entirely proprietary. Who is using this crap and keeping them afloat?

I'm not trying to troll...really. I'd like to know who actually finds they're products worthwhile. (Any of them, not DRM wrapper specific) I'd also like to know of any content that you can't get in an alternative format? Apparently I'm surfing in the wrong waters.

$0.02 please.