Re: Christoffel Symbol and Riemann Curvature Tensor

From: sal (believer_at_nospam.org)
Date: 06/19/04 

Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 07:52:53 -0400

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 15:11:29 -0500, Tom Roberts wrote:

> On 6/16/2004 2:55 PM, Pmb wrote:
>> "sweet" <sweet430@hotmail.com> wrote
>>>BTW, u can create ur documents much easier in MS WORD and then save it
>>>as both a WORD document and an HTML document. You can post the HTML
>>>document directly on your site and skip all that painful hard coding
>>>required by HTML!
>> To do that requires uploading all of the GIF files that Word creates and
>> the other junk that it creates to support it. It's a pain in the ***. I
>> tried it and decided it wasn't the way to go for me.
>
> Not to mention that Micro$oft makes it so easy to put MS-specific
> constructs into your web pages, that then make the site unreadable by
> non-InternetExplorer browsers. Not a good plan in physics, as Linux has a
> STRONG following.

With good reason.

I'm peripherally involved with parts of the computational physics
community. The system I'm currently working with (when I'm not wasting
time reading posts on s.p.r.) has 2048 processors.

Windows does not support such a machine.

In the high-performance computing world, Unix in all its flavors is
currently the dominant OS; as far as I know, there is as yet no credible
version of Windows available for HP computing work.

Furthermore, much of the HP computing work is done remotely (you don't
stick a 2048 processor system under your desk, for example). In
consequence, X windows is also used heavily in such work. X support on
MS Windows is still not up to X on Unix systems, though it's gotten better.

So while it's certainly feasible to put Windows on your desktop and spend
all your work-time talking to Unix systems, it's also very common to use
Unix front-to-back when working in that environment.

FWIW I still run Quicken on MS Windows ('cause it doesn't run on Linux :-) ) 

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