CBS has broken CNET.

Steven Sinofsky out at Microsoft. It seems like a strategic move of some sort after internal disappointment with the Surface launch and Windows 8.

I don’t know if Ballmer and Co see it this way, but I think the mistakes being made here have to do with surface being a top secret project within Microsoft, from Microsoft’s partners and even Microsoft’s Xbox’s designers being shut out (even though Xbox is Microsoft’s most successful hardware platform to date). Any Tablet strategy should have some strong ties, co branding, interoperability with XBox. There is word of an XBox “surface”, but this should have been first. Microsoft should be trying to build out from their existing installation bases. Instead they are trying to introduce all of us to Windows 8 (something totally different) and a 32 GB tablet with only 16GBs of memory with Office installed.

I know this is old old news. But I am venting. My G2 is a dud. Great phone, I like the hardware enough, but the deployment of this platform is stupid. (Btw Microsoft did the same to their windows 7 phone users).

Though I am a programmer, I don’t have the time nor patience to rom this phone to get ics, an android os that is so sparely used compared to iphone that I don’t know if its really good. I did that with my unlocked Sony w810 walkman phone for some kind of software issues when a walkman phone was as smart as you got.

I don’t want to have to do that for my full touch screen android. I’ve got a bit longer putting up with this b.s. then I’m out. My g1 had over the air updates, the fact that I can’t just connect to wifi and update this phone myself is awful. I use chrome. Its google’s browser. Its on my iPad 1g and iPod touch. Its not on my Android phone. Neither is the latest OS. So basically, I was being sold into a stone age the minute I bought the phone. I guess the won’t miss me. Gonna jump to an iPhone and I may try virgin mobile or something else, but enough of this garbage.

One thing Apple has is a process to cut bait from bad ideas. Ping is being disabled because it was never alive. It’s absence will be a great upgrade.

Naomi Wolf : Dopamine :: Suzanne Somers : Estrogen

Faux science, actual stupidity:

For example, she says bioidenticals kept her slim but then later complains about weight gain. She says she feels great but then later acknowledges that after years on bioidenticals, she was bleeding so heavily every day that she recently had to have a hysterectomy. That’s the kind of success we can live without.

source: Suzanne Somers’s Pseudoscience – Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Somers:

Indeed, a breast cancer survivor who takes massive quantities of estrogen to “rejuvenate” herself is playing Russian Roulette with her life, plain and simple. That Somers has been lucky enough thus far not to have a recurrence of her breast cancer is just that–luck–and nothing to do with any of her health regimens. Worse, she made millions selling books advocating “bioidentical” hormone therapies and since her breast cancer treatment has diversified into a veritable cornucopia of “anti-aging” treatments that she hawks at her website Ageless-Diva.com.

source: Oh, goody. Suzanne Somers has found new woo – Respectful Insolence.

Now compare that with Naomi Wolfe’s prescription for a woman who needs to be creative:

After consulting many research papers and interviewing many scientists, Wolf has decided that the sex–creativity link can be “explained” by dopamine, one of the brain chemicals involved in female orgasm. Dopamine, according to Wolf, is the chemical that fosters female focus and motivation. It is what makes women leap up from the rank sweat of their enseamed beds to write novels. Modern women who complain of depression need better sex and more dopamine, but patriarchal societies, fearful of sexually empowered women, prefer to fob them off with antidepressants. “Serotonin,” Wolf writes, “literally subdues the female voice, and dopamine literally raises it.”

Wolf literally does not understand the meaning of “literally” and her grasp of the scientific research she has read is pretty shaky too. By repeatedly confusing correlates with causes, she grossly exaggerates what neuroscience can reliably tell us about the functions of individual brain chemicals. Dopamine undoubtedly has a role in female orgasm. But it also has a role in schizophrenia and, by Wolf’s own admission, a panoply of addictions. Given this, it seems foolhardy on Wolf’s part to designate it “the ultimate feminist chemical.”
[…] There is a strange hubris in Wolf’s claim to understand how all rape affects all women. It is the same hubris that compels her to instruct us on how all women need to be wooed, and how all women feel when they come. Wolf remarks more than once in this book that she has no wish to be “prescriptive,” but prescriptiveness, alas, is her compulsion. She won’t be able to rest easy until all of womankind has heard her gospel and has started having sex that is not just pleasurable, but worthwhile. Her refusal to acknowledge the heterogeneity of female temperament, of female sexual proclivity, of female desire, would be galling, if it were not so dotty. As it is, her willingness to position herself as a visionary sexual prophet inspires a sort of affectionate awe.

source: Pride and Prejudice by Zoë Heller | The New York Review of Books.

Wolf goes on to recommend hiring holistic male prostitutes. Make sure you read Zoë Heller’s piece.

Interesting stats from TPM: Less than half of TPM visitors use Windows. 16.8% use IE. In August 2008 it was 72% on Windows and 39% using IE..

Good for the FCC. Verizon Must pay 1.25m fine..