The new Schwinn Sting-Ray is an abomination.
This is what a Sting-Ray should be. Okay, technically, that’s a Sting-Ray Junior which was my ride back in the early 70’s. (The photo’s not of my own bike, but of one I found listed on eBay, pretty nearly the same model that I had, except mine had a white seat.) Sure, I took some flack for the slightly smaller chopper bars and lower profile of the Junior, but I was a small kid and it fit.
And, better yet, six or seven years later every kid in the neighborhood was eating their hearts out when I stripped my candy apple red Sting-Ray Junior down to its frame and rebuilt it as the coolest damn BMX bike in the Brighton Green subdivision. New wheels, new seat, new handlebars, new pedals, new front forks, and I even kept the rear coaster brakes.
Ahh, I wish I had a picture of that tricked out BMX Sting-Ray now. Classic!
Culture
Jason Kottke posts an interesting entry called GooOS, the Google Operating System which extends on these three paragraphs from the Topix.net weblog:
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
Kottke’s right — that’s a brilliant summary of Google’s business model.
Technology & Internet