Happy Birthday Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace Honored by Google December 10, 2012 – Happy Birthday – Born 197 Years ago!

Happy Birthday Ada Lovelace! You would have been 197 years old today!

Ada Lovelace

For women in Tech, Ada Lovelace shows that even back in the 1800s, women could do some amazing things!

Ada Lovelace: ‘The Enchantress of Numbers’ (+video) – CS Monitor

Ada Lovelace was the visionary half of the team that helped create the modern computer. Lovelace is honored by Google as the ‘first computer programmer.’

That’s quite an accomplishment for a woman who was born 197 years ago – born today (December 10th) but back in 1815! From Ada Lovelace’s Wikipedia entry:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known asAda Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage‘s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Because of this, she is often considered the world’s first computer programmer.^[1][2][3]

Ada was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Byron. She had no relationship with her father, who separated from her mother just a month after Ada was born; four months later Byron left England forever and died in Greece when Ada was eight. As a young adult, she took an interest in mathematics, and in particular Babbage’s work on the analytical engine. Between 1842 and 1843, she translated an article by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with aset of notes of her own. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program – that is, an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Ada’s notes are important in the earlyhistory of computers. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.^[4]

Amazing!

The inventor, Charles Babbage, had the following to say about Ada Lovelace as quoted from her Wikipedia article,

Ada Lovelace met and corresponded with Charles Babbage on many occasions, including socially and in relation to Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. They first met through their mutual friend Mary Somerville; Ada became fascinated with his Difference Engine and used her relationship with Somerville to visit him as often as she could. In later years, she became acquainted with Babbage’s Italian friend Fortunato Prandi, an associate of revolutionaries.

Babbage was impressed by Ada’s intellect and writing skills. He called her “The Enchantress of Numbers”. In 1843 he wrote of her:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans – every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.^[42]

Here are a few more links about Ada Lovelace:

Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science – eBook by Betty Alexandra Toole, Ed.D.

Ada Lovelace – The Babbage Engine – Key People – Computer History Museum

Secret Ada by Panopy for iPhone / iPod Touch

Secret Ada is on sale today for $2.99 (40% off for a limited time) in the iTunes Store.

On the Panopy Blog:

I have a meta-entry for Ada Lovelace Day. Instead of writing about a particular women (I’ve already written about 45 of them so far in my iPhone app, Secret Ada), the topic is “Women in Technology: Why Care About Gender?”

I snagged Secret Ada today and have been having a blast with it. Deciphering text to read about the 45 women!

I hope Panopy makes Secret Ada for the Android soon too!

What do Microsoft and Apple have in common?

They apparently both have sold out to the entertainment cartels (movies, games, music, etc.) to prevent you from even making legitimate use of what you buy….meaning on the very computers and display hardware that you pay your hard earned money for!

The funny thing is, MacWorld is playing this up like it’s a good thing:

Apple didn’t just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks, the refreshed Macbook Air and 15-inch MacBook Pros replaces the DVI and mini-DVI interfaces found on older models. But is this another proprietary debacle like Apple’s failed Apple Display Connector (ADC) interface? No.

DisplayPort is, in fact, an open industry standard promoted by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the same group that determines standard sizes for flat panel display mounts, for example. And Apple isn’t the only company supporting DisplayPort. HP, Philips, Samsung, Lenovo, AMD, Nvidia, Intel and many other companies have thrown their weight behind the standard, so we’ll be seeing a lot more DisplayPort-compatible devices in the coming years.

But at least MacWorld does at least try to list some of the downsides:

Unless you’re content with the infinitesimal selection of displays that work with DisplayPort right now, you’ll have to buy more gadgets to get your new Mac to work with a DVI or VGA display. You’re going to pay $29 for the privilege of getting such an adapter through the Apple Store. Unless you need a Dual-Link DVI adapter to hook up a Cinema HD Display or another 30-inch LCD panel, that is—that’ll set you back a full c-note, and you’ll be waiting four to five weeks for it, according to the online Apple Store.

What’s more, regardless of whether you buy Apple’s DisplayPort adapter or a third party’s (if you’re lucky enough to find one, that is), you’re going to mess up your desk with more boxes and wires getting that DVI or VGA display to work.

First Microsoft caved under the entertainment cartel’s unreasonable demands and turned Vista OS/hardware into Vista The Enabler. Now Apple’s newest hardware and OS on the new Aluminum laptop computers has turned into Leopard the Enabler … NOT enabling you as the owner of the harware, but enabling the entertainment cartels to say what you can and can’t do on your hardware with movies, music that you buy. And so many hardware companies have also caved!

All so Apple can make a few bucks in the iTunes Store??

Read it and weep:

Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you

High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

So what you say? AppleTV already had this, did you know that? Maybe you want to educate yourself a bit, eh? HDCP, DPCP, DisplayPort Content Protection.

Arstechnica continues a little later in the article AFTER explaining one way in which a teacher has already been frustrated by unreasonable unintended consequences of not being able to play a movie on a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room’s Promethean system:

The technology in Apple’s MacBooks that prevents a seemingly arbitrary collection of iTunes Store files from being played on HDCP non-compliant devices is perhaps more accurately called DPCP, or DisplayPort Content Protection. As we’ve covered in the past, DisplayPort was designed as an open, extensible standard for computers that offers lower power consumption over DVI (especially in the Mini DisplayPort format that Apple uses on the new MacBooks). But more importantly, DisplayPort also beats DVI in the studios’ books by offering the option of 128-bit AES encrypted copy protection.

And folks at the Apple Support Forums are also complaining about this iTunes movie purchases will not play on external display – HDCP auth error:

Well, I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a storm over this one already but I expect there will be.

Just got a new MacBook last week and finally found a mini Display Port -> VGA adapter so i could use my 19″ external display. I rented a movie from the iTunes store yesterday and when I tried to play it on my external display, it gave me a warning/error that the display was ‘not an authorized HDCP display’ and it would not play. Plays fine on the small MacBook screen, just nothing external. To make it even worse, i tried all the movies that I have purchased from the iTunes store with the same result… NONE of them will play on anything but the MacBook’s small 13″ screen. This is crazy unacceptable.

Has anyone else run into this yet or have any ideas of something I may be overlooking in order to get purchased movies to play on an external display?

Yep…and I am sure there are many more that will find things they can’t do with what they bought.

Gawd, I hate it when I am right. I knew Apple would sell out to the entertainment cartels like Microsoft did.

Companies that are adopting or plan to adopt DisplayPort Content Protection in their hardware.

And as Wikipedia notes DisplayPort is basically just another standard — more of the same but different — like HDMI, it’s direct competitor:

DisplayPort is a competitor to the HDMI connector (with HDCP copy-protection), the de facto digital connection for high-definition consumer electronics devices. Another competitor is Unified Display Interface,[2] a low cost compatible alternative to HDMI and DVI. However, the main supporter of UDI, Intel Corporation, has stopped the development of the technology and now supports DisplayPort.

Yeah, that should help the new TVs, electronics devices and computers work together, eh?

Well, it looks like we add another set hardware that are never gonna be part of this ladies’ electronics gizmos … unfortunately.

Thanks for nothing Apple.

Sad.

Flash Away! Youtube, et al, Time to move to Ogg video!

Adobe was bad enough before, now that they own Macromedia (Flash and Dreamweaver, etc.), they aren’t satisfied with owning the most expensive ‘must have’ unfortunately web software — they want more! They want a piece of you and me, and everyone!

Adobe Push DRM for Flash

The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video (FLV) into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement — any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so — but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Much more in the article!

I say that it’s time for the likes of Youtube.com et al to move to open source Ogg Video!

It’s so sad that when a previously free and open ‘proprietary’ standard gets ‘full of themselves’ that all of a sudden, it’s smash the users and providers till it breaks their backs!

Unfortunately, “Adobe now has an incentive to push the use of DRM: it’s only available to sites that use Flash Media Server 3 software, which starts at over $4,000 (with extra fees depending on the number of simultaneous streams).“

As if that isn’t bad enough, “Users may also have to upgrade their Flash Player software (and open source alternatives like Gnash, which has been making rapid progress, may be unable to play the encrypted streams at all). Third-party software that can download Flash Video, like the most recent RealPlayer, will also break.”

There are lots of good reasons why DRM is not viable. And here are just a few of them from the article:

Finally, there’s a classic suite of arguments against DRM that will be as true for online video as they were for music. DRM doesn’t move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users. And there’s no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.

More in the article.

Also, I think it is very deceptive. Allow folks to make use of a format till it’s ubiquitous! THEN!!! Encrypt it and lock it up! People will ‘THINK’ it’s all the same old Flash as always — very friendly as always. They will have no idea what hit them or their computers.

Totally disgusted about this. IF THEY WERE GOING TO START DOING THIS. They should have created a totally NEW DRM’d video delivery product with a new name so we users could avoid it like the plague, and kept Flash as it was. That would have prevented confusion about what this ‘new’ format was all about, as compared to the well-known Flash format, and just kept Flash as it was.

They quietly started this crap with Flash 9.x. But it’s not till some companies start making use of this new $4,000 DRM nightmare that folks will begin to really see the head of this monster.

I think Google‘s Youtube, et al should stop using Flash and go with an open source type of video delivery system. Maybe help the open source Ogg/Theora Video Projects or some of the others that EFF mentioned in their article.