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Before MS, there was a time where it wasn’t possible to get a virus by receiving an email. Users had to click on the attachment. Email itself is a text protocol after all.

Then they added automatic HTML parsing of incoming emails, and the attackers cheered.

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Email may be text-based, but parsing MIME is a pain in the ass (speaking as somebody who wrote a console-based email client.)

You can go back to mutt's parsing, and CVE-1999-0940 for an old example. But I'm sure that's only one of many.

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Some years ago, I ended up on a call with a support team guy, helping him under some parts of a system I worked on. He shared his screen, started drawing diagrams. It took me a whole 10 minutes to realise it was in paint, he was just that good at using it.

Turns out paint was the thing almost every customer had installed/had access to, so he worked to the lowest common denominator and got really good at using it. I guess now he'll need to find a new tool to astonish devs with.

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If you're in support across multiple customers, especially in regulated industries, you learn to rely on the minimum common denominator, which usually means OS utils.

And at the end of the day $2 and $2000 screwdrivers are both still screwdrivers.

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86-ing?
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It comes from working in kitchens. It means to remove something from the menu, or otherwise make it unavailable.
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Also seashells.
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86 seashells? I don't even know what do with the three seashells.
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Greetings and salutations!

I understood that reference.

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Surely a SketchySeaBeast could come up with uses for at least three seashells
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Traditionally tossing excess baggage overboard when the situation gets grim enough.

Like when a previously sturdy old sailing ship starts taking on water, for instance in the 18th century and beyond.

Numerical equivalent to "deep-six."

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