This week on infoMania the news wants you to know they’re hip to Woodstock’s 40th anniversary, two shows that celebrate the strange joy of child beauty pageants, Bryan discovers that lesbian kisses equal TV ratings gold, Sergio looks at the hottest pop videos on YouTube, and Brett explores the free health care option that is the world wide web.
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Last year, Omega released a special edition timepiece to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo astronauts voyage to the moon. In 1969, the men in the space capsule wore Omegas so the firm decided to recreate that bit of history with a contemporary product.
But what if Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong hadn’t worn Omegas at all? What if they had worn copies? And Omega knew that the men weren’t checking their timepieces, but rather an off-brand in space all those years ago. Does the big historical release make sense?
What if Porsche released a recreation of the famous convertible that James Dean perished in, but in reality, he had been killed driving a kit car? What if Paul Newman didn’t really wear a Rolex, but the firm released a tribute to a knockoff on the famous actor’s wrist?
Guitar manufacturer Gibson is navigating similar waters with their decision to issue a recreation of a copy.
The firm has released a number of celebrity signature models over the last couple of years. Some of the instruments have proven to be very successful, while others (like the Buckethead model) have been a bit more questionable.
One of the undeniably successful ventures was collaboration with former Guns n’ Roses axe slinger Slash that produced several interesting models ranging from the couple-a-hundred-buck Epiphone to an aged-replica instrument that was an exact duplicate of the guitarist’s own instrument (all the way down to the scuffs and cigarette burns) that ran about ten grand.
Late last week, Gibson made a big splash by announcing the newest model, The Slash Appetite Les Paul. Branded as the “the axe that launched a thousand riffs,” the instrument is described as an exact recreation of the axe Slash wielded on 1988’s landmark Appetite for Destruction record, all the way down to the capacitors and the pots.
Weird thing is, Slash didn’t play a Gibson Les Paul on that record.
The comment gallery was all over the Gibson website when this news was released. As many others have pointed out, Slash in fact played a copy of a Les Paul on Appetite for Destruction. In Slash’s 2007 best-selling memoir (co-authored by Anthony Bozza), he writes, “It was made by the late Jim Foot, who owned Music Works in Redondo Beach. He made about fifty of those Les Paul replicas entirely by hand with no detail overlooked” (page 172). In other sources, a luthier named Chris Derrig is credited with creating the instrument. Regardless, it wasn’t Gibson.
All of this raises interesting questions about the psychology of collectors and the purchasing influence of a iconic association. True Slash fans know that his LP wasn’t a Gibson, so they’re not going to be fooled. They’ll judge the new Appetite model on it’s own merits. Or, they know it’s kind of a weird duck in the lineage perspective, but it’s got their beloved tone and they don’t care about anything else.
And what of the more general fans? It’s hard to accuse Gibson of trying to dupe consumers because surely if you’re going to plop down the $4,728 MSRP on the Appetite model, aren’t you going to do a little homework first? And if mom and dad are rich enough to spend 5k simply because Junior likes Slash’s top hat, then there’s not much hope for them.
And then when you start thinking about the fact that the Les Paul is, by very definition, a celebrity signature guitar and that now you’ve got signature versions of copied signature version and so forth, then your head might just explode. It all gets very meta.
As Sesame Street is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, now seems like as good a time as any for us to practice our counting…of mobile operating systems/platforms. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Darn, my hand ran out of fingers! Well, no matter, Samsung thinks there is plenty room for more and has taken the wraps off its own, new open mobile platform, bada.
The search king has given much of its front page love this week to honor Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary, but it did save some space to tout the new Droid smartphone.
Originally posted at Beyond Binary
In honor of Nerf’s 40th anniversary and the launch of the N-Strike Raider Rapid Fire CS 35 blaster, which ships today, Nerf sent over a mighty fine and ginormous care package to the CG office. I can’t believe the Parker Brothers developed Nerf in 1969 and the first product was some dumb four-inch polyurethane foam ball. They’ve come a long way since then.
Let’s dig into the goodie bag.
I’ve been wanting a Nerf football all summer! Do you guys remember the Nerf Turbo football with the whistle from the late 80s, early 90s?
All these N-Strike doohickeys came out after my time, but they look pretty sweet. I’m actually impressed that the quality of the Nerf products is quite high. Most of the toys I see these days are of poor quality and materials. Other Hasbro products I’ve seen are pure crap, but these ones are pretty cool. Good job, Hasbro! Now make the Transformers toys like you used to.
Is that a scope? Hell yes!
Capture the flag?! Bless your hearts, Parker Brothers. Who wants to play?
Again, I used to have a Nerf basketball hoop set up in my room as a kid. This one will go up in my office.
Anyone up for LARPing this weekend?
And now for the pièce de résistance, I present to you the N-Strike Raider Rapid Fire CS 35 blaster. What makes this so special? It holds a 35-dart drum. How bout dem apples?!
Hasbro is even giving away free darts for their N-Strike blasters. You can find all the details on how to receive 50 free darts here.
Hot on the heels of the news of UNIX’s 40th anniversary comes a Linux Foundation report entitled Who Writes Linux. This report investigates who is contributing to the Linux kernel, and how much: “Since 2005, over 5000 individual developers from nearly 500 different companies have contributed to the kernel. The Linux kernel, thus, has become a common resource developed on a massive scale by companies which are fierce competitors in other areas.” Wow!
It bears noting that an analysis like this is only available because Linux is open source software. You can look through the changelogs and project history to see who has done what, who’s been attributed with doing what, etc etc.
ComputerWorld has done a nice job of summarizing the top contributing corporations. Lumped in with the expected participants (Red Hat, IBM, Novell) are some less likely companies (SGI, Parallels, Renesas Technology):
As Vaughan-Nichols notes:
You see, Linux isn’t just some hobby, nor is it just being used by some businesses that specialize in it. No, Linux is made by big business for big business, and it has been for some time.
Businesses can use Linux because it’s such a robust, viable operating system: it frees them from having to develop and maintain their own operating systems for specialized (usually embedded) systems, and instead focus on applications develop for those systems. A lot people like to pooh-pooh Linux because they may have had some trouble using it on their crazy home-brew desktop system, but it’s clear that Linux is a very successful part of the computer industry today.
The Linux Foundation report itself is chock full of easy-to-read tables with interesting data (changes per hour, lines modified per day, etc). If you’re curious about Linux development, this is a pretty good glimpse at it. From a purely academic perspective, it would be fun to compare this data with similar data from Apple and Microsoft regarding OSX and Windows development, respectively. Good luck getting that data from them, though.