The Xerox Alto was the internally used research project. The Xerox Star was marketed commercially but had way too steep a price to assemble a useful system -- since it basically required a small LAN of multiple machines and a laser printer -- for hardly anyone to buy.
For example, there was no pre-emptive multitasking. The CPU, the 68000, was designed to enable it, but Jobs didn't care about stuff like that.
Yeah, but it also was designed around 128kB of RAM (itself an increase over the original plan to go with 64kB as I recall) so it's not like it could have run multiple apps if they wanted it to.
They were just trying to build one computer back then -- not a platform that would be in use in the future.
It set the standard for the one button mouse too, which Apple has stuck with to this day.
In fairness there was no consistency then as to what other buttons did, if anything, and it was confusing to people who already had to be taught what a mouse even was and how to use it. Also, Apple's mice ship for some years now have multiple 'buttons' (technically trackpad areas -- the mice have no physical buttons at all), and the platform has supported contextual menus since the late 90s.
Also, this isn't really a Steve thing. The NeXT machines all had two button mice.
The power switch was conveniently located on the keyboard, so you could accidentally power your machine off more easily.
Totally untrue. The original Mac had a power switch on the back left side. A big rocker switch near the compartment for changing the clock battery.
Power switches on the keyboard didn't appear until ADB came along for peripherals, which on the Mac was '87. Annoyingly not all of the machines could be powered on from the keyboard even as late as the mid-90s. And none of them would just shut down from the keyboard -- there was always a dialog box that could be canceled. The button was more related to the Apple II keyboard mounted reset switch.
The floppy drive had an electronic eject mechanism, which was prone to failure and prone to getting stuck if the machine crashed.
Auto-inject was even sweeter. I never heard of auto eject failing in except in truly ancient drives (20-30 years old) that need to be lubricated and fixed up anyway. And if the machine crashed the disk would either eject on reboot, could be forced by holding the mouse button down during boot, or in the absolute worst case, ejected using a straightened paperclip in a subtle but conspicuous hole even with power off.
I don't think that was a Steve thing either -- hell, it took some effort just to get him to agree to the Sony 3.5" disk, which was a new thing and no standard at the time. Auto eject isn't a bad idea though, especially on removable media, so long as it can be overridden.
The Timex has you.
Under what legal theory does that remotely make sense.
Authors are not inherently entitled to copyrights. They can carry any number of conditions, and in the past, have done. There's even still a few on the books.
There's no reason Congress cannot decide to say that if a work is allowed to go out of print for, say, a year, with some definition as to what constitutes being in print (so that authors don't just have to whip up a single copy) and what sorts of works the statute would apply to, then it enters the public domain. This would tend to encourage authors to keep works in print at all costs until it's no longer economical to do so, at which point they'd enter the public domain.
On a related note, you may wish to look at 17 USC 303(a), which encouraged authors to publish certain works before a deadline in order to lock in a certain duration of protection. The EU did something similar resulting in certain rare sound recordings getting very limited pressings in order to meet the minimum threshold.
If anyone can copy an author's book, would any author ever publish?
Yes! We know this for a fact because: 1) Authorial copyright as we know now it did not exist anywhere until England in 1710, and did not become widespread until well into the 19th century. And 2) Even then, there were many limits, and it was not uncommon for a given author to not get copyright protection due to some failing on their part (such as publication without notice or registration, in the US).
Yet many works were published, many of which are among the finest works humanity has ever created.
Again, that is why the second part of the sentence is important which you seem to ignore. That is why it is clearly spelled out in the Constitution.
Protecting authors is a means to an end, but it is not the goal of copyright. Basically, the goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science (i.e. knowledge). This is accomplished by A) encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not have created and published. This is also accomplished by B) having the works be in the public domain so that they can be freely disseminated as widely as possible, used to the fullest possible extent, and serve as the basis for derivative creative works, which are treated with equal respect by copyright policy.
The mechanism we use to encourage authors for prong A is to give them a monopoly concerning a work. This is directly at odds with prong B. To address this, the monopoly is limited in time and scope -- not all uses of a work fall within copyright and it won't last forever. Nevertheless the system is largely controlled by the various publishing interests (movie studios, book publishers, record labels) with little concern for the public interest which should control. But if in actual practice the public interest was actually looked after, there would surely be other conditions that would limit copyrights so that authors got the minimum copyright necessary -- in duration and in the scope of rights protected -- that got them to create and publish their work, since, after all, giving them any more than that would be wasteful.
The fun bit is to consider whether pornography is 'useful arts'.
Depends on how inventive it is, I suppose.
The part of the copyright and patent clause that concerns copyrights and creative works is the promotion of science, which in the late 18th century when it was written, basically just meant 'knowledge.' The useful arts falls under patents and inventions, and means something like applied technology. There are still traces of this in English -- Patents deal with state of the art technology but the invention must be disclosed in a way understandable to a person having ordinary skill in the art, and must not be anticipated by previous examples, i.e. prior art.
Owning an original piece of art doesn't mean you have the copyright. The most the guy with the cels could do would be to publicly display them. This is the same sort of foolish behavior that the dopes that bought that Dune book the other year engaged in.
So then why did so many plead guilty to that charge?
We'll have to ask them. I suspect denial of decent council.
And why couldn't Your Dear Leader have bothered to lift a finger to help these people?
Out of office by the time the Maoist junta got going?
Happiness is twin floppies.
