Friday factualities

Posted on Jeremy's behalf while he's celebrating still more holidays

The IPKat stumbled across this curiosity on the Yamaha website. The promotional blurb for one of its most popular products reads as follows:

"As a resource for the creative teacher in studio and classroom, the Clavinova is hard to beat.

Yamaha’s Clavinova has almost become the generic name for the digital piano. ..."

So far as the IPKat can see, young musicians seem to assume that "clavinova" is indeed the generic term for the digital piano. He wonders whether Yamaha would be better advised to encourage consumers and users to think in terms of "digital piano", reserving the term Clavinova for its own products, rather than proudly proclaiming to prospective users that its trade mark is tantamount to a generic term. Merpel is more sanguine about this: trade users - retailers and distributors who buy Clavinova digital pianos from Yamaha and sell them on - seem to have no difficulty in treating Clavinova as a trade mark for that company's products.

Wikipedia on digital pianos and Clavinova
Strange and peculiar pianos here
Where to find them here


Who says the techies have no sense of humour? This delightful link, on the subject of the Kayak Award for the best effort in the fight to help the International Standardization Organisation ward off Microsoft's lobbying for acceptance of its OOXML standard, came to the IPKat via his Polish friend and colleague Tomasz Rychlicki. Rather more grim is another offering from Tomasz - a biting political comment from Vincent Chow on how Beijing 2008 got its logo (right) [Merpel adds: more interesting than the item itself is a perusal of the many comments added by readers - it really shows how erudite and well-informed the readers of the IPKat weblog are, when compared to some others].