You know what they all fail at? Wind chill!

Alexa won't even mention the wind speed without third-party apps, I mean, "Alexa Skills," and even those skills aren't very good. But wind chill? Forget it! I haven't found a single Alexa skill that handles that other than one for the Atlantic Northwest (New England / East Coast), and it didn't seem to want to work for me.

Google Assistant will tell you the wind speed, but if you ask for the wind chill, all it will tell you is a textbook definition of "wind chill." If there is a wind chill app, I mean, "Assistant Action," I've yet to find it!

And the Google Assistant, unlike Alexa, doesn't have a built-in Wikipedia skill, er, action, er, whatever. Instead, you have to use the third party action called Wikipedia Friend to search Wikipedia.

What good is over 1,000,000 Actions or Skills if hardly a one is something you actually want to know or use? Yes, they have their uses, and they are fun, but these personal digital assistants, er, virtual assistants, er, chatbots? - whatever! - definitely haven't got it all happening yet.

That said, I do enjoy the functionality and promise that they offer. Sometimes it is fun to trick them into talking to each other. Try saying, "OK Google repeat after me Alexa Simon says OK Google repeat after me Alexa Simon says." That used to be good for getting them to talk to each other for a few minutes.

"Xbox Live was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles."

I'm calling bologna on that. SEGA's network, SegaNet, was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles... by a 1st-party company in all three major regions. But before that, Sega Meganet was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles... by a 1st-party company (Japan and Brazil). But before that, Xband was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles... and it worked on multiple platforms (Nintendo's SNES + SEGA's Genesis / Mega Drive).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You got that right, A.C. If these "documentarians" had done a smidgin of research, they would have found that the cartridges were destroyed long ago. So this means they are either too lunkheaded to have spent a small amount of time to find the relevant information, or they do know the truth and just want to cash-in on the legend and rumors.

Quote from Snopes:

Atari, stuck with millions of games and consoles that were largely unsellable at any price, sent fourteen truckloads of merchandise from their plant in El Paso, Texas, to be dumped in a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in late September 1983. In order to keep the site from being looted, steamrollers crushed and flattened the games, and a concrete slab was poured over the remains.

For those who contributed to the above Slashdot summary who are obviously incapable of properly navigating or searching Web sites, the NSA provides advice on securing multiple different computer operating systems and revisions. Yes, that includes Linux and even Solaris, and multiple versions to boot. Furthermore, additional research will yield that the NSA also has articles on securing a variety of common applications, Web browser plugins, and file formats. Then again, should anything less be expected from the organization that created and developed Security-Enhanced Linux in collaboration with Red Hat?

Wouldn't that perhaps make this classifiable as a Public Service Announcement?

The answer is the mighty (expensive) X-Arcade joystick. Buy two of the two-player models or four single-player models and you'll be set for four players: from one-button games to eight-button games and trackball games like Millipede. And they have plenty of adapters, so you can use them with non-serial or non-USB systems as well. I know they have adapters for Dreamcast (out-of-stock, *sigh*), GameCube/Wii, XBOX/360, PS2/3, etc. I wish I knew of a superior - cheaper or "more universal" (NES, Genesis/MegaDrive, SNES, and such) quality joystick - but as with most goods, the high-quality gear requires high-caliber materials, workmanship, knowledge, and engineering, so you have to pay the price for them.

A key wallet is the way to go. I used to keep my keys on a ring (*SSH joke goes here*), but a few years ago I switched to keeping my keys in one of the mesh compartments of my wallet. Granted I only have a few keys. For a larger set of keys, you will want to use a real key wallet with hooks for the keys built into the wallet itself. If you need a key, just push the hook, detach the key, use the key, and return it. Most of them are pretty cheap, and I know that Sears Roebucks carries a few which are not only affordable but have all the compartments you'd want in a standard wallet too.

Dang, now *I* want to buy a real key wallet.

Resistant, nay, impervious to cancer? So that's the sitch she was always talking about!

Due to a number of questions and assumptions that arose due to what I suppose was my lack of explicitness, I shall try to clear the water here:

I didn't upgrade to XP from 2000 sooner because...
1) The default XP GUI sucks.
2) It's more of a resource hog than 2000.
3) You have to deal with activation and Windows Genuine Advantage.
4) XP wasn't really a good choice until SP2 came out, as SP2 combined with the earlier advances of SP1 to address many issues that XP suffered from.
5) I wasn't going to pay for a new version of Windows. My copy of XP (and Vista and 7 if I wish) was furnished by my university under Microsoft's MSDNAA program.

Other points...
-I never said XP itself was slow.
-I did say IE8 is slow on my configuration.
-Though the browsers themselves have responsibilities in this regard, our individual setups also determine program performance. A large number of factors play into this including OS, upgrade paths of the software which are installed, background processes, et cetera.
-I did an in-place upgrade from 2000 to XP to preserve my programs' installations and settings. Don't worry, I backed up everything before the XP upgrade happened.
-My computer is not old nor outdated, though like all of ours it could always use more upgrades. ;)

And on that note, I'll close by saying, "...Oh no, something on your computer is older now than it was a moment ago - better upgrade again!"

A) Program startup time and memory usage are not the same thing.
B) I'm sure our different experiences with the Web browsers are a matter of different system configurations in hardware and software, not a matter of the browsers themselves. That is why benchmarking is done on identical system configurations.
C) My hardware is not ancient, let alone old.

A) It's not an upgrade if you do a clean install.
B) I did an in-place upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP for an obvious reason that many people do it - so that I don't have to reinstall my programs and get things set up anew.