This Book Loves You… Sorta

This Book Loves You Author: PewDePie Release Date: October 20th, 2015 Publisher: Penguin Genre(s): Humor, Nonfiction, Pop Culture Spoilers: Mild Rating: ★★★☆☆ GoodReads | Amazon For full disclosure, I’ve never watched...

Nike's Reversal: An Omen For Wall Street?

Disclosure: I own shares of NKE Another quarter, another pleasant surprise for Nike stockholders. After the market closed on Tuesday, the company reported strong results across all its major product segments. Wall Street took notice, sending Nike’s stock sharply higher in early market trade on Wednesday. Nike’s Key Financial Metrics as of December 23, 2015

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Review: Dell Inspiron 15 7000

Introduction and design

Dell's Inspiron 15 feels like a computer designed specifically around Windows 10. It functions nicely as a laptop, and does an admirable job in tablet mode. Switching between the two configurations allows Windows 10 to excitedly ask if you'd like to switch back and forth between UI modes. In either configuration, the Inspiron does well, but with a few exceptions, it's a much more useful laptop than it is a tablet.

The Inspiron 15 is up against Lenovo's ThinkPad Yoga 15 in the size department. While both machines feature a relatively enormous 15 inches of screen real estate, they're also competing against sleeker machines, like HP Spectre x360, a 13-inch convertible that hits all the highs.

Design

The Inspiron 15 is a shot across the bow of Apple's design department. With its brushed-aluminum interior finish and backlit, chiclet keyboard, this laptop could easily be mistaken for a MacBook at first blush.

The trackpad is set into the inside of the laptop with a smooth, beveled border that highlights the change from the aesthetically-pleasing surface in a sleek, but striking way. This border carries over to the outside edges of the laptop's aluminum interior, which is milled with a subtle angle, adding a fashionable design element to the otherwise industrial keyboard deck.

On top of the clean finish, the aluminum makes the machine feel solid. No matter how you hold it – in one hand or two – the laptop never feels like it's straining under its own weight, which is a good thing, considering the machine weighs close to 5 pounds (about 2.2kg).

The keyboard itself is quite lovely, with wobble-free keys spaced perfectly and a satisfying amount of travel. The keyboard lights up as well, depending on the ambient light, which is another nice touch on top of also being spill-resistant.

I don't enjoy the Microsoft-backed precision touchpad as much as I enjoy the keyboard, however. I can never quite find a sensitivity setting that feels right to me. It is either too twitchy or too slow. More than a few times I'll try to click on a link on a website and the cursor will roll off before I can depress the touchpad. Turning on the tap function helps me somewhat, but it still never feels quite right.

Unfortunately, when converted into tablet mode, there isn't really much that jumps out about the laptop. It's just a very large, albeit very colorful and bright, screen. Dell did include a Windows button on the bottom of the screen, which is handy for quickly accessing the tablet-mode Start screen. But that's really all there is to get excited about when you have the Inspiron 15 converted.

The keyboard and brains of the computer sag a little on the hinge when folded into tablet mode, so that gravity opens it up just slightly. There's no satisfying catch or magnetic clasp to hold the hefty halves together. It's just enough give to raise doubts in my mind on how well the hinges will hold up after repeated use.

When bigger is better

For full-page or endless scrolling websites, the 15-inch screen in tablet mode suddenly turned into something I never again want to be without. The same holds true for PDF documents.

I found normal web browsing to be less than ideal in both horizontal and vertical tablet orientations. But, specifically for websites like Feedly or Reddit, holding the tablet vertically is something I never knew I've always wanted in my life.

Specifications and performance

The Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1 is a sweet deal, priced at $899 USD (about £580, AU$1,499). For that price, you get an Intel i5-5200U processor, which performs well under normal use. The chip is able to keep up with Windows 10's streaming from Xbox One feature, and I played a few games of NHL 16 without a problem.

Streaming from the Xbox One and lightweight gaming is about all you're going to get out of the Inspiron 15. Much like the HP Spectre x360, there is no dedicated graphics chip. Minecraft works fine, but I wouldn't recommend trying to play Metal Gear Solid V with it. The Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 15 beats both machines spec-wise, running a higher-end i5-5300U and a dedicated Nvidia Geforce 840M graphics processor onboard. No configuration of the Inspiron 15 includes a discrete graphics option.

That's a shame, given that the 1,920 x 1,080p full HD (FHD) screen looks great. It's crisp and colorful, with high resolution images and HD movies looking lovely displayed on it. The one thing I don't like is the auto-adjusting brightness, a feature I shut off.

The setting was too sensitive, and merely moving my hand in front of the front-facing camera would cause the screen to pump up the brightness suddenly, only to drop it back down again a second later. It was too jarring to be useful.

Here is the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1 configuration sent to TechRadar for review:

Spec sheet

• CPU: 2.2GHz Intel Core i5-5200U (3MB Cache, up to 2.7GHz)
• Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 5500
• RAM: 8GB DDR3L (1,600MHz, single channel)
• Screen: 15.6-inch LED backlit Truelife display with FHD resolution (1,920 x 1,080)
• Storage: 256GB SSD
• Optical drive: Optional external DVD-RW (not included in configuration)
• Ports: HDMI 1.4a, 2 USB 3.0 (one with PowerShare), USB 2.0, Noble lock slot, media card (SD, MMC)
• Connectivity: Intel Centrino Wireless AC 7265, Bluetooth 4.0
• Camera: Integrated widescreen 720p webcam with dual digital microphone array
• Weight: 4.7 pounds (2.14kg)
• Size: 15.04 x 9.94 x 0.78 inches (W x D x H) (382 x 253 x 20mm)

While the Inspiron 15 doesn't have the graphics capability of the ThinkPad, it trounces Lenovo's machine when it comes to storage. The 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) overshadows the ThinkPad Yoga's standard 150GB configuration and puts it on-par with the HP Spectre.

There are optional configurations with hard drives available in 500GB or 1TB. However, those will add about a tenth of a pound to the Inspiron's already heavy weight. On screen size, the Inspiron is much larger than the HP Spectre's 13.3-inch screen, and the Inspiron we tested costs the same as the entry-level HP Spectre x360, which comes with a mere 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD.

The base model Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1 comes with a 500GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, and an Intel dual-core Pentium processor for just $549 (about £360, AU$780). For just $150 more, you can upgrade to an i5 processor, and from there you might as well spring for the SSD and double the memory to get to the $899 version we tested.

Like the Inspiron 13 7000, Dell does not offer a special edition of this machine in Australia, and doesn't sell any version of it in the UK. However, for those that live down under, you can pick up a regular Inspiron 15 7000 for a starting price of AU$999.

Performance

The Inspiron 15 performs adequately in everyday tasks. Web surfing, movie viewing and streaming from Xbox One all work nicely. The i5 processor is capable enough to handle photo editing without any real hiccups or slow performance, but I wouldn't recommend trying to use Lightroom in tablet mode, unless your fingers have surgical precision for adjusting the sliders.

Benchmarks

• 3DMark: Cloud Gate: 4,556; SkyDiver: 2,547; Fire Strike: 612
• GeekBench: GeekBench: 2,336 (single-core); 4,115 (multi-core)
• PCMark 8 (Home Test): 2,239 points
• PCMark 8 Battery Life: 3 hours and 40 minutes
• Cinebench R15: OpenGL: 15.69 fps; CPU 129 cb

In our benchmarking, the Inspiron 15 scored comparatively with the HP Spectre in the 3DMark test, but failed to even catch up to the dust left behind by the Thinkpad Yoga. The Yoga's discrete graphics card really helps push it far above what the Inspiron is capable of with its on-board graphics.

The Inspiron also falls just slightly behind both competitors on the PCMark 8 test, but where it seriously lags is battery life. The Thinkpad Yoga came in at 5 hours and 7 minutes on the PCMark 8 battery life test, while the Spectre x360, despite its smaller size and lack of a dedicated graphics chip, came in at 4 hours and 38 minutes.

However, in real-world testing, watching a movie on a continuous loop at 50% brightness and volume, the Inspiron's battery lasted an adequate 5 hours and 16 minutes. That's almost enough to relieve the boredom of a cross-country flight without needing to swap to a different device. Still, that's not fantastic and well short of Dell's claim of nearly 9 hours.

Looks, sounds, and feels great

In spite of some performance shortcomings, the Inspiron looks and feels so nice, especially for the price. It makes a strong standing in its class.

The speakers output a clear, distortion-free sound that doesn't fall to pieces in the mids and lows, something you might not expect out of a mid-range laptop. Certain applications work really well in tablet mode, like Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta and certain websites. Watching movies on the Inspiron is also a treat, given its wide, vibrant display, and if you trust your kids enough, it could be used for in-car entertainment on road trips.

But don't bother trying to use the Inspiron 15 outside. Its reflective screen made it impossible to see anything, even on a slightly overcast day at max brightness.

The laptop is sturdy enough that you'll never feel like you need to hold it in any sort of special way to keep it from being damaged, but opening the laptop does require both hands and a firm grip. Its weight and size make tablet mode difficult one-handed without propping it up on something.

Bundled software

• McAfee Live Safe Internet Security: You're going to want to uninstall this immediately and find another solution. Its intrusive pop-ups hide the "close" option in a drop-down menu rather than a simple button.
• Amazon One Button App: a simple shortcut to Amazon located in the taskbar.
• Dell Backup and Recovery: Dell's proprietary backup solution.

Verdict

Dell's Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1 laptop is a nicely priced machine with a modern metallic look, but it's weight and size in tablet mode keep its convertibility from being truly useful, which is a shame. Maybe a more apt description would be to call it a 1-and-also-a-tablet-if-you-like, rather than a 2-in-1, because it's really just a nice laptop that also can be used as a giant tablet.

We liked

The build and screen quality are fantastic and make the Inspiron look like a higher-end computer when open. The keyboard quality is wonderful, with solid keys and an intelligent backlighting system. For everyday usage, the Inspiron 15 is more than adequately powered and the SSD option makes it feel nice and peppy from startup to file searching.

We disliked

As nice as it is as a laptop, it falls short as an enormous tablet. Without fiddling with zoom settings, the screen is just too big to use for web surfing. And at nearly 5 pounds, simply holding it comfortably as a tablet is not easy. In laptop mode, the perfect trackpad sensitivity setting is hard to nail down.

Final verdict

Dell's Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1 makes for a great laptop and an OK tablet. It feels in every way like a laptop first and foremost, and I found myself defaulting to the laptop configuration in most instances. The extra screen real estate is welcome in certain scenarios in tablet mode, but the display is just too big to hold over your lap, and you may gravitate towards the HP Spectre x360 for these reasons.

The Inspiron 15 is a fine machine that is worth the price as tested, and would make a great laptop for professionals or college kids looking for a versatile device. Though the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 15 offers stronger performance, the Dell hybrid is more affordable and doesn't come loaded with specialized features or options you might not need.

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Hugh MacLeod’s Illustrated Guide to Life at Microsoft

For the last wee while, Gapingvoid has been working with Microsoft, to create a body of work that expresses the company vision under its new CEO, Satya Nadella.

The Microsoft Stories cartoon series “Hugh MacLeod’s Illustrated Guide to Life at Microsoft” launched today during OneWeek 2015!

---

The team and I have traveled to Seattle for Microsoft OneWeek. I will be giving two talks: one on Creativity, as an update to “Ignore Everybody“, and another on Company Culture as the key to being happy at work. We’ll be premiering the new work there. Windows 10 is also being released to the public during OneWeek, so it’s a pretty big event.

This project was really interesting because it isn’t promoting Microsoft by writing pre-set promo messages in cartoon form. The idea was about seeing the company, from an artist/outsider’s perspective, and trying to get an understanding of its essence and how it has changed.

And I see it, of course, in terms of Culture. I see it in terms of the personal motivations that drive the company.

Sure, Microsoft sells software. Sure, Microsoft is big. Sure, Microsoft is good at some things, less good at other things. We all know all this.

That’s not what interests me the most. Why not? Because all big companies like Microsoft make software and are good at some things and less good at others.

What’s more interesting to me are all the “Freaks” who work there. The world-class scientists, engineers, futurists, and yes, marketers who don’t think about what they can sell today, but what can be theoretically possible in 10, 20, 30 years. And then aim for that.

Trust me, it’s freaky stuff. I’ve seen some of it, up close. But it does create the eventual future, and the rest of us lesser mortals fall in line eventually.

I embodied this idea in my favorite cartoons in the series: “The freakier we get, the better we get.”

I see this “Freak Culture” as what makes Microsoft such  an interesting and powerful company. The products are just an extension of that, not the other way around.

And yes, this is why we at Gapingvoid focus so much on Culture Change.This stuff matters, this stuff is interesting, this stuff is is what REALLY drives business. And the companies that remember that and take it seriously, will be the winners. End of story.

Thanks to Microsoft for a killer opportunity to help make a difference. We could not be more pleased or excited.

Rock on!

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Bring Gmail’s Archiving Feature to Microsoft Outlook for Mac (without scripting)

The Archive feature in Gmail comes handy when you would like to preserve an email conversation forever but at the same time move it out of your main inbox. While a thread is selected in Gmail, you can press the Archive button, or hit the “e” keyboard shortcut, and the selected thread is removed from your inbox but continues to exists in the “All Mails” folder.

Microsoft has just launched a new version of Outlook with Office 2016 for Mac but there’s no built-in option to help you easily archive messages similar to what you have in Gmail. You can obviously move email messages to the Archive folder through the Message > Move > Choose Folder.. menu but that is no match to the simplistic option available in Gmail. Press ‘e’ and you’re done.

Add Gmail-like Archiving to Outlook

Here’s a step-by-step guide that will help you emulate Gmail’s archiving functionality in your Microsoft Outlook. The tutorial is for Office 2016 but it should work with previous versions of Outlook on Mac OS X as well.

Step 1: Open Microsoft Outlook, select any message in the inbox and press the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+M to move the selected email message into another Outlook folder.

Step 2: A search window will pop-up. If you are using Gmail with Outlook, type All Mail in this window to select your Gmail’s archive folder (see screenshot). Or you can type the name of any other Outlook folder that you plan to use for archiving messages. Click “Move” to move the selected message.

Step 3: From the Outlook menu, choose Message > Move and make an exact note of the highlighted menu item corresponding to the folder that you selected in the previous step. In this example, the menu is available as All Mail (email@domain.com).

Step 4: From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click Keyboard. Click Shortcuts, select App Shortcuts, then click Add (+). Choose Microsoft Outlook from the Application dropdown, type the menu name exactly as noted in previous step and put Cmd+E as the app shortcut.

Click Add to create the app shortcut, switch to Microsoft Outlook, select one or more email messages and press Cmd+E. If you’ve followed the steps right, the selected email messages will instantly be moved to the Archive (All Mail) folder of Outlook, much like Gmail.

---

The story, Bring Gmail’s Archiving Feature to Microsoft Outlook for Mac (without scripting), was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 14/07/2015 under Apple Mac, GMail, Microsoft Outlook, Software.

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Coffee. Bourbon. Chocolate chips.

Three favorite food groups in ice cream form. Yes!

If you’ve ever made homemade coffee ice cream, you know why we get so excited about it. It’s like an ice cream latte—smooth, rich, creamy—but you get to pick the coffee. In my case, I use decaf beans because otherwise I’m bouncing off the walls for days.

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Scientists have finally figured out how big Pluto really is

Humans were never really sure how big Pluto was -- until this morning, that is. NASA's New Horizons mission took an accurate reading of Pluto's size as it flew by the object that was formerly known as the ninth planet this morning. The mission found Pluto to be 1,473 miles in diameter, making it larger than all other known solar system objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Pluto's largest moon, Charon, was measures at 751 miles in diameter. The map above from NASA shows what Pluto and Charon look like compared with the Earth's surface. Pluto's diameter (the straight-line distance through the object from one side to another) is about the equivalent of the distance from Boston to Miami. And the diameter of Charon is roughly equal to the distance from New York to Chicago. Correction: An earlier version of this post mixed up circumference and diameter. The distances above are for Pluto and Charon's diameter, not circumference. We know the difference, we swear.

What Taco Bell Food Are You?

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Government Realises Hardly Anyone Wants To Tear Apart Small Animals

The government has postponed a vote on letting people tear apart small animals for sport.

@VictoriaLIVE who cares about vermin foxes. They are only bloody animals and vicious ones to boot. Ask our dearly departed pet rabbit!

— eamon mcmahon (@pokeymarley) July 14, 2015

Only a tiny minority of incredibly angry people supported the bloody pastime.

Yes, town dwellers, foxes are VERMIN. Not cute, not sweet, not to be fed and protected! https://t.co/fADmuAiMIA

— Ngaire Wadman (@NgaireWadman) July 14, 2015

Every region of Britain supports the #foxhunting ban – http://t.co/B3pUJX6UbX pic.twitter.com/j8CK1Fb5ri

— YouGov (@YouGov) July 14, 2015

But this did not deter the tiny minority.

Too many people bought up on basil brush / foxy woxy thinking foxes are cute, they are not, they cruel sadistic vermin, lift fox hunting ban

— Chris Thompson (@F1_CWT) July 14, 2015

Foxes are a major problem, hunting is vermin control. I've had chickens decimates several times by foxes @VictoriaLIVE

— Frederick St.Gregory (@fredgregory1) July 14, 2015

@Communitaria71 I continue to support drag hunting as a sport and that foxes are shot as part of farmers' vermin management controls.

— Anne-Marie Trevelyan (@annietrev) July 14, 2015

Scottish people also pointed out that nobody really liked the idea of murdering small animals for fun.

#SNP priorities #foxhunting pic.twitter.com/s49ekJYPgd

— General Boles (@GeneralBoles) July 14, 2015

Some people did suggest an alternative.

I want to hunt some truly vile vermin, on horseback. Can I hunt my local Tories? Don't want things to get pestilential, do I? #foxhunting

— Mum About Town (@SE24mummy) July 11, 2015

I can think of one change to existing laws on hunting that most people would support.. pic.twitter.com/bvGrc5YqcG

— Jason Spacey (@Jason_Spacey) July 8, 2015

SEE ALSO:

• Foxes To Vote On Tory-Hunting Ban


• Boris Johnson Demands Boris Votes For Boris Laws

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Olga Ilyin

"It had only been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly... 'I trust you; do what you must,' life had an uncanny way of responding to your need."

Exhausted Mother Epidemic as School Year Ends

A mother of three is being treated for exhaustion as the school year ends.
Our Daily Fail undercover reporter (posing as a stressed father with Man Flu) managed to obtain a copy of the hospital admissions form containing Mrs Prabulous's own reasons for seeking help. It makes for sorry reading. Amongst her sins were:

- failing to RSVP to birthday party invites

- telling her five year-old there were no more spaces at an after-school activity because she "couldn't bear to spend one more minute in the blooming car to get there"

- not checking homework folders since May (April)

- hardly ever remembering '"that damned library book".

Even worse, the pint-sized British Asian mother who now lives in Malta
admitted that her biggest crime of the school year was feeling actual relief when her eldest went down with a suspected case of chicken pox forcing the whole family to miss a school event. She confessed:

"I nearly did a jig in the middle of the lounge upon realising that I was off the hook having to make entire trays of tandoori chicken for the British table at the biggest event of the school year. Wrong. Attitude."

A senior consultant who specialises in treating Syndrome of The Underachieving Chronically Knackered Yelling Mother (SUCKY Mother) confirmed that this is not an isolated case and that the clinic has seen a sharp rise in this sort of case over the last few weeks. "It's not unusual for stressed out mothers to be admitted complaining of lunch box boredom, school project frustration, PTA exhaustion and utter dread over 'that stupid new maths long division method'. However, if I'm honest, this is the most severe case we've treated so far."

Our reporter discovered that Mrs Prabulous is not just suffering from run of the mill fatigue. Upon closer analysis, doctors noticed serious symptoms of general disorganisation and apathy. When interviewed upon her arrival, she revealed she:

- has considered giving her kids a packet of crackers and a jar of nutella between them and "just letting them fight it out in the playground" as she was tired of coming up with lunches that all three would finish.

- was the last parent to pay for end of year teachers' gifts

- resorted to using her five year-old's Hello Kitty markers to write the children's names on clothing as she never got round to ordering name labels. Ever.

- got term dates wrong once, causing her kids to miss the first two days of school.

Parents at her children's school have been shocked by the developments. "We always knew she wasn't the most organised or involved of mothers but this is a shock," said one who did not wish to be named.

The Daily Fail's special investigations unit has learned that the clinic was full of mothers repeatedly asking "Is it wine o'frickinclock yet?", clutching crumpled unsigned class trip forms and muttering something about waiting for the bell to ring on the last day of term and collapsing at the finish line.

Since our undercover visit, doctors have identified the condition suffered by Mrs Prabulous.

It is called Sheer Relief.

It is often replaced by another disorder 48 hours later:

Omg-they're-home-for-two-months-itis.

To read more from Prabs Patel, visit www.absolutelyprabulous.com.
You can also follow her at Twitter.com/Abprabulous and on her Facebook Page

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Spotted face of distant Pluto coming into focus

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