The year has started well. I had a long vacation on the Sandwich Islands (also known as Hawaii) that ended right before the beginning of the new year. The first week of classes is passed and I am getting into the rhythm of things, so I can afford five to ten minutes to write about it. The best thing is that my level of crankiness went down to almost zero.
Interestingly, I had to go all the way to Waikiki to learn to surf, even though the place I live in boasts a large number of surfers. The main issue is water temperature. In Hawaii falling into the water does not produce thermal shock, so it possible to surf without a wetsuit. Here in Santa Barbara the experience seems more traumatic for a beginner. I also saw some of the `crazy’ people who surf on 20′ surf performing their acrobatics and being beaten by the waves regularly.
Of course, those are not the only waves that I have to learn to catch. I’m still waiting to start surfing the smart phone wave. My current phone is semi-smart, but not enough. I’m also waiting to see if the rumors about a mac tablet are true. I would use it because I like to draw, and having the tablet screen sensitivity would help me with that. I’m also considering buying a netbook. I want something portable and essentially disposable (from the point of view of cost) to take around where no sensitive information is stored.
On a different note, people nowadays are also using GPU’s for computations, and the CPU’s to control them. The GPU’s are the graphics cards. They are optimized to do a lot of arithmetic in parallel for rendering images quickly. A single CPU can then guide a GPU with 256 or 512 arithmetic units. For certain processes you can just use that numerical capability in highly parallelizable arithmetic operations. Hence one can use it for physics simulations (so ong as one programs them correctly). I’m waiting eagerly for some funds to get my hands on these and start doing some of the simulations I want to do. This is another wave that I have yet to catch.
A few years ago while at a reception I chatted with a guy who regularly surfs off the coast of New Hampshire in the winter time. I’m sure its a great way to bring up Lorentz and the subject of length contraction!
I would scan through Engadget and Newegg on the netbooks though I honestly think you might be better off keeping your powder dry another month or so for the onslaught of low voltage cpu laptops which are going to hammer the current netbook market either giving you a better rig or a cheaper old model.
My video card has 800 processors.
The top of the line, $600 ATI card has like 3200. Well, consumer top of the line. The scientific versions, are, of course, several thousand dollars.
The current generation of ATI beats the experimental Nvidia Tesla silicon by a really sad amount at the video game side of the equation, and also outperforms them on the dual-precision FLOPS without breaking a sweat.
Nvidia might pull some tricks out of their hat though, they have in the past.
Also, you can get some motherboards and put like 4 of these puppies in ‘em. dayumn sun! with the previous generation of consumer cards, 4 of them will output around 1 TFLOPS of dual-precision. The current top of the line ATI, if you can put four of them in a machine (due to their configuration you may only be able to use two) you’d get almost 4 TFLOPS of dual-precision.
That’s beyond the top of the supercomputer list of 1999. Not too shabby.
I have just purchased an archos 9 pc tablet. It is basically a 9 inch touch screen based device running windows 7.
http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archos_9/index.html?country=es&lang=es
It is created by a French company so I am not sure that it would be available in USA (I guess you live in USA).
Other, more expensive, solutions are the devices for the company viliv. You have for example, the viliv S5:
http://www.myviliv.com/ces/main_s5.html
or, if you find a 5 inch screen too small you also have the Viliv X70 EX:
http://www.myviliv.com/eng/product/x70ex.asp
It is a device based on win XP, and I have read that it performs very well. It is a pity that it is a bit too expensive. Anyway, as far a I know they are available in USA and the basic version of the X/= costs around 600 $.
Probably the apple based tablet PC will cost far more than any of this and , well, it will be apple. Surely they have their fans, but I am not among them at all.
There are other solutions, for example Archos has an archos 7 and archos 5 (the number referring the inches of the screen) but they use the android OS so you have very few serious applications for it. In particular I am not sure if you actually have something so basic a a pdf reader that correctly opens an arxiv paper.
If you can live with a 4.1 inch screen another solution would be the nokia 810 internet tablet. It runs symbyan and althought I have not tested the versions compatibility I know for sure that there are good pdf readers for that platform (I have tested them in a a windows mobile PDA).
Those are possibly the newest products, but there a few older ones that you could look for. I guess that if the main use of the device is to have a portable arxiv pdf reader these are a better option that a notebook.