Virtuosity

In a significant departure from tradition, Microsoft today announced they were releasing 20,000 lines of device driver source code under GPLv2 licensing to the Linux community. These device drivers are expected to significantly enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The previous release was supported only under SLES and as closed source, leading users to ponder why these drivers weren't made available on other Linux distributions and open sourced.

Kudos to Microsoft for listening to users and allowing the rest of the Linux distros to run optimized on Hyper-V. Note however that although Microsoft has open sourced and submitted the driver code to the Linux Driver Project, it is not yet part of the main Linux kernel. The code still needs to be reviewed and tested and submitted for official inclusion into the Linux kernel tree. Once through this process, these integration components should eventually gain acceptance and make their way into most Linux distributions.

As reported last Sunday in the Guardian, Alan Turing's famous question, first posed in 1950, will once again be testing at 9am (GMT) this Sunday, October 12th at the University of Reading in the UK. Can machines think? If one of theses six ambitious AI challengers are able, and I highly doubt it, to fool a panel of human judges during 5 minutes of conversation it will certainly mark the dawn of a brave new world and the realization of Vernor Vinge's Singularity.

If however the challengers fail as expected this time around I wouldn't get too comfortable. Ray Kurzweil postulates in his 1999 book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" that we have until 2019 before "a $1000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain." Once that becomes reality, can true machine intelligence be that far off?

In any case, let's hope John Connor and friends are keeping a close eye on this Sunday's outcome.