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Charmed Announces Crusoe-based Linux Wearable
isdale writes: "Charmed Technology, founded by MIT Media Lab graduates, announced what it claims is the fastest available wearable computer -- 800Mhz Crusoe TM5800 processor. The CharmedIT comes standard with a 266 Mhz Pentium MMX for about $2k. The Crusoe upgrade costs another $500. The OS is extra ($250 for RedHat or Debian), as is the display, input device, carrying case, battery, charger, usable application ... if that isn't enough options, you can also get a DIY kit."
$2,000 for a 266 Mhz Pentium MMX Processor Board ?? Wow that's what I paid for mine in 1998. Can't believe prices haven't risen... Must be because the OS isn't included.
There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling!
I didn't see any mention of an external media drive (cdrom, floppy, etc.), I think they get away with it by just making it extremely hard to install anything... pretty sleezy if you ask me.
As someone who went to MIT for four years, I would like to second this post.
I worked hard, destroyed my health, (only recently lost enough weight that I can start running twice a week again . . . pathetic) and had no social life. If I had gone to a state university, I would have been able to take more of the classes I liked and could have afforded to stay an extra year if necessary to learn what I thought was important -- I wanted to learn Russian and Hebrew in addition to all the technical stuff, for example. But instead I was stuck struggling to pack it all into four years because the damn place is so expensive. I completed all the requirements for the 6-3 degree, and didn't get the degree because a professor rejected the final project/AUP/thesis thing. I got a job in Boston just to be able to stay around the re-write it my spare time, and the guy kept wanting more work out of me, and screwed up an attempt to take an institute lab in my spare time by getting caught doing a lot of traveling for work. Finally I left the place, but where I live now rent is so cheap, and no income tax, that I have more take-home pay on just about half the salary.
I've moved to a big state university town since then. The kids I meet who are in this college are more balenced, and most of the time smarter (but not intensely obsessive about things) than the kids at MIT. I feel happier the more interaction I have with non-MIT people. When I meet MIT people in the course of work, it seems half of them are kind of recovering like me and half are bitterly hated by everyone they interact with.
I have made several career choices in order to make sure I do not have to meet or work with MIT people any more. Among these was a conscious decision to give up lisp, the best way to program there is, but lisp people seem like the worst of MITers even when they are not from MIT. Read Erik Naggum's posts on comp.lang.lisp if you need a striking example. In all fairness, it's not just MIT people, I treat anyone from the northeast, a big school, or jewish as having two strikes against them until they prove they are real people. Only lawyers have more constantly been sub-human than people from MIT.
As for the MIT Media lab, they are a different sort of dispicable character. They seem to be focused on selling the reputation of the rest of MIT for their own gain. They take a corporate donor, wave a bunch of smoke and mirrors and invoke the MIT reputation, get money, and then when the guys finally realize that all they are doing is hooking up random junk to each other about and then hyping it in the most oily dot-com style, they toss that donor and search out more. They had a wearable computer FASION SHOW. Nuff said.
If you are a high school student considering going to MIT, here's what you should do. Find an MIT alumni to talk to who is not a member of the any of the alumni clubs or shit (that means hooking up with them outside of MIT's recruiting, which is hard.) Ask them to look you right in the eye, and say "if you did it all over again, would you go to MIT again ?"
A large portion will have to admit the answer is no. They will point out that their experience wasn't totally bad, etc, but on the balence, they would have gone to a good state school. (A factoid often quoted is that MIT alumni contribute proportionally less than all the other high-reputation places to their school; I think this is only partly due to the fact that a lot of them viciously hate the place, and more related to the fact that the demographic of MITers is more middle class than the likes of Harvard, Princeton, etc.)
I look forward to discriminating again MIT people in jobs and any other way (I'm buying some rental property in the next year or so, no MITers will rent my place) for the rest of my life. I'm still trying to give northeasterners and jews a fair shake in the interest of an equal society and all that, but MITers are right out.