Science Project Quadruples Surfing Speed - Reportedly

johnp. writes "A computer browser that is said to least quadruple surfing speeds on the Internet has won the top prize at an Irish exhibition for young scientists, it was announced on Saturday. Adnan Osmani, 16, a student at Saint Finian's College in Mullingar, central Ireland spent 18 months writing 780,000 lines of computer code to develop the browser. Known as "XWEBS", the system works with an ordinary Internet connection using a 56K modem on a normal telephone line. " A number of people had submitted this over the weekend - there's absolutely no hard data that I can find to go along with this, so if you find anything more on it, plz. post below - somehow 1500 lines of code per day, "every media player" built in doesn't ring true for me.

Comments

Re:Basic maths.

[mkettler]

Sustaining 16hours a day, with 6 hours of sleep a day is what you consider hardcore coding? Wow, I didn't realize I was in the uber-endurance category of coders. I know the average coder is a fat, lazy, idiot, but 16 hour days? Man, you're weak... And I'm not just talking about insane college students. I know people >40 years old that can push harder than 16 hours a day for a week when needed.

Now let's realize this is a "put 100% into it" for a short period of time scenario. One week. I'm not talking crunch time at some large lazy company. I'm talking sleep on the floor of your office, have people bringing food to your desk and collapse at the end of the week type coding. You know, insane dotcom startup type stuff.

Based on that, I'm assuming a more reasonable level of 20 hours of hacking a day (I *have* done this) that's 3.75 lines of code per hour or one per 16 seconds. Now, I don't consider that a particularly insane level of coding for a single-week burst of hard-core coding following a week of hard-core thinking.

I do agree that I don't see how anyone could maintain that kind of speed for months. It's more what happens when you've been thinking over some really monstrous code for a while, finally get how it is going to go together down in your head, and sit down to implement it and have zero time to write it in.

I dono, maybe me and my co-workers are some kind of gods, but I don't see these "one week" numbers as outrageous.