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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.
Sounds scarily like some of the browsers you get on PSC which are just the IE control bundled in with the QuickTime control, etc etc. If he has actually made this, it'll probably be for Windows anyway...
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They've claimed that a 16 year old student has written 780,000 lines of code. That it combines a browser accelerated way beyond what anyone else has ever claimed (and that could potentially run faster, just doesn't yet), multi-format media player (actually, I don't want to watch DVDs in a little side window while browsing the web, thanks...) a meta search engine and an avatar-based help system?
That's massive work _and_ a revolutionary breakthrough. If he's that good - and in a way that others hadn't thought of despite the efforts of several of the world's largest companies going into browser and network research - then this is remarkable. But without hard evidence (or even a mention on the competition's admittedly poor website) this just sounds way too much like a scam.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Onw would think that even someone not from the US would have hear of Caltech and MIT if they were in the computer field. They are, quite literally, world famous.
No this is either total bullshit, or a huge exearation. Remember, with real science, computer or otherwise, the MOST important part is subjecting work to peer review. Anyhting which can only be demonstrated in one lab in a hands-off, no-details demonstration isn't science and the person is hiding something.
I'm surprised that the majority of posters are resorting to unimaginative "what BS" posts instead of thinking up innovative ideas. Ok, here is my idea:
/table.
Most web pages have a lot of static content in, especially menus etc. You could start rendering the page immediately from the cache from the last page and rerender afterwards as the new page starts to differ from the cached version.
As the page comes in, keep switching to the page that is closest to same structure in cache (ie predominantly on the HTML tags). Don't render the text until the initial few chars are confirmed by the version downloading, then progressively render that (ie show old version then modify words where they differ).
This would have the effect of progressively rendering the page as a whole much like those progressive GIFs. It would show a large speedup on pages that contain tables, as most browsers these days won't render a table until it has recieved the
This would be a 'faster' browser with no compression or pre-caching.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Yes, but for a year-and-a-half? EVERY day? AND while, presumably, taking other classes and studying for tests in other courses, having friends, etc?
Think not.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Yes. For a year during my mid-teens.
I don't deny that it's possible to write 10,000+ lines of code in 5 days but, unless you're some sort of prodigy, I would have serious reservations about the quality of that code.
All of us who chose development as a career because we love to write code, rather than just because it's a well-paid and relatively easy-going job, have at some time cranked out amazing amounts of code in a short time. My doubts are caused by the duration. I don't believe that it's possible to sustain that sort of output for that period of time.
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.
Twits who make up bullshit stories like this thrive on attention. By posting it on a major site like slashdot, you give him exactly what he wants. Just use a little restraint, and try not to post the stories that are obvioulsy fake -- like this one, and the one about Masters of Orion 3 beign out soon (grin).
Prediciton: It turns out to be some Visual Basic application which uses built-in windows components such as media player... thus allowing "All media formats, and DVD playing capabilities"
Quadrupling "Surfing Speed" is so bizzare a claim that I have no idea what it could mean. Maybe he's blocking banner ads... at 56k it could make a difference.
As for the "lines of code" I strongly doubt that a kid is using the same criteria for lines of code that everyone else is using... it probably includes his html test suite, and all his test code, abandoned code and documentation added together. Or maybe he didn't know how to write a function, so it is a big cut-and-paste one-function VB program with Goto's.
It's not that I doubt that a kid can pull this sort of thing off, it is that I doubt the school teachers nor the media have enough knowledge to judge it or report it accurately.
You can't be serious, if the average software engineer could type out just 10-20 lines of code in a day, a program like Apache, or the Linux, kernal, or windows would have taken a team of 100 programmers decades to write.
A good software engineer should be able to write at least a few hundred lines of code in one full day
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I am not surprised you don't believe me. It's hard to believe it myself, and I'm the one that has done it. I do not suggest that that level of productivity is typical of either myself or others nor sustainable over a long period of time. My long-term average is less than a tenth that (and dropping as I get older).
The state I'm in when coding like that is best described as a fugue state. My mind is racing and everything else just gets ignored. Meals. Sleeping. I call it "going under" because that's what it feels like when I come out of it. The productivity that I see during such periods is prodigious to say the least.
But it's absolutely brutal on the body. You used a 16 hour day in your calculation, but that's understating it by nearly 50%. Because, in that state, I'm not sleeping at all. I'm incapable of sleep. Nor am I taking regular meal breaks. This allows coding for about 23 hours per day.
Typically when I get into that state it only lasts for about two days (40-50 hours), but there have been a handful of times when it has lasted longer ... as many as five days straight.
As for whether or not the code produced was trivial, the last such time I did this I wrote a Java debugger from scratch. Mostly that was UI code (Swing didn't exist at the time so I had to write a lot of rendering and layout components) but the class disassembly and debug engines were fairly complicated (but nowhere near the complexity of a JPEG or MPEG decoder!). It took 96 hours to write almost 14,000 LOC.
Now, there are two other interesting productivity data points. When coding in C or C++ (doesn't really matter which) my productivity maxes out at around 1,500 LOC in a day. Java triples it! And the bug rate falls by ~90% in Java. I love Java.
Anyway, that's my story, believe it or not. And, as such, it's not entirely unbelievable to me that someone could do 1,500 LOC/day for at least a few days at a shot. Doing it for 18 months straight though? Doesn't seem likely.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Still, sustaining 1,500 LOC per day for a year and a half ... that's beyond the productivity level of anyone I've ever seen. I personally have managed 4,500 per day for a period of about a week on occasion ... but I wasn't sleeping much during that period.
I broke 1,000 LOC per day for about a week while working for an unnamed gigantic CPU monopolist. I was behind schedule, over budget, and had a hard deadline, and the code itself was fairly repetitive and not terribly efficient. Ordinarily, I'd figure I produce closer to 250 LOC per day during a normal coding period.
Provided this story isn't complete hogwash, my guess is that the reporter asked the boy about the writing the program and he answered that it consisted of 780,000 LOC and took him a year and a half to build. He probably neglected to mention that 90% of those lines were in libraries written by other people. He may not have even intended to be deceptive in any way, figuring that any fool would know that was the case, but not realizing that the reporter was a fool.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Karlin Lillington has more on the browser today and this seems informed!!
The Irish browser story: Ok folks, here's the scoop. I am just back from talking to one of MIT Media Lab Europe's researchers, who both checked out the browser and talked to Adnan. He says the browser is 'absolutely extraordinary'. He says that what Adnan has done is re-engineer the efficiency of how a browser operates, which allows it to run up to six times faster (but usually not that much faster -- two to four times faster is more common). So it's not managing bandwidth but managing the way the browser itself handles and presents information. The researcher (whom I know and will vouch for) says that instead of simply tinkering with existing code he went down to the socket layer and reworked it at the protocol level (now, many of you guys will know the significance of this better than me, I'm just reporting the conversation). He added that it is incredibly clever work and stunning that a 16 year old has done this (I am not scrimping on the superlatives because that is what was said). (NB: A conversation in a group ensued that this work perhaps suggests that because the browser market is a virtual monopoly, there's been little incentive to improve efficiency in this way -- indeed, it might be beneficial to product development to just eke out a leeeetle more efficiency now and then and advertise it as continuing innovation... but I leave that to further discussion among the well-informed).
And Adnan has indeed worked in all the existing media players AND a DVD player so you can watch a DVD while surfing. And incorporated in a voice agent that will speak web pages, for young children or for the sight-impaired. The improved efficiency angle got the notice of the few media reports done on this so far, but it's really not what Adnan himself was emphasising -- it's the whole package, said the MIT guy.
Not surprisingly Adnan now has more than one university interested in him. And he has apparently told the numerous companies who saw the browser in action and who wanted to commercialise it that, at least for now, he has no interest in commercialising it.
I will note that the MIT researcher had a big grin on his face and it was clear he found the whole project a pleasure to talk about. He also said he'd heard about the browser before he arrived at the Young Scientist exhibition and made a beeline to see it. Adnan apparently didn't really think it would necessarily win an award --the researcher told me it was clear that it HAD to win. So there you go. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about all this soon.
And yes, he has copyrighted it.
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