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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.
... I wonder if he will open-source the code? Could make Safari even faster!
Join the Free Software Foundation
10megabits (OOL) is just too slow, i need that 4x increase. Now, a 4x increase in uploads, across a cable modem, would be a different story. though i don't really need more than a megabit, sometimes an increase there would be nice.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
780,000 lines of code in 18 months is approximately 1500 lines per day every single day. I'm skeptical.
He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University and eventually set up his own Internet or computer company.
(For people who don't get it, Harvard's CS department, while reasonably good, is not exactly the obvious top pick among CS hotshots.)
The only way that I can see to improve the speed of browsing on the client side is to improve how fast the browser renders the page. The only other way to speed it up that I'm aware of is to change to server to also listen on UDP and have a client use UDP.
I've heard of tools in the past that claim to speed up browsing by cacheing ahead. These tools follow links on a page before you request them so that they are already in the browser's cache when you come to click on a link.
The other possibility is some heavy compression server side, but this would require a server module (e.g. mod_gzip) and this rules out any kind of built in compression in ppp, so the sppeedup would, I guess, not be as noticable as 5x.
Needless to say, I'm fairly sceptical that this is an actual speedup of browsing. If you can only fit 56Kbps down a line then you can only fit 56Kbps down a line...
It then makes use of network magic. You mean no-one ever told you about the magic ?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
The only way to achieve this kind of speed gain would be a new and radical form of compression.
Of course they spring up on a regular basis...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"To make the software more user friendly, it features a talking animated figure called Phoebe."
:) /. a site...
:)
Oh goody! Someone to take microsoft's place!
can't wait to see that little tingy pop on me when we
Maybe the Irish have a 1. april equivalent today?
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 ?
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
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!
Other special aspects of his browser are the fact that access to 120 Internet search engines and other features such as music and video players are built in.
Oh access to 120 search engines!!, in opposition to the rest of browsers where you can only acces to 3 or 4 search engines?
I bet he just cached the first page of 120 search engines to make the browser look faster... and that caching is included in the 780000 lines of code.
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Why am I thinking this is just another one of those snake-oil web speedups that does lots of caching and pre-emptive downloading of pages on the off chance you are going to view it? I'll be taking this story with a large pinch of salt for now I think.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
This can't be true. I mean, yeah, it's possible to write 1500 lines of well polished code a day, but every day for 18 months, and on a project of this magnitude, by himself? I doubt it. I'll believe it when I see it.
Do we have any reason to believe that this has a lower bullshit quotient than that daft '100x compression of random data' story doing the rounds last year (can't find the /. link, here The Register's one)?
.
Sure, you can leave stuff out (images, JavaScript, Flash), but "at least quadruple"? If the page is simple enough then you can't just ditch a chunk of it.
Ooh, AND "[at] least quadruple surfing speeds" and "they found it boosted surfing speeds by between 100 and 500". Even the article isn't making any sense . .
Of course, if this turns out to be true than I will be the first to eat my cat (and the first to download it), but I'm sure this isn't even possible, right?
Just my 2 cents (actually, that was more like 5) . . .
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
We all remember the Flannery episiode, right. She was awarded the first prize at the Irish Young Scientist compition in 2000 for work on speeding up the processing time of the RSA algorithm. I remember slashdot covering this (although I can't find the story) but I also remember reading that it made breaking the encryption almost trival. Still the IYS award is a compition thats been running for 30-40 years now and is a credit to our small corner of the world.
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.
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.
/., refreshing every five seconds to make sure I got a local copy of pages about to be slashdotted?)
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
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Even if that was the case, there are lot of people that arent really citizens who think they are.
I for one, am a national, i was born in one of the states, and not in a federal territory, alot of the
laws out there dont apply to many of us.
http://taxliberator.net to ask questions about laws, who they pertain to and such. Its main drive is about taxes, but the guy that runs the site deals in alot more.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
It's curious that there is so few info about Adnan Osmani.
I however found out this thread in the news but, mind you, it's based on the same story...
They bet that if it's possible, he may have either implemented some quick prefetch and/or pre-formatting subroutine...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I propose increasing browsing speed by severely limiting the use of search engine crawlers. Perhaps only between 2:00am-5:00am every morning (EST) would we allow them.
2:00 am to 5:00 am?? That's when I do most of my browsing!!!!
Of course, not at Kuro5hin.org...
I uh, do, uh, anatomy research... and uh, changes in primate mating habits caused by the ubiquity of digital cameras.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
You can find it here.
It says it took him 2 years and 1.5m lines...
Pity this guy never heard of open source. He could have taken and plugged in his mysterious bright idea.
Maybe he found some compiler options that quadrupled the rendering speed of <somebrowser/>.
Maybe he is just a fraud, and could sneak into the competition after creating a nice looking theme for <somebrowser/>.
Maybe I'm just guessing and typing whatever comes to mind in <somebrowser/>.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
A fixed time for this would be dumb.
If this sort of scheme were to be implemented it owuyld make more sense to do it whenever 2am to 4am is local to the site's country code. (I know that that is not necessarily its location or area served.)
This would also allow the spiders to work 24/7 as opposed to a few hours a day as you suggest.
...6 56K modems, with 6 active phone lines required. Your ISP must also support multilink PPP.
I'm sure that that's in there somewhere, oh, yeah, look...there it is commented out above line 53,425 in the code. Yep.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
Ummm..interesting theory about ADs expanding to fill the bandwidth but not sure about whether people on 1MBit+ connections would agree..
I bet he's a Raelian.
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
Take a look here http://www.esatys.com/gen_info_awards.htm have they announced the winners yet?? At the time of posting this I couldn't find the winner for the 2003 award!!!
Jim: Yes, I --
PHB: Jim...I'm concerned about your performance.
Jim: Er, wha--
PHB: You write, what, 30 maybe 80 "eL Oh Cee" a day? Right?
Jim: Well, the TPS and project plans take --
PHB: Says here, that this 16 year old kid can write 1500 "eL Oh Cee" a day. What do you think about that?
PHB: Don't laugh...this is serious.
Jim: Sorry. I ment --
PHB: Jim, maybe you need to put in more hours. Reconsider your work habbits.
Jim: I work till 10 most nights...
PHB: Jim, it's not the hours it's how efficiently you handle them. I expect todays TPS on my desk by noon, along with a status report on each programming task you've done today.
Jim: It's 11 --
PHB: That's it Jim! Keep up the good work. In the meantime, see if you can increase that "eL Oh Cee" to, say, about a hundread. It's good to make a good impression. Fine. Excellent. I knew I could count on you. I'll see you then! ... Brian...did you fill out that TPS report...
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I don't know about Ireland, but whenever I needed to do a science project, I had to supply shitloads of information, especially when making bold claims. Isn't that how science works?
Hell, even reading the hypothesis of his project would be an improvement over what we have -- nothing.
What shitty news coverage. The media isn't skeptical enough when it comes to science. If this was some miracle dreamed up by a politician, the media would have torn him to shreds by now, digging up dirt on him, his family, his marital history... everything.
But when a miracle science story comes around, the media swallows it hook, line, and sinker. Unacceptable for this day and age.
of
line
breaks
within
functions
I hate that shit.
2003's Vaporware of the year!
It's eaasy to curn out that amount of code when you 'that age', and have project that inspires you.
I've written a C++ windowing wrapper for windows, inluding string and varient datatypes (which are quite big in thenselfs) in less than a 5 day week, it contained few bugs and had 10000+ lines of code.
Working against RFC's and using other peoples designs makes coding easy, there's not much to think about and you can just sit there are curn away line after line, about as quickly as you can cut and paste.
I don't believe the speed imporvement though, TCP/IP over a 56k modem is TCP/IP over a 56K modem.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It's obvious, I could consume that many lines of code too writing a browser:
If Instr(html, "<B>", i) -1 Then ...
bold = True
i = i + 3
Else If Instr(html, "<I>", i) -1 Then
italic = True
i = i + 3
Else If
If anyone tries to optimize/correct the above, they're missing the point.
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
A google search on his name, Adnan Osmani, returns only pages in Serbian? And only 5 of them at that.
Adnan says a six-fold increase is about the maximum practical boost.
"At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six."
Now that's a good debugging technique, no wonder the code has 780,000 lines!
To make the software more user friendly, it features a talking animated figure called Phoebe.
With these skills, I guess he'll be working in Redmond soon...
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
But I've seen the advertisements that gives me ten times faster connection, really!
I think what he did was as follows:
1) Use COM to incorporate every Active Document Web Browser there is
2) Use IE as a basis for the rendering
3) Use those annoying little characters that MS calls agents
4) Develop a compression utility that works on the server as a proxy.
My guess is that his compression is partially lossless, meaning some data gets lost. I am guessing that is why when he has 7x compression the system crashes. Below that the system "ignores" the lost data.
So what I think is unique with this browser is that it is an all in one solution that probably is pretty user friendly. And remember what amazes people is not the tech, but the presentation of the tech....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Surely a national science compo would be well publicised on the Internet. I can't find anything about it. Also, the fact that the guy's footprint on the Internet is, ummmm, zero, makes me suspicious.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Yes, you're incredulous. Yes, it's impossible. Yes it is 1500 lines a day. Yes, the article's poorly written. Yes, you will eat something highly unlikely. I get it. Now watch me dance.
~
If you need me, I'll be hanging my computer from the
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.
Is most likely Microsoft Agent technology. It's built into to Win2k (it's used by office2k+) and it's trivial, if not time-consuming, to create new characters for it.
see: http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
The "too good to be true" icon must be Rachel Stevens' fine ass.
Haven't the guys with the bar jokes been warning us for years? Now it's finally starting to happen. Tee-totalling Irish programmers doing 780,000 lines of code in 18 months? Horrors!!!
It says "surf speed." That could mean anything. In particular, for the perceived speed, rendering and latency are probably more important than bandwidth.
If you compare IE 5.5 using HTTP/1.0 with Opera using HTTP/1.1 you're probably most of the way to a six-fold increase on a page containing tables anyway, for instance.
I think you people are forgetting what using dial-up is like...
OTOH, I think the article is probably complete tosh. :-)
Unix does not prevent you from doing stupid things; that would also prevent you from doing clever things.
I don't think its possible that he is rendering HTML 4 times faster and if he's using standard protocols (TCP), then he can't be getting the data any faster. If this story has any truth to it at all, I'd imagine this kid wrote a very memory intensive browser that kept open most media players. If you are browsing various media types (PDF, MP3, DOC, AVI, etc.) then keeping viewers/players for each of these types in memory would make browsing faster. Most people don't leave this stuff open, because it degrades overall performance when you aren't perusing multimedia.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I hear Clonaid helped him write it.
2:00am - 5:00am GMT would seem much more reasonable.
What's that you say? that's 6pm - 9pm EST? Shame.
Stop playing with time-shifting, and go out and play with the kids...
It doesn't say that it increases bandwidth, it says that it increases surfing speeds. It smells like precaching/'intelligent browsing' to me.
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"
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The encryption story wasn't snake oil, and had very solid documentation. Sarah Flannery won Irish young scientist of the year, and subsequently the EU-wide prize, for her work. Her paper is here.
The Cayley-Purser algorithm she developed was subsequently shown to have security flaws; I don't recall if this was before or after the EU prize, but thats immaterial, the work was original and interesting, and worth a prize for a 16 year old!
She has subsequently written a book , which is a pop science introduction to crypto, and I understand from the blurb she's now studying maths at Cambridge.
-Baz
This is really simple how it works. He simply increases the local gravational field while approaching the natural log raised to the 27 power of the speed of light. This causes the future to get entangled with the present and Osama takes advantage of this.
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).
Clientside caching surely is most of the speed.
Serverside caching could be used.
TCP/IP non-comformaty is the third option.
Assuming this is true, (ignoring the 1500 lines a day), what else could he be doing?
Judging by harddisk prices, client side cacheing algorythms would make sense. Cacheing many portal and search engine homepages is a powerful start. Combined with a central server that then reviews these popular pages for changes, and publishes a simple summary for the browser client to collect and compare with older summaries, then a browser can collect only updated portal pages for the cache, all optimizes portal renders.
Then less common homepages, such as the high school I attended, can be gleened from users typed-in webaddress history, and automatically cached as chron-job.
Creating cached copies of commonly used graphics on portal website can save a ton of bandwidth. Again a server based bot could rate the linkcount of graphics on portal sites, and if the graphic has changed, and then post this list for browsers to collect for caching. Searching HTML for imagefiles, that are already stored in the cache, and modify the page on the fly to call only the cached image would save bandwidth. e.g. caching all of slashdot's article catagory icons.
Then the tricky part, "which linked pages to cache while the user reads a page?", so that when a link is clicked, the pages renders fast. I would download the html from all of them, and while the reader reads, check for already cached images, and then start downloading image files.
-Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wanna be!
and first poster of the word "knoppix"
Anyone that wrote that much code in that little of time (1500 lines per day!) MUST not know what a function is
If he doesn't open the source code, the person that patened "cut and paste" should sue him for blatent abuse of his patent!! Anyone that codes that much in that small period of time scares me!!! Come up for air once in a while!!
Remember to breathe
-- Mr. Miagyi, The Karate Kid
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
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
Ahh! The theory of "proof by the masses".
"If everyone else belives it, it must be true"
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Could George have perpetrated this fraud? Or, is he just a patsy? This is almost as big a mystery as the Kennedy assasination... :)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I really don't see how this could really speed up browsing that much. And I am VERY sceptical that it's anywhere near as fast as Opera 7. Seems to me that if it's that fast, it's because it doesn't show anything on the screen. And as for the 1000+ lines of code a day, I mean no one could do that even if the lines where just comments containing a blog. Well maybe my ex-girlfrend could, I mean she can carry on endlessly...
Youth+Enthusiasm+Amphetamines=Achieve the impossible.
Then he discovered loops.
Why, those Irish are good for nuthin' other than drinkin', fightin' and scammin' technology pundits!
</grandpa simpson voice>
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Looking at St Finian Collage website there is nothing about this under there press relese section...
Did the
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
"He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University and eventually set up his own Internet or computer company."
If the content at Harvard's Computer Engineering program is anything like it is at my university, he's going into the wrong program. Unless he wants to build hardware, or program chips and other low level stuff he's going into the wrong program. He'd be much better off with a Software Engineering or Computer Science Degree. Especially since it seems that that's what he's really interested in. A Business degree might even be nice, since if he really did program all this stuff, seems he's got the computer part pretty down, and should learn how to manage that business he wants to start.
It's happens so much today that people go into university courses and don't really know what they'll be doing once they get there, and then they drop out, or at least waste a year or two before realizing they should switch degrees.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The competition is real, the prize (3000) is real, the winner is real, but I have my doubts about the project. Well, to put it differently, I think it's bullshit. Anyway, here's the news article about this. RTE is the Irish state broadcaster, BTW: http://www.rte.ie/news/2003/0110/9news/9news11a.ra m
Is he part of the Raelians?
Perhaps he's cloned himself to be able to write so much groundbreaking code so quickly.
Google searched for it:
http://www.fhs.ie/newsroom_latest.asp?id=241
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
So, it he's such an ubercoder, doesn't he read Slashdot? If so, why isn't he replying? Oh, I forgot - no time. He's gotta write 1500 lines of code after school today. Give me a break. I know how easy it is to fool a panel of technoidiot science fair judges and teachers. This is a total hoax.
Best compression so far on html is 6:1 - and that's specific to html - and it's proprietary. Use of such a compression algorithm would require the server to use it too. Best compression on images so far is JPEG2000 - and that requires that the images be in that format, or for the server to re-compress them before transmission.
The media player thing is easy. To "incorporate" every media player, one only needs to use the plugins and standard APIs these media players provide and embed them into the app. Providing an animated assistant requires time to actually draw the assistant and animate it on the computer. Even if it's a stick-figure (which I'm guessing is not the case), it would take some time to animate and code so that it works right. Then to actually give it a voice and some text-to-speech, you could just use Microsoft's own text-to-speech libraries.
Writing 1500 lines of code a day is simple, provided that you a) don't have a life b) don't care about the quality of the code c) copy a portion of the code from other sources d) include blank lines or lines with just '{' or '}' e) include lines with comments and documentation (that's about half of 'em) and finally f) use an ide with auto-completion. Even with all this, it still takes a while - I mean, it's gotta compile, right?
After writing 1500 lines of code, you then have to see if it compiles, see that it doesn't crash or break other code you've written. You still have to unit-test it. Note that you also have to factor in at least 6 hours everyday for sleep and another 3 for meals, breaks, and bathroom. That leaves 15 hours for coding. Oh - and he has classes - take another 8 hours minimum. That's seven hours of coding, testing, debugging, compiling.
Hmmm. Something's still not quite right.
can i get the beta? i promise to respect all patent rights.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
He's nuts, he couldn't have written this, he's a clone, ::insert jokes:: mod +1 Funny
Well I dunno, this sounds *pretty* lame.
Speed: This claim sounds pretty preposterous. The only things I can think of are KeepAlive (only works sometimes) and caching pages ahead of time. Maybe it constantly keeps connecting to the server so when you click a link it doesn't have to connect. Maybe it uses some form of ranking to figure out what links to download first. I don't have a clue how it works, but it sounds pretty amazing and/or fake. I would like a copy if it works though ;D.
Media Players: Sure, I can include the installation files too. But built-in?!? Again, it sounds pretty nice, but I don't think that Real, Apple (QuickTime), or Microsoft (Windows Media) would be pretty open to a 16?-year-old hacking/borrowing their code to make a browser that can view their media format, without their choice of spyware installed.
I wonder if the writer surfs slashdot?
--Tom
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
He's not really an application script-kiddie.. He's really one of those new clones we've been hearing about, except, better!
;)
Now, not only can he code 1400+ lines of quality code per day, every day, but he can do it at age 17, BEFORE taking college level courses in computing science.
Must have been the tapes they played back for him in the womb.. Oh wait.. What am I thinking?
I know.. He saw Steve Ballmer in action and was inspired.
Four words for Adnan Osmani, "Show us the code."
user@host$ diff
The 30 hour days are, after all not attained through coffee alone!!
!
One possible explaination for the LoC count may be that he's using Borland and trusting it's "count". At my first real job, we used Borland and I made a realtively complex program over the course of 18 months (coincidentally enough). The line count was over 1.5 million, but the reality was that it wasn't that long, Borland was counting lines processed, which included the header files, and the OWL and windows headers could add a lot to each module (of which there were over 100, since I was big on modularization).
I never really knew the true line count. I just remember the Borland one because I used to often do a global compile any time I wanted a half hour break ("Oh, the systems acting funny. Better do a global compile to make sure it's not a dependancy problem." If my boss came by and I wasn't there, he'd see the compile running on the screen).
-no broken link
Actually, where I work, they've introduced (I can't say we've introduced, because I dont whole-heartedly agree with any of it) a system called the TRS, Time Reporting System. We have to fill out TRS reports about what percentage of our time we put in a certain projects... The system came with no documentation and no explanation of how it was to be used or what it is used for.
Think about it... each week we have to enter a percentage for a project code. There are a few unaswered questions, such as what happens for vacation time. What if you work 1 hour per week on a project, do you enter 2% for a project? and the percentages dont have to total 100%, they can total 500% if you choose. When they introduced this system, I started laughing hysterically because it reminded me so much of the TPS reports..
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
It works fine at 6x yet crashes at 7x? What the heck is he doing to speed up surfing? The major bottleneck at 56K is download times. So if he's caching data, why would it crash when you tell it to cache more?
Just cache the whole internet locally to your HD. Simple.
Geeks of the World, Unite!
Irish Patent Office only finds 4 patents for inventor "adnan", and none of them seem related.
to those of you who love to comment without really reading it here's a recap.
:))
... there is NO WAY IN HELL
:-P)
How blind surf... there's an animated character called phoebe that'll read out the text of the webpage (shudder to think about how it'll read the non properly encoded html pages... cuz I know We ALL adhere to proper html coding nowadays
The lil bugger will also read emails for you so yes it supposedly works for blind people.
He also believes he can get a patent on something called a Web Browser.
He believes Harvard will accept him because he wrote a "Web Browser".
As I'm sure most of you seen the 780000 lines of code. I'll tack it on with his quote.. "I didn't expect it to be that good". Which in my mind spells... "I took the mozilla open source and I actualy downloaded all the plugins before hand"
I'm sorry but being an Avid MS developer (yes I'm not hard core.. but I will use textpad for the dirty stuff) I love Visual Studio and I can tell you it doesn't get any lazier then that.. and
EVEN SO
I can spit out 780000 lines of workable code in 18 months
(Including all the shitty comments that MS puts in)
I mean 780000 lines of code is RIDICULOUS...
A game I wrote in Assembly was only 50000 lines of code and that took me 8 months! (I wrote the game SIMON for those of you that are curious... With CGA graphics and Sound!!!
Speaking of which.. anybody know how many lines Phoenix Browser is?
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.
Most likely, he did this very easily using ActiveX and _maybe_ some pre-caching. Which would explain why after "7 times it crashes"- your hard drive is full of cached sites. Using Visual[C++, VB, C#] he just dragged the ActiveX controls for a browser and "every media player" onto his app. Pheobe, his little assistant is just Msoft's Agent control (commonly seen as the annoying paperclip in Office). He may have even counted the ActiveX code as his, which would mean his 1400lines/day was really done in about 4 hours the night before.
Now, I'd expect Slashdot to have a little healthy journalistic skepticism when it comes to claims like this, especially if the post itself says "doesn't ring true".
If you're wondering why so many obvious hoaxes, like this one and the Raelian clone-baby, are making it into the news at all, I think I've found the secret: a couple of years ago, the Raelians had the foresight to lobby for removing the word "gullible" from most major dictionaries.
As for his speed claims, this too sounds like hype. I can think of several ways to 'speed up' surfing, (e.g. trickle precaching sites, tinkering with QoS settings etc.) but all of them are just making better use of existing bandwidth and browsing habits and certainly wouldn't increase speeds by the multiples he suggests.
I do not believe for a second he has done anything innovative at all.
It's not that hard to quadruple surfing speeds ...
Just compare it to Netscape 4.79 and load up your page with about 30 nested tables...
It wasn't done from scratch...
The competition he won is the same one Sarah Flannery won, the ESAT young scientist competition. See:
http://www.esatys.com/
Is it possible he counted 780,000 loc because he was including libraries and component code etc. etc. The article is badly written and doesn't give a true representation of his work. He claimed on Irish TV that he had written a client-server pair. I'm still fairly suspicious myself, but it *is* possible.
Anyone can write 1.5kloc/day. That's just about one line per minute.
Now, getting it all debugged is another issue...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think not. So it's just another boring accelerator that pre-fetches links, which never work for me because I appear to surf in an unpredictable manner.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
this is all i could find: google groups
He says he is keeping lid on it and yet patents it.. which means its fully disclosed in apatent applicaiotn..
Why does this story sound fishy?
Come on people think when you read the article..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
The article mentions that this fellow has applied for a patent last thursday. Guess what? There's no mention of the patent on the Irish Patent office website or the European patent office website or WIPO website.
"At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six."
I call bullshit. That claim dosn't make any sense whatsoever, especialy if it's just software.
It seems (to me) Like he just threw together a bunch of MS APIs (such as the microsoft speach API for 'Phoebe', the windows media API for the DVD player and video players, probably even used IE to display pages).
At most he threw in an intelegent caching routine, such as pre-downloading linked pages or something. I also don't think he wrote 780kloc
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Which is a huge help for me and my 200mb/day bandwidth cap...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
with that many lines of code, i feel sorry for the poor bastards that will buy the code to get the technology. could you imagine walking through that many lines of code to see what bits you can integrate/merge into your own project?
sounds a bit of a hoax personally - thats a lot of code to have written in such a small time. media players themselves to handle "everything" would take that long.. how much of the code is actually relevent to the 4x speed up tho?
AND while, presumably, taking other classes and studying for tests in other courses, having friends, etc?
Whoa...slow down on those assumptions there hoss...
--trb
He should go to MIT, Harvard for computers and science is a stupid idea.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
Dosn't PHP include all the text for the page, markup and server side scripting? If not, why the hell are you writing so much code in PHP!?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most of the time downloading stuff involves the modem. Unless he did something to that I don't see how he could get such speed increases. Also 1500 lines of code is about normal for someone who is comfortable/experienced in coding a particular kind of software and is not having to learn anything particularly new like a new API or methodology.
Eat at Joe's.
Unfortunately, we only have Brownies in the U.S., and i'm guessing that the editors ate a pan of these 'brownies' before they posted this.
well here's his school website http://www.stfinianscollege.ie/ wonder if it'll stand up to the /. effect. maybe we should drop him a line
What I'd like to see is a record kept of all these half-arsed claims reported on Slashdot. We could then go and check up on the claimants' final demise, making sure they got their just dose of ridicule rather than letting them sneak away forgotten.
Anyone remember the bloke with the inexhaustible energy supply a couple of years back? Or the Afghan Commodore-hacking prodigy <cough> Katz </cough>?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Like everyone needs "college level courses" to be able to program. I hate classes. Are books suddenly not an option for learning to program? Because they were working pretty good when I learned perl.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Clonaid is already talking about cloning him
He got rid of those Classmates.com and X10.com popups...
...for faking all this well enough to fool a bunch of idiots in the press / online / and judges.
I see a bright future for this Mr Osmani... in the internet fraud business. He's already shown his talent for overstatement and con artistry. This story would sound so believeable to someone who has no clue about how the 'net works. I doubt he has much in the way of programming skills, though.
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Note there are no claims that the browser speeds up page loading, rendering, or reading the web. Only 'Surfing' is sped up, which probably means the browser displays just the links and probably auto-clicks a link for you if you don't get around to it fast enough. Remember, surfing on the net is going from web page to web page.
Sounds like another example of trying to steal the blue ribbon, just like the recent clone claims. I mean honestly, claiming we grew a clone in the womb of a woman for the last 9 months which is exactly how regular babies are born but this one is a clone wink wink nudge nudge. Goobs.
Z. http://www.play.net Your games, my job. C'est la vie!
--are you saying it's like a predatory-gluttonous browser? The server gets a request that includes *some kinda code* that bumps your request to the head of the line and causes any other requests and transfers going on to become degraded or stop until your's is completed?
BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI.
even if this program was really there, it would be just BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI BONZI
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University [...]
Of COURSE he wants to go to Harvard. And he ought to fit in just fine.
He hasn't proved that he did a prdigious feat of programming. But he HAS proved that he can get the media to print a piece of preposterous hype as straight news.
Perfect for a CEO with a Harvard MBA.
[...] and eventually set up his own Internet or computer company.
See?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Until I see it available for download or reviews of it in my favorite mags I'll just remain neutral on the whole thing.
Maybe he is the first Raelean to achieve immortality through cloning and he is actually a 50 year old hacker in a brand new body!!!! Phreaky!!!
... dunno 'bout the science tho. Saw this lad on the telly last friday on the late late show with the horrible pat kenny. looked about 23, not 16.
l
Young scientist competition - no info on winner!
http://www.esatys.com/science_set.htm
Late late show - this site looks a bit dodgy
http://www.rte.ie/tv/latelate/latelate.htm
I will be the first to eat my cat
In some places, "cat" is slang for the female external genitalia, the same as the "pussy", and to "eat" such genitalia means to stimulate the clitoris orally. Thus, "eating" one's own "cat" refers to autocunnilingus. Are you really flexible enough to perform this act?
Will I retire or break 10K?
And in a separate exhibit, one of the young entrants has claimed to have cloned a human.
More information Here:
http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story
Here is the website for the Young Scientist competition but they have not bothered to put up this years results yet
http://www.esatys.com/gen_info_awards.htm
I visited his stand at the exhibition - unfortunately, he was not there at the time - there was a note on the stand saying that he was "busy giving press interviews"!
What was displayed on the stand was very low on details as well. There was no detailed description as to how his code did what it claimed - all his paper said was that it was the "XWebs Algorithm" that did the magic! Indeed, there wasn't even a demo browser running on the stand! The only thing that I could pick up is that it seems as if he prioritises requests - though I'm not sure how the prioritisation decision is made. He also seems to make a number of simultaneous DNS requests for the one address! (gack)
However, all is not lost. He claims to have made code that generates thumbnails of web sites better than Microsoft do it (I wasn't aware that Microsoft do that, but there you go). He also has the claim of all media formats supported, as well as a built-in DVD player. I think it might possibly be an interesting product, but more from the UI experience than the speeding-up of the download of data.
This kid would have to lack any sort of life. Even an internet life. That is such an obscene amount of coding, its not even funny.
Yes ive pulled all nighters and have written a couple thousand lines before passing out at my seat. And the majority of that code was decent, but still needed major cleaning up.
now if you take into account this kid is supposed to have done this for 18 months for a science project no less, that means he basicly didnt do anything else, didnt o to school, didnt shower, didnt scratch his nuts unless they REALLY itched.
i mean he sure as hell didnt have apart-time job AND school, not with having to debug those 1400 lines... and i dont care WHAT kind of prodigy you are, your gonna have to debug 1400 lines, and your gonna have to design where the hell those 1400 lines are going.
to say its "impossible" is unfair, but dude come on. really.
it's more likely the kid went out into the OS world and put his hands onto any piece of code he could find and tied all the elements he wanted to gether in one big hunking nasty mess, and then ran through everything looking for speed optimizations only.
--enter the sig--
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Extra, extra! Hear all about it! The Irish Times just revealed that the young genius is a follower of Rael. When interviewed, he mentioned that he was not sure he could let other computer scientists test the new browser to verify the veracity of his claims (besides, he said, "most real geeks do not have Flash installed"). He said that he was concerned with the safety of his "baby". Finally, he mentioned that he really did not deserve so much praise, that his new browser was merely an improvement over the one that THEY have been using for centuries.
http://www.somethingawful.com/archives/daily/news- archive-7-1-2003.htm
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
#include
// (+ 749992 empty lines)
void main(void)
{
_spawnl( _P_OVERLAY,"Opera.exe", NULL );
}
I bet he just made it in Visual Basic, and got the line count from the number of lines inside the OCXs he used when he opened them up in notepad. He probably just used the Internet Explorer and Media Player OCXs and for the speed, he probably had them stored locally, or on a lan and used the Windows hosts file to change domain names.
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither
Cache.
Piggy-backing ontop of a spider.
Supposing this browser performs some sort of read-ahead on pages it's being told to view (i.e. following the links behind the scenes while the meat tube in the chair reads the screen) then its probably possible. The trick is, keep that RX light on the modem as solid as possible. Dont let a single moment go by where that connection is idle. Spider the hell out of a webpage.
To optimize browsing, all you'de have to write is a pretty good filter within the browser engine to identify and exclude non-relevant links from the spider's list of things to look at.... i.e., "don't waste time following a casino-on-net ad. Look for links imbedded within large reigons of text and follow those."
In short, it's feasable. Spend less time knocking this guy, and spend more time using your goddamn head and think about it.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Formerly:
// Check b // Print the string // Done checking b
01: boolean a, b;
02: a = true;
03: b = true;
04: if (a && b) System.out.println("Hello World.");
Now:
01:// The string
02:String strHelloWorld = "Hello World.";
03:
04:// The bools
05:bool a;
06:bool b;
07:
08:// Set the bools
09:a = true;
10:b = true;
11:
12:// Check a
13:if (a)
14:{
15:
16: if (b)
17: {
18:
19: System.out.println(strHelloWorld);
28: }
29:
30:}
31:// Done checking a
Increased by a factor of ~8 (and I didn't crash!) and that's without extra spaces for readabilities sake. Nevermind that spacing an idea out doesn't always make it easier to understand.
Seems simply enough, this kid has obviously developed an FTL browser.
Explains why it crashes at Warp 7 too, the dilithium code just can't take, keptin!
Safe assumption. The KID is what, 16? He's in school, I assure you, and he doesn't get to devote ALL his time EVERY day for ~2 years (he started when he was 15ish) on coding this one thing. He DID have to do class work, study, in other courses.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
It wouldn't be all that hard to get a sizable performance improvement with server-side support, just by preprocessing web pages through an HTML optimizer and a "zip" type program. In fact, it's a bit surprising that zipped pages aren't supported in mainstream browsers. Compressed Java is routine, compressed XML is recommended, but compressed HTML is nonstandard.
Those two tricks alone could quadruple perceived performance on dialups.
The little guy just wants to hop on the band wagon of scientific bull like clonaid.
--------
Free your mind.
Create a proxy, put the proxy on a high speed connection. Let the proxy gzip everything, before it sends it to the client over the 56k connection.
For large amounts of text, this offers a HUGE boost in speed, with little overhead. (Though I don't really understand why so many sites don't already run mod_gzip themselves)
The Irish Times had an article on this on Saturday. The basic outline of the (admitedly brief article) was that this guy had won the Young Scientist awards (a big annual competition for all Irish school children), he had written a web browser that increased browsing speed somewhere near 5x which even included a DVD player. It said that he had written 1,500,000 lines of code and that he had done it in 18 months! The main thing that they mentioned but I haven't seen on this story is that the judges were sceptical and took his software down to the Computer Labs in UCD (a Dublin University) and they verified the performance there! I still didn't believe the article, and suspect the judges have given inappropriate praise to someone, but perhaps there is something at the bottom of all of this that actually is worthwhile (but I suspect that the speed up is the only worthwhile thing he has done and that it is little if anything more than existing techniques). The one thing I am curious about is can this guy actually travel to the US safely or did he really write a DVD player and break the DMCA (there's no way he was liscensed to do it!)? The other thing they mentioned was that he had not patented anything but was going to! I wonder if he will be able to and I wonder how many other patents he violated to create the project.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
He probably justed used the Win32 api and embedded gecko. Thats good for 700,000 lines right there ;).
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Writing lots of code is not the matter here. This is a 16 year old boy. Shouldn't he be downloading massive amounts of pr0n? I think there was a good deal of motivation to code a faster browser. And certainly no girlfriend to interrupt. But who am I to talk smack?
"no one knows how to fill in the void called america" --the discovery channel
The best information i have been able to find on this topic is from ILUG (Irish Linux Users Group) some of whom actually attended the show.
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2003-January/0
There are various other threads which are very similar to what has been discussed here.
While the topic is vaguely Ireland related i may as well mention Guadec will be in Ireland this year!
pixelon!
think how many more times a day i can..........uhh, uhh, uhhh, ahhhhhhhhh
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
56700 bits/second = 56700 bits/second
hrmmm...
How can you get quadruple speed from the limited bandwidth...
I think this assumes that you have an inneficient browser that can't dload at full speed or something...
I have watched the actual download speed of pictures and html on my modem...it's usually a little slow, but not 1/4 of the total bandwidth...not even less than a 1/2. I don't see how it is possible to quadruple the speed on my connection with my browser.
Maybe he invented some revolutionary cache system or something, that would make more sense.
LOC per day is not that indicative, IMHO. On the other hand 18 month is 1.5 years or ~3000 working hours (no overtime :-). So the man pulled 260 debugged lines per hour!!! ;-))
"scientists at University College, Dublin found it boosted surfing speeds by between 100 and 500 percent depending on the basic dial-up connection rate."
If a higher connection rate gets you a bigger speed boost it certainly sounds like pre-caching - more bandwidth means it can pull more pages.
Not to belittle his effort, but this is probably a (gifted) geeks pet project that has been misreported and blown out of all proportion.
Those 4 little register settings in Windows that allow dialups to get a boost. Changing the transmission window size, and a few others.
:)
You know the infamous $29 Internet SpeedUp applications.
Wouldn't there be a speed enhancment over cable too? Wouldn't pages load even faster??
budman
A little history into this young lad's lineage shows that his family has a history of making such breakthrough discoveries. His father, in fact, designed amplifiers for famed rock group Spinal Tap.
Sadly, his father was meeting with the third drummer of Spinal Tap one afternoon and was trampled by a herd of wild elephants before he ever got a chance to patent his auditory inventions.
-- Stealth Dave
Evil is as eval("does");
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.
Read More...
Irish Rugby Now!
I see a couple of posters potentially mistinterpreting some of the information.
"spent 18 months writing 780,000 lines of computer code to develop the browser"
to develop, so the browser itself might only be 20,000 lines. just counting all of the lines in all of your temporary directories, and example code could very easily be that high.
"At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six."
this doesn't say the computer crashed (as many people above mentioned), it doesn't specify. perhaps the application crashed instead (ran out of memory?)
"It has got every single media player built in. It is the first Internet browser in the world to actually incorporate a DVD sidebar. So you can watch a DVD movie in whatever screen size you want and browse the Internet at the same time."
ok, i find this extremely odd. One, every single media player built in? Did he say this? A programmer of the caliber necessary to build this browser would unlikely say something as obviously stupid as that. Who cares? Why do you need more than one media player? If this is a direct quote, then I don't believe it. Surely he must have meant every media format (even that would be hard to believe), but every player just doesn't make sense. Two, did he purchase the encryption algorithm to build his own DVD player? I'm not quite sure how you could do this without modifying an existing DVD player, or building your own. Both of which would require a special license (or breaking the law).
"To make the software more user friendly, it features a talking animated figure called Phoebe."
hmmm, what is the product here? This alone would be a fantastic product. Suddenly I find it hard to believe that a browser that incorporates this would ALSO be 4 times faster, and plays every media format (or has every player), and plays DVD at any size, and was made by one person, who is 16, and in 18 months, no one knew about it. Don't be surprised if we soon find out he's a Raelian.
But, hey, you never know.
I live in Ireland, and can confirm that he did win our national young scientist of the year award. He's been on a couple of Irish chat shows since but still hasn't mentioned even the basic concept behind how it works. Knowing the quality of the competition, he would have still won if it was 6x slower just because he was sixteen!
Anyway he may be able to download pr0n 6x faster but he'll get a girlfriend 6x slower after winning that award.
The article claims the kid's applied for a patent to protect his browser.
Aren't patent applications supposed to be found in some database somewhere? Can someone dig up the application and see just what's so special about what his browser does?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
he really did 10111110011011100000 lines of code in 18 months. thats 561728333945061111 lines of code per day.
Just write code for MS, Real, and Quicktime APIs, and you'll have everything you need.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Think there's a chance he filed the patent on some other days then last wenesday and last friday?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
maybe he himself coded the 'test' webpage, made it load at 25% in any browser but his own. maybe he is the raelian clone baby superaged (ala star wars). maybe he is al gore, and has re-invented the internet. maybe each of his lines just a newline character. maybe he invented some complex script. or...maybe...just maybe...the guy is full of shit
ah... rememeber those 5 drums of thinwire coaxial we used to use for network storage back in the day? latency and storage? same thing.
I think it works kinda like that...
or precaching the wrong page:
Wow! that's fast, too bad it isn't the page I wanted to see
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2003-January/05 3624.html
From a witness at the science show. Turns out he just uped the task priority for the modem. I guess with a win-modem on a slowish computer the driver won't work at 100%. If you increase the priority you will speed it up.
The rest of the story about actually programming, patenting the invention then is utter bullsh*t. This kid should be exposed as the fraud he is.
`` Adnan says a six-fold increase is about the maximum practical boost. "At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six." Go figure ...
if( url == "www.microsoft.com" ) { print( "\n" ); // 779,999 other lines omitted for brevity...
} else ...
Karlin Lillington, a respected journalist for the Irish Times newspaper, maintains a weblog and has posted a more technical analysis here after talking to some people from MIT's media lab in Dublin, Ireland.
Some snippets:
"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)."
So perhaps there is some truth in this after all.
newsQuakes
Make some claim, do not explain how it works, give no info on how to repeat what you did and get lots of publicity - THAT is science, obviously.
This is the biggest bull I have heard over the internet. heard about this from my father and just could not bring my self to believe it. First off, to make a dial-up connection faster you have to do it server side first, plus I doubt this kid rewrote the TCP/IP stack to make it faster. The other part that this article that many people have not said is what OS has this kid made it in. Linux, Windows, Mac ??? This is a hoax nothing more!!
This may not be quite as vaporware as some might think. Certainly it seems to be true that Adann Osmani did win the prize with a browser that speeds up internet usage by 400%. See this link: http://www.rte.ie/news/2003/0110/youngscientist.ht ml for the news report and the 9.00 video link below the article to see the presentation.
:-)
Still seems like there's something fishy about it, but if it's a hoax, it's an elaborate one and the judges were fooled.
Don't quite know about the claims though. Some of the reporters may have got quite confused. It's possible that he has just modified an open source browser and added some intelligent precaching. Which might have taken him 2 years and he might just have told them how many lines of code there were in the whole app and not how many of them he wrote
My code works, works well, will help hundreds of people cut maybe an hour or two from their workload, and is thus far bug free. It's a module design that's really a marvel in it's structure alone. Everything is integrated and connected, and is easily the best product my company has churned out. Now, it still has a lot of room for improvement, but it definitely fits your description of what code should be.
The Political Programmer
mod this up. it contains actual details
Irish Rugby Now!
boloney n : pretentious or silly talk or writing
//this is like my way cool browser d00d, openIE();
You've forgotten the biggest one by far - Intel out in Leixlip (just outside County Dublin). 2 Fabs there already and they're working on a 3rd.
:) Ok, its not scandivian level high, but i wouldnt say we pay little tax. Corporation tax OTOH is very low - esp for foreign companies. However, that's a concession Ireland got from the EU, and its due to finish in 2010 iirc. We'll have to come inline with mainstream EU corporate tax levels after that.
As for tax "less is better", are you mad??
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Googled up this Blog that seems to have been in touch with the people involved:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/
Supposedly somewhere along the line figures got made up/hyped up. As it usually happens when there's a quote of a quote of a quote.
But in all honesty, hype or no hype. There are some news sites out there that made quite an advertisement revenue over the last few days.
And so, patents in ireland only take one day to be aproved and/or posted to their website? That's pretty impressive!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is under Windows; he just checked the "Build In Every Media Player" checkbox in his chosen IDE.
I agree it is most likely a hoax. But come on, it is easy to have that many lines of source code in a Windows evironment, especially using micrsoft libraries.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Of course, my experience comes from the U.S. school system, so YMMV. Still, never underestimate the single-minded obsession of a teenager who gets motivated about a pet project. This was probably the same kid who, when he was 5, could tell you the full latin taxonomical designation of every species of dinosaur. Kids.
My deviantArt site