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

Hmm.

[boris_the_hacker]

Well I have to confess to being mildly curious. I mean, a 16 year old school boy writing 780,000 lines of code in 18 months ? Well I am impressed, by my meagre calculations that equates to _roughly_ 1,400 lines of code a _day_ every day for 18 months. And this application makes the internet go upto 6 times faster [apparently 7 times make it crash]. Not only that, it has been a secret project for the entire time. I smell a rat, either that or a complete genius code writer.

But what really got me where the two most important features someone could ever want in a Web Browser - it can play dvd's [it incorporates ever media player!], and also has a handy animated assisant called Pheobe.

Now, I am most probably wrong, and will happily eat my hat, but I cant help but feel that this isn't an entirely accurate article.

ps. Does anyone know if it is standard compliant ?

Re:Hmm.

[Sycraft-fu]

There is simply no way a browser can incorperate "every media player" because they operte on different standards. Windows Media Player operates using DirectShow to play it's files. It's nothing more than a control program for DirectShow. Any DirectShow filter loaded onto the system with decode capabilities can be decoded. Any other program can use the same interface, and play all those file types. Fine, however this is Window ONLY, the code is proprietary to MS and not for otehr platforms. And then on Windows you have other things like QuickTime. QT does NOT function as a DS filter, it's a whole seperate way of doing things and again we have proprietary code. This continues for any other mdiea standard (Real for exmaple) that has it's own system.

I have a feeling this project is nothing but hot air.

What a load of crap

[Masa]

This has to be a hoax. And not even a good one.

A kid coding 780'000 lines of code in 18 months. All alone. In that time he have had to design and implement the whole shit including "every single media player built in".

It would require some sort of dial-up-server side module to compress and modify the contents of the data and this kind of system would most certainly be a lossy method for transferring data. It won't be possible to transfer binary data with this thing without corrupting the result completely.

And what kind of a piece of software would choke under the load of 7x56k modem ("At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six.")?

This is just a cheap attempt to gather some attention.

Ok, let's think this through....

[orthogonal]

If this thing's really a web browser, and it runs completely on the client computer, any web pages it's requesting are coming down the line as HTML, uncompressed (except insofar as the modem's protocol might compress). Without a compresser on the other end, the speed's not coming from compression.

If it does require a server side piece, it's not a web browser, per se; but as a general question, is it worthwhile to look into "compressed" web pages, e.g., foo.html.zlib? (I tend to doubt the savings are that much for the "average" page, but shoving graphics into an archive might keep down the number of requests needed to fetch a whole page and its graphics.)

If it's not server side compression, the only thing I can think of (and fortunately smarter people than me will think of other things I'm sure) is that he's pre-fetching and caching pages to make the apparent speed faster.

So is the "secret" that he has some hueristic that sensibly guesses what links you'll click next, combined with regularly fetching, oh say, your most requested bookmarks? (In my case it might look like: slashdot -- New York Times -- slashdot -- sourceforge -- slashdot -- freshmeat -- eurekareport -- slashdot.)

In other words, is he mirroring sites locally in the background? And if so, how must bandwidth is wasted just sitting in the cache until it's stale?

(On the other hand, could I point his browser at /., refreshing every five seconds to make sure I got a local copy of pages about to be slashdotted?)

Irish Patent Office does not know about this

[klaasvakie]

Searching Irish Patent Office:

Query :
Application Date: 08/01/2003 -> 10/01/2003
Abstract: *internet*
Results: 0

Query :
Date Of Grant: 08/01/2003 -> 10/01/2003
Abstract: *internet*
Results: One Result: 2000/0717 82661 Server-based electronic wallet system

Thats it, so it doesn't seem he applied for the patent in Ireland then...

P.S. The stars around "internet" are mine, I used them to indicate that I searched all abstracts that contained the word "internet"

Re:Basic maths.

[sql*kitten]

780,000 lines of code in 18 months is approximately 1500 lines per day every single day. I'm skeptical.

Indeed. I remember reading that IBM reckon that, including design, coding, testing, debugging and documentation, a programmer's doing well to get 10 lines of code per day, averaged over the life of the project.

Also depends how he's counting lines. In C, because that can vary so much depending on individual formatting style, a good rule of thumb is to count semicolons. And even then it won't tell you if programmer A is writing fast but hard to read code and programmer B is checking the return value of every system call (as you're supposed to but few ever do), adding lines and robustness with no extra actual functionality.

Re:Basic maths.

[ergo98]

I dono, maybe me and my co-workers are some kind of gods, but I don't see these "one week" numbers as outrageous. We're all gods when we don't need proof though, right? I code 100,000 lines per day and sleep 15 minutes on my commute to work (it's a straight section of the highway). I am a GOD! Of course then there's that silly old thing called reality. Here are some simple facts. Feel free to disagree.

• Heroic coding is almost always destructive. Read The Mythical Man Month for a little background on this: Basically when people start putting in those 20 hour days then it's either the beginning of the end (which in some cases as the beginning of the beginning as well. See many well know .com cases). People, even gods like yourself, have a finite amount of problem solving cerebral ability per day, and extending that is generally counter productive.
• The human body can go a couple of days with minimal sleep, but it is absolute folly to extrapolate that and presume that it'll keep going for even a week: Instead you'll either require a massive sleep "make-up", or you'll become mentally dull while your immune system collapses (this is presuming you don't have a medical condition).
• A line of code per 16 seconds again sounds good and we can all easily do it by reimplementing something that we've already done (ooh look at my reversing a string function!), but it is astoundingly unlikely that someone could continue such a rate beyond even an hour. If coding were so trivial we would have tools to generate the code.
• Ah the number of projects I've worked on where someone has given optimistic numbers, presuming that they'll magically create line after line after line...and then a subtle bug hits. Days later their half a day of coding is eclipsed by days of problem solving. I'm sure this doesn't affect Gods, though.