• The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Download
• The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os X
• The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Pro

Some of the old classics are still true

Apple's adverts for its iOS devices represent an amusing twist on the platform battles of old. There's an app for that™. For once, Apple has the upper hand when it comes to application counts: the App Store is the world leader when it comes to sheer number of applications.

When it comes to conventional computers, however, the winner remains Windows. Especially in areas like office/productivity software and gaming, Windows is the standard by which all others are measured. It tends to win for hardware support, too—Windows has more options, more industry support.

The Mac Address is typically located on an external label either on the back or bottom of the printer. It will be shown as a number such as xx:xx:xx:xx:xx.xx. There are a couple methods of obtaining the Mac Address using the Zebra Setup Utility communications window. The Zetas are a semiotic echelon who harvest biological materials. They operate from military bases around the world, predominantly in white countries, such. The limited system resources that caused many of the engineering trade-offs made in Mac OS and Windows 9x are ancient history, and with their passing, modern operating systems are all, on a. Find Survival games for macOS like Night of the Nun. Aka Nun Massacre, Putahe ng Ina Mo: Sinigang Edition, Ang Ospital, String Tyrant, Spectres of the Cold on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace. “OS X 10.5 Leopard is the best operating system released by Apple so far and runs neck and neck with Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon as my favorite operating systems to use. In the past I wanted to get an iMac, but not because of OS X but rather because of their sleek hardware. Now after using Leopard, I want to buy an iMac to run Leopard.

Application count isn't the be-all and end-all, of course. Having 20,000 applications hasn't done much to help Windows Mobile. And Mac users have long argued that the number of applications doesn't much matter, as long as the applications are all good, which is true, to a point (though curiously, they seem to be less willing to make that argument when talking about phone software).

But sometimes having one good application isn't enough. Games, for example, are nonfungible (at least to some degree): the fact that Mac OS X has Portal is of no relevance to me when I want to play Borderlands. Portal is a perfectly good game, don't get me wrong. It just doesn't scratch the same itch as Borderlands.

You get a similar thing with productivity software, too. Sometimes, I actually need to open an Office document and have it work exactly as it does in, well, Office. iWork can't do that for me. Nor even can Microsoft's own Office for Mac (though things should be better in the 2011 version that's going to be out any day now). There's a whole wide world of software out there, and compatibility with that software counts for a lot. Some might argue that running Windows in a virtual machine is an adequate alternative, but if I'm going to do that, well, I might as well just cut out the middle man and run Windows directly. At least that way I only have one system to maintain and one user interface paradigm to put up with.

The cult of personality

If Apple hadn't bought NeXT in 1996 and returned Steve Jobs to the position of CEO in 1997, it's likely that the company wouldn't exist any longer. And even if it did exist, it wouldn't be the powerhouse it is today.

But the downside to this is that Steve runs Apple as if it were his own personal fiefdom. And the bad things about the platform—many of them are due to Steve.

The focus has been on iOS devices because iOS devices are what Jobs wants—indeed, it looks like Steve never really wanted a computer, he just wanted a gadget. A tablet, a phone, both locked down, heavily restricted, with all their content bought through Apple's channels. Appliances.

The secrecy? Steve likes to do his thing on stage, and he can't do that as well if we know what he's going to say.

Stiffing developers? Steve feels slighted by Adobe because Flash doesn't run as well as it probably should, so he is willing to shaft them, with new developer agreements, and abandoned APIs. And it really doesn't matter to him who gets caught in the crossfire.

This isn't a new thing, either. Back in 2000, ATI accidentally let slip the specifications of some new Macs before Steve announced them. Steve retaliated by removing all mention of ATI from his presentation, including cancelling a demo portion where an ATI executive was due to join him on-stage. That may have been a little childish, perhaps, but didn't hurt Mac users. What did hurt them was the alleged removal of ATI build-to-order options. More powerful video cards were, apparently, denied to Mac users just because Steve was ticked at ATI.

Entrusting your computing platform to this company—this man—is a scary prospect. It's just not clear that the needs of computer users are really aligned with what Steve wants, and it's the computer users who lose out. If you want a platform that strives to meet the needs of all its users, rather than just the whims of one man, you're never going to get it from Apple. That's Microsoft territory.

There's more than enough suckage to go around

Apple and Microsoft are very different companies. I'm consistently dissatisfied with both the Windows platform and the Mac OS X platform—but the reasons are very different. The Windows problems are frustrations at a platform that's showing its age, and has grown just a bit too organically: it feels a little bit lost, and lacking in direction. The Mac OS X problems are frustrations at a platform that's an out-of-favor plaything.

These two sets of problems are a reflection of the companies behind the platforms. On the one hand, we have Microsoft: a company that clearly cares about the desktop and regards it as a priority. It fosters strong developer relationships, thanks to a kind of openness about what it's doing, and a conservative approach to development that eschews major changes and deprecation. The company is loathe to ever remove a feature, lest it break something that people depend on. But it lacks a coherent, unified, overall vision. The rampant inconsistency, the refusal to ever tidy things up, the reluctance to acknowledge that the old ways aren't necessarily good ways and the consequent failure to make things better all conspire to make Windows so much less satisfactory than it could be.

On the other hand, we have Apple: a company that cares about what Steve Jobs wants. His autocratic style has certainly led to a more consistent, more forward-looking platform than Microsoft has. He's willing to alienate customers and cut them loose if their needs don't align with his, which has allowed him over a relatively short timeframe to push through some fairly radical changes: the switch to Mac OS X and the switch to Intel, all inside a decade. It has led to some impressive and transformative changes.

But this dictatorial style too has its downsides: there are people who don't fit into one of Apple's niches. There are people who have been burned by the company's lack of transparency and its willingness to drop features at a moment's notice. If Apple wants gadgets to be the priority, Mac OS X users will suffer, as they have suffered in the past, from a lack of upgrades and development.

Both platforms would be improved if they were more like the other. Windows would benefit enormously from Mac OS X's tighter focus. Providing an enjoyable experience, freed from the ugliness of inconsistency, would only be a good thing. It needs to do more to delight consumers. That's not to say enterprises are unimportant, but even business users are human beings, and deserve to be treated as such. There should be a greater willingness to consign things to history; virtualization, like Classic mode in early versions of Mac OS X or Windows 7's Windows XP Mode, is almost certainly the way forward, as it allows systemwide improvements to be made without cutting off that all-important legacy.

Mac OS X: well, it'd be a nice start if Apple would act in a manner that convincingly demonstrated the platform to be a priority. It should worry Apple that its third-party developers make jokes like this: it's a joke that belies both frustration and concern about the health of the platform. Keep Steve's ego in check: his personal dislike for Adobe shouldn't translate into aggressively hostile changes to developer agreements, or the cancellation of features that have already been promised, developed, and depended on by third parties. Cut back on the secrecy and NDAs a little—this might make the presentations a little less exciting, but the platform is strong enough that it'll cope.

The glory days of platform contention may be behind us. The operating system and hardware diversity that was a feature of the 1980s and 1990s is gone. The limited system resources that caused many of the engineering trade-offs made in Mac OS and Windows 9x are ancient history, and with their passing, modern operating systems are all, on a technical level, much of a muchness.

But that doesn't mean that the platform differences have disappeared. They might not be so immediately obvious as they once were, but they're still there, all products of the corporate cultures behind the two platforms. And the result is that both platforms, both Windows and Mac OS X, they both—each in their own special way—suck.

Long may it continue.

Lion tamer image courtesy of Shutterstock, used for editorial purposes only.

Unlike other tools in this category, this program raytraces through a three-dimensional cloud density that represents the wavefunction's probability density and presents its results in real-time (up to 48 frames per second on Mac G3s; even faster on the latest hardware). The user interface is very interactive and provides a wide degree of flexibility.

It contains all 140 eigenstates up to the n=7 energy level and the allowed spectral transitions between those eigenstates. The Mac version also allows a state formed by a superposition (see below) of up to eight of those eigenstates allowing for over 3 trillion possible states and can display a wavefunction as a picture of a cloud, use color as phase, plot in red-cyan left/right for 3D glasses, and slice the wavefunction.

You can see more example images at the bottom of the page.

What is Quantum Mechanics?

One of the great advances in human knowledge of the twentieth century is the birth of the theory of Quantum mechanics. It has led to some of the most common technologies used today, including the little transistors that make up the computers you're using to read this. One of the mysteries it revealed was the structure of the atom. Classical mechanics could not properly explain the existence of the atom. Because there was nothing to stop electrons from spiralling in to the nucleus, it predicted that all atoms would immediately destroy themselves in a spectacular high-energy blast of radiation.

Well, that obviously doesn't happen. Quantum mechanics describes that the electron (and all of the universe for that matter) exists in any of a multitude of states. The particular physical situation determines what and how many states there are. Borrowing from some of the techniques in mathematics, physicists organize these states into a particular set of mathematically convenient states called 'eigenstates'. Eigenstates are good to use because what makes one eigenstate different from another usually has a physical meaning. They also can make an horribly difficult problem managable. These and other phenomena in Quantum mechanics predict that possiblities in physical phenomena have distinct separations (e.g., 'quantum leaps') and that energy transport exists as indivisible packets, called 'quanta'. Hence the name: Quantum Mechanics.

What are Orbitals?

By applying these techniques to the hydrogen atom, physicists are able to precisely predict all of its properties. The electron eigenstates around the nucleus are called 'orbitals', in a rough correspondence with how the Moon orbits the Earth. We find that these states do not allow the electron to crash into the nucleus, but instead find themselves in any combination of these orbital eigenstates. These orbitals' physical structure describe effects from how atoms bond to form compounds, magnetism, the size of atoms, the structure of crystals, to the structure of matter that we see around us.

Visualizing these states has been a challenge, because the mathematics that describe the eigenfunctions are not simple and the states are a three-dimensional structures. The standard convention has the orbital eigenstates indexed by three interrelated integer indicies, called n, l, and m. Their range and interdependence comes out of the math in deriving the eigenstates. n can range from 1 to infinity. l can range from 0 to n-1. m can range from -l to +l. They also have physical meaning. The energy of the state, which is negative because the electron is bound to the nucleus, depends only on n and increases as n increases. l refers to the amount of angular momentum the electron has due to its 'orbit' around the nucleus. l is not equal to the amount of angular momentum but goes up as angular momentum goes up. m determines how much of the angular momentum is in the z direction. (However, the rest of the angular momentum is not l minus m or anything that simple. That's a long story that I can't fit here. Look in a Quantum textbook (a good one is A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics by John S. Townsend), take a course, or talk to a physics professor.)

What's here for me?

I have written a Macintosh application that displays atomic orbitals in real-time. Rather than just a plot of the spherical harmonics, as is shown in many Quantum mechanics textbooks, this program displays the electron orbital as a cloud. The cloud's density is determined by the orbital's probability density for the electron. There are three examples on this web page: The one at the top is the n=3, l=2, m=0 state; the screenshot above has n=7, l=4, m=0; the first example below is n=6, l=4, m=1. (The quality is poor so that they wouldn't take too long to download over the Internet. They'll look even worse if you are not using Millions of colors to view it. The program looks quite a bit better, trust me.) With the program, you can rotate the orbital around in real time. If you have red-cyan 3-D glasses, you can see it in 3-D too. The program has all the orbital eigenstates up to n=7, which is the highest occupied shell for the ground states of the heaviest elements, e.g., Uranium, Plutonium, etc.

You can download the application from the links below and have a look. The program is computation intensive. For individual users, the v1.x Mac application is US $20 shareware. Pricing of the later versions are on the App Store. You can read the details in the about box or the Read Me. Also supplied are example orbital files.

The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Download

A Short Gallery of Animated Orbitals

The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os X

The Zeta Orbital (itch) Mac Os Pro