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

ooh, sign me up!

[caveat]

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.

Basic maths.

[psychofox]

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

Re:Basic maths.

[SHiVa0]

CTRL-C then CTRL-V...

you see, it's not that hard to make 1500 lines of code per day!

Re:Basic maths.

[byolinux]

We'll probably find he's just compiled Phoenix and put his own name in the title bar...

Re:Basic maths.

[D4MO]

{
Do curly brackets on a single line count?
}

Re:Basic maths.

[mangu]

I've heard about this thing called code reuse

I must be getting old. In my younger days, that was called "libraries", and you only counted each line once, no matter how many times they were reused.

Re:Basic maths.

[Pentagram]

Maybe he's a big fan of whitespace?

Re:Basic maths.

[Karamchand]

The typical assembler line is way shorter than the typical line of a highlevel language. ;-)

Re:Basic maths.

[(bore_us)]

Sure 780,000 lines is a lot, but of course he used his own editor which quadruples his programming speed.
I wonder what ever happened to reading webpages while surfing... Ooohh, right, so that's what you call surfing :-))

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.

[jimfrost]

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.

From my software engineering course way back in college I think I remember the number being 4 or 5. But that is more like an industry average. One thing about software is that the best programmers are something like two to three orders of magnitude more productive than the average. Between that and the communication costs growing exponentially in a group you find that a few very talented programmers are vastly more productive than a mass of average programmers.

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 am not sure I'd take that number at face value though. If this were real he would almost certainly be using a lot of prewritten code for codecs and the like and that would balloon the LOC for little effort on his part. It's more than a little unlikely that he'd be able to write all his own codecs in the first place.

So, while the LOC sounds specious, it's potentially believable given the probability of code reuse.

The thing that makes this entirely unbelievable is the performance claim. 4x performance of existing browsers over a 56k line? That's simply not possible since the bulk of time spent waiting is data transmission time. That could be improved but only with a server side component and it's doubtful it could be improved substantially without a large loss in quality.

I'm not going to dismiss the claim of a new web browser, but I'd be surprised if any of the size and performance claims hold water.

Re:Basic maths.

[orangesquid]

Maybe his code is very well-documented, and he documents the API before each function (inputs, outputs, all defined behaviors, all possible errors)....

I wrote 30,000 lines over three months, 8 hours a day.... but who knows?

Re:Basic maths.

[Zeinfeld]

We'll probably find he's just compiled Phoenix and put his own name in the title bar...

Most likely he has taken an open source browser and added in his own extensions. This is the type of innovation that making the browser open source is meant to support.

As for speeding up browsing by a factor 100% that is pretty easy. We did a lot of work on HTTP-NG and you can speed up downloads a lot just by compressing the headers so that they fit into a single packet. HTML is also very compressible. The biggest mistake we made in the original Web code was not putting a lightweight compression scheme into the code, although it did make it into the specs.

Of course the reason this did not happen was the LZ patent GIF fiasco and the then state of the GNU compression libraries. Even so Microsoft has supported compression in IE for some time.

I am rather more skeptical about the 500% claim. I don't think that there is that much redundancy unless you have completely artificial examples.

Re:Basic maths.

[plover]

Hey, this is a Windows project. Ever use Visual Studio's "wizards"?

The bastards'll generate 100 lines of code per left click, 150 lines per right click, and an extra 50 lines for each check box you manage to hover over.

Unless it's MFC based. Then double each of those.

(Before anyone starts refuting this, it is a joke! I don't care how many lines of code the app lizards crank out...)

Re:Basic maths.

[Kintanon]

Heh, you assume a drastically inflated amount of sleep. If I can go for 4 days on about 4 hours of sleep for DragonCON I'm sure some of the more hardcore programmers can do it for a codeing binge.
Assume average of 1.5hrs of sleep per day across the week. With .5 hrs for eatting and using the bathroom. Leaves us a massive 22hrs worth of codeing time per day. 4,500 lines isn't that implausible now.

Kintanon

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.

Re:Basic maths.

[jimfrost]

Some of the issue may be in exactly what counts as a "line," and I don't really care to argue that issue, but...

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.

Re:Basic maths.

[Theodore Logan]

I thought you were referring to the parent comment, which says the exact same thing as the write up. CTRL-C, CTRL-V indeed.

Re:Basic maths.

[Angst Badger]

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.

Re:Basic maths.

[jimfrost]

It is not my contention that it is impossible to do a 20 hour (or even 24 hour) day. Indeed, I would totally believe in a 48 hour session...but then my belief wanes (and one can't simply think "well what if you do a long session, then break, then a long session!?": The problem is that following a long session one generally crashes and crashes hard -- The net productivity over the period of combined heroics and crash evens out, if not falling on the negative side).

That, at least, I can entirely agree with. In every case where I did marathon sessions I was worthless for days afterwards. Over the long term I find it difficult to maintain more than a few hundred LOC per day on average.

My intent was to illustrate that 1,500 LOC in a day is not entirely unreasonable, it being a third of what I've managed at peak. But I entirely agree that sustaining it for more than a year is going to take a certain kind of individual, one I might label as "demented and sad" in Breakfast Club terms. I'm not willing to say it's impossible, though, because there certainly are individuals who can survive on little sleep for long periods of time (Edison was one).

Re:Basic maths.

[angel'o'sphere]

well,

when I had "software engineering" in my computer science courses, we got this figures for LOC per say:

Application programs: 25 - 100
Service programs: 5 - 25
System programs: 1

Application programs are things like an editor (albeit some editors are rather complex), service programs are things like cc and ld or asm (albeit some of them are not "that" complex) system programs are stuff like the kernal itself or, dynamic link loaders, device drivers etc.

Well,
we all know that LOC is not a defined "value" but people working a lot with that "measure" just define it :-)

E.g. if you work with COCOMO or with PSP(personal software process) the typical LOC is defined as a single definition, a single expression(some even say every part of an expression), an argument to a function call, every include, every define and so on:

fprintf(stderr, "this is an error number: %ld", errnum);

That would be 4 LOC, one LOC for the "statement" and 3 for the 3 arguments. Consider you can make an error/bug in every argument or 'misstype' fprintf for fscanf ....

LOCs do not realy get interesting in comparing hero programmers (10 to 20 times more effective) with standard programmers, but by comparing programming languages!!!

The VERY INTERESTING point about LOCs is that the noted rules of thumb above are independend from programming languages!!!

A programmer writing lets say 12 LOC per day C also writes ~ 12 LOC per day in assembler, in LISP in PERL or what ever language is appointed for the project.

So: the more expressive and the more abstract a language is the more "algorithm" or "computation" is defined in the lines of code.

In other words: 10 lines of C are far more calculation than 10 lines of assembler, while 10 lines of LISP, SQL or Prolog are even more than C.

Bottom line: the number of statements the average programmer can write depends far more on the problem domain than on the language choosen!

Well, the productivity of the so called hero programmer is in general not in lines of code, but in "abstractions" he implemetns. Or in number of features he implements. And that is often acomplished by choosing the right language constructs(not by writing more lines) ... e.g. using auto_ptr templates in C++ instead of manual exception management and manual allocation and deallocation inside of a function lets you "work" much faster and yields more maintaneable code. More readable, less to think about and faster ongoing to the next feature.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Basic maths.

[ajd1474]

I had a friend once who did 1500 lines in one day... but he got a REALLY serious nose bleed

Re:Basic maths.

[Archfeld]

yeah but this is supposed to be fast and optimized so it can't be wizard driven :)

Re:Basic maths.

[alonsoac]

If someone asks you how much lines of code your program has would you go counting lines in all the libraries you use? That seems odd to me, I personally wouldn't even think about doing that.

Re:Basic maths.

[CommieOverlord]

If the absolute lifetime peak of your exertion, ever, is to put in 16 hours a day for a week, you *are* pathetic.

Either that or you have incredibly bad luck finding a company that values their employees. If I have to work more than a standard work day on a regular basis, then something is wrong.

Re:Basic maths.

[jelle]

"(but nowhere near the complexity of a JPEG or MPEG decoder!)"

In implementations such as those, the algorithmic complexity is not specifically the factor slowing it down, but the large ISO/ITU standards documents filled with details written in unreadable wording are the main factor slowing it down. Along with the extreme level of optimizations for speed, memory usage, and (coverage) testing that is (of course not to forget power usage, and implementation in fixed-point with optimized rounding&saturation adds a lot to the time too).

Sure, one can quickly hack up a bunch of lines of code resulting in a JPEG decoder. But it won't be tested very well, it will be slow, need a lot of memory, may have rounding and overflow problems, etc...

As with everything, quality and quantity are interrelated.

Re:Basic maths.

[jimfrost]

That's shortsighted on two accounts.

First, time is of the essence when building software. The faster you can build it and get it to market, the more money you make. And the faster you can modify and tune it, the more competitive you are in the long term.

If you can triple programmer productivity, even at a cost in performance, you can rapidly gain returns through improved algorithmics that overwhelm what you would have gotten from optimization.

Second, computing power has been multiplying over time. Back when Java first came out performance was a pretty significant issue. I was writing on a 100MHz Pentium box with 48M memory and, yea, sometimes it was pretty slow.

But that factor of three or so that I lost versus C++ got drowned out as the hardware grew to what we have today, with processors that are something like forty times as fast and memory sizes twenty or more times greater.

I'll take the productivity, thanks, and let Intel worry about the performance.

suspicious

[g4dget]

If nothing else makes you suspicious about that story, this should:

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.)

Re:suspicious

[peterpi]

An "internet company" heh?

Good God, he could make a fortune if he's on the internet! Genius.

Re:suspicious

[rcs1000]

Yes, but he is in Ireland. I'm not entirely sure how aware the average Dublin 17 year-old is of the relative rankings of Ivy League US universities.

I'd be suspicious about the alleged speed of writing code. (That's thousands of lines a day!) It seems to be like this is just a browser which loads up links ahead of displaying them. Which, amazingly enough, is what all those "Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized!!!" programs do.

How doing this faster can make the computer crash is a bit of a mystery to me. (I can't think of a single program with a speed dial, and above a certain speed, the computer crashes... ;-))

Re:suspicious

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:suspicious

[sql*kitten]

Yes, but he is in Ireland. I'm not entirely sure how aware the average Dublin 17 year-old is of the relative rankings of Ivy League US universities.

He is in Ireland, but Dublin's no tech backwater. Trinity College Dublin is world-renowned for science and maths, and a short flight away are Imperial College and UCL in London, not to mention Oxford and Cambridge. A little further than that is the Sorbonne. There's no reason he shouldn't be as familiar with the rankings as anyone else.

And thanks to the Irish government's very sensible tax policy (i.e. less is better), the country has a sizeable presence of US high-tech firms, like Oracle and Sun.

As others have said, tho', anyone who claims to be able to sustain 1500 LOC/day for 18 months, is probably not to be taken seriously.

Re:suspicious

[toast0]

what does the technology level of dublin (or ireland) have anything to do with ivy league universities in the united states?

the coder guy wants to go to harvard, and people said thats a dumb place to go to school for cs when you could aspire to caltech (not really part of the ivy league i don't think) or mit. and another guy said that people from dublin probably don't know about all that many us universities. and then you say that universities in dublin are pretty great, wtf?

Re:suspicious

[sql*kitten]

what does the technology level of dublin (or ireland) have anything to do with ivy league universities in the united states?

The point is, there's no reason for someone to be overawed by Harvard's reputation simply because he's from Ireland. Or indeed to be ignorant of the reputations of MIT and CalTech. Despite the romantic ideas some Americans might have about it, Ireland is actually an advanced, cosmopolitan country, just like everywhere else in Western Europe.

Re:suspicious

[John Harrison]

Places to be: MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkley. None are in the Ivy League.

Re:suspicious

[Lionel Hutts]

For CS in general, Cornell and Princeton are just behind the Big 4; for some specialized areas, they (and Brown, Yale and, possibly, Penn and others) are the places to be.

Of course, for computer engineering, none of them is particularly respected.

Re:suspicious

[John Harrison]

I cerntainly didn't mean to imply that the Ivy League doesn't have excellent programs. Just wanted to point out that the ones that are generally regarded as "the best" are not it in. You are right that you need to look at what you want to specialize in and what a particular department's strengths are. Of course you may also want to consider the what the weather is like and then go to Stanford.

Re:suspicious

[the gnat]

I went to Yale, and I certainly wouldn't rave about the CS department. I was a bio major, but I did a shitload of programming, and I've not been too impressed with either the research that goes on there or the students it produces. Besides, David Gelernter works there- what else do you need to know?

Re:suspicious

[geekoid]

If you want to start a business, you go to Harvard, not Caltech or MIT.

You don't go to Harvard to study, you go to meet people. Wealthy young people who would make great partners.

Re:suspicious

[mikeage]

Yes, but you didn't seem to notice that most people don't study Computer Engineering in the Computer Science department. ;)

Re:suspicious

[I Am The Owl]

Also Dartmouth. And Princeton is 2 or 3 in many rankings that I have read.

Re:suspicious

[kalidasa]

what does the technology level of dublin (or ireland) have anything to do with ivy league universities in the united states?
The point is, there's no reason for someone to be overawed by Harvard's reputation simply because he's from Ireland.

Hell, for undergrad CS or Engineering, Harvard's probably the THIRD best university in Boston, let alone the world. MIT, BU, both have better undergrad CS programs, I suspect. This is not to denigrate Northeastern, by the way; I worked with a Northeastern grad who was pretty impressive.

For grad, on the other hand, it is probably second to MIT (in Boston; I would expect Stanford and Caltech to be ahead of it nationally, too, and probably a lot of other places mentioned here). The thing is, Harvard is a lousy environment for undergrads: most of the faculty and resources that make it such a superb institution aren't really available to undergrads. Once you're in the graduate programs, though, in most disciplines (don't know about CS), you're dealing with the people who are tops in their fields.

What Harvard has is cachet with the outside world. It's also a great place to go if you're talented but really don't know what you want to do with your life. MIT's good for fields outside the technical fields, but it is spotty, while Harvard is at least a bit strong in almost everything.

If I could go back and do my work anywhere I wanted, I'd pick Cambridge (UK, not Mass). Based on what I've seen in my field, that's nirvana. Trinity would be worth considering, too.

Re:Great, yet another browser...

[Pathwalker]

I wonder if he will open-source the code?

it is doubtful that he will - according to the article he has applied for a patent on it.

Speeding up browsing?

[icerunner]

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...

Re:Speeding up browsing?

[srhuston]

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...

Yes, unless you have one of these!

Re:Speeding up browsing?

[Mr Z]

I've heard of tools in the past that claim to speed up browsing by cacheing ahead.

So have I. Mozilla 1.2 actually does this.

--Joe

I get it...

[cca93014]

This uses the same technology that manages to compress the entire British Museum, a DVD of "The Matrix" and the goatse weblogs into 42 bits of data and a packet of peanuts.

It then makes use of network magic. You mean no-one ever told you about the magic ?

Re:I get it...

[perky]

British Museum? Hmm.. how many Library of Congresses is this? I just want to understand this analogy better

7

Re:I get it...

[perky]

SMS Marketing System

are you the people that spam mobile phones?

Re:I get it...

[cca93014]

No.

Re:Great, yet another browser...

[byolinux]

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...

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.

Re:Hmm.

[WEFUNK]

Based on the level of tech knowledge exhibited by the average tech reporter (pretty low) I'd guess that "built-in" probably just means that it comes pre-loaded with standard plug-ins. Especially when it's cited in an article that seems so impressed that "Other special aspects of his browser are the fact that access to 120 Internet search engines..." - a rather useless/annoying feature that's standard in any run-of-the-mill adware/spyware package or by visiting one of those squatter's website's with all the pop-up ads (searching dmoz 115 times isn't going to help anyone...).

The claim that it's 100 to 500% faster is probably accurate in some sense, but compared to what? An old version of Netscape or Explorer? And on what kind of set-up? You can probably see that kind of variation in a single browser installation just by changing to different options and settings or by closing other windows or background applications. Personally, I often find myself switching between browsers depending on what seems to be working better on a particular day or on a particular network or machine.

On the other hand, he does sound like he's a bright kid with a good future, but probably one that just took Mozilla and turned it into snazzy looking bloatware with a bunch of extra features. Or, perhaps an even brighter kid who did the same thing from "scratch" with a lot of cutting and pasting (of his own work and from existing programs and libraries) to end up "writing" so many lines of code.

Re:Hmm.

[The J Kid]

either that or a complete genius code writer.

Can't be that...he's name isn't even Neo!

Re:Hmm.

[Mike1024]

Hey,

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.

If it's on Windows, he could have just called in external components, like Microsoft Agent. And there are loads of media players that can embed in other programs.

Just my $0.02,

Michael

Re:Hmm.

[FlukeMeister]

Tell me, have you stopped by the mplayer site recently?

You might notice that mplayer supports just about every major codec, as well as DVD playback. Embedding mplayer in a browser would take as long as writing a plugger config file.

I have trouble with the whole "at least 4 times faster" guff, but then, my lecturer at university had trouble with me completing a year's assignments in a couple of weeks. Just because you can't see a way to do something, don't be so arrogant as to assume that everyone else is the same.

I should point out that the judging for the Young Scientist of the Year is pretty rigorous. I would be surprised to find that these claims are entirely without merit if he has won the prize. Assuming, that is, that the journalist involved hasn't just made everything up.

To those that are using the lack of results on the Irish Patent Office database search as evidence that you're right, and this is a steaming pile: did you even read the page you were searching? Really? Allow me to quote:

Note: This search will only return patents that are published.

780kloc isn't that difficult either, espcially if you start counting libraries, headers, etc. Sure, maybe all this kid has done is link together a few common components and create something new out of the combination. So, are you going to wait and find out what it is and come up with something better? Or are you going to trash somebody based on a half-page article because you were too lazy to come up with an idea of your own?

Re:Hmm.

[Alsee]

Pheobe? Damn that's a stupid name for a paperclip!

-

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof

[GregWebb]

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.

Strong sense of deja vu

[Zocalo]

No, not another duplicate Slashdot story, but I seem to recall a story about another young Irish student who had developed a "revolutionary" encryption engine a while back. That was largely all claim and no solid documentation as well, and what has become of her efforts since then? Not much, not even a single update.

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.

Re:Strong sense of deja vu

[headbonz]

Its probably not fair to characterize Sarah Flannery's work as having had, "no solid documentation." As this page at Cryptome points out, Sarah's work did not "revolutionize cryptography" because several mathematicians -- including Sarah herself -- identified a "definitive attack" on the technique described in her winning paper (which was an application of the Cayley-Purser algorithm). Her book remains a good read, especially for young women, and I don't think anyone believes that the math in her original paper is anything less than exceptional for a 15-year-old.

Re:Strong sense of deja vu

[Ivan the Terrible]

I seem to recall a story about another young Irish student who had developed a "revolutionary" encryption engine a while back. That was largely all claim and no solid documentation as well, and what has become of her efforts since then? Not much, not even a single update.

Bullshit. Get your facts straight before you malign someone. Sarah Flannery

• won the Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year, and
• the European Young Scientist of the Year awards,
• was awarded a third-place Karl Menger Memorial Award from the American Mathematical Society and a fourth-place Grand Award in Mathematics,
• won Intel Fellows Achievement Award,
• wrote a paper on her algorithm, with a postscript exposing a successful attack,
• wrote a book, In Code: A Mathematical Journey, on her experiences (5 stars, 13 reviews, sales rank=35K).

She used Mathematica, so the Wolfram website has review of the book.

Here's a quote from Bruce Schneier in his 15 Dec 99 newsletter .

To me, this makes Flannery even more impressive as a young cryptographer. As I have said many times before, anyone can invent a new cryptosystem. Very few people are smart enough to be able to break them. By breaking her own system, Flannery has shown even more promise as a cryptographer. I look forward to more work from her.

All of this was easily found with a Google search that garned 24,000 hits.

Re:Strong sense of deja vu

[Abcd1234]

Ahh, bull... she may have a father involved in cryptography, but that just may be the reason why she got involved in the area. Moreover, she was likely exposed to these concepts at a younger age, because her parents probably consider her education very important. Plus, she would have had greater access to the materials necessary to learn these things. After all, an "impoverished urchin" might have a little trouble getting the resources necessary to learn concepts like abstract algebra in the first place (or even find out they exist to learn!). Like it or not, access to education and a persons financial caste are highly correlated.

As for getting advice from other researches, that's called science! Ever read a research paper? See that part at the back, usually titled "references"? The fact is, she still had to understand the math in order to a) understand and formulate her algorithm and b) discover the attack which defeats it, indicating that she's certainly no slouch. Genius? I don't know... that's a difficult thing to determine. But she's no doubt quite intelligent.

OOC, did you read her paper? Could you understand it?

Is that so?

[Pike65]

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) . . .

Re:Is that so?

[evilviper]

if this turns out to be true than I will be the first to eat my cat

I don't thing your cat would be too happy about that...

That's got to be the funniest typo I can ever remember reading.

Re:Is that so?

[Pike65]

Typo?

Re:Is that so?

[pne]

they found it boosted surfing speeds by between 100 and 500

Between 100 and 500 percent speed increase -- not 100 times!

Re:Is that so?

[evilviper]

I don't know where you got the idea to eat your cat, but it is very similar to the expression ``eat my hat" which is also similar to saying someone will ``eat [their] words".

Saying you will eat your cat is all to literal to work in the expression. It's like saying you'll eat your children, or something similiar to that which is both possible, and a bit ghastly.

However, I would like to know what inspired you to choose that phrase.

Re:Is that so?

[quintessent]

Also look for that unbreakable encryption algorithm that should be released any day now.

Lets not get too excited

[jibster]

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.

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.

Re:What a load of crap

[byolinux]

Does that really matter? Johansen was 15 when he wrote DeCSS...

Re:What a load of crap

[Elwood P Dowd]

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".

I'm not going to read the article, but... how long is Gecko? Couldn't he have just co-opted Gecko?

Re:What a load of crap

[Yurian]

Whatever else this may be, it's definately not a hoax.This guy did indeed win Ireland's Young Scientist competition. I know because it takes place 5 minutes walk away from my house. He also made the front page of the Irish Times, a major national newspaper.

As for his claims, well, I wasn't at the show this year, so I haven't seen his entry, unfortunately. They do sound fairly unbelievable, but you have to remember that they're being filtered through journalists, most of whom are really fairly tech-ignorant.

I can say though that the Young Scientist is a major and well respected competition. The quality of the winners varies a lot from year to year, as you'd expect, but it's not run by idiots likely to be taken in by a hoax. Two yeras ago they flew in a Maths professor from MIT to verify some claim, so don't just accept things blindly.

Of course, none of this prevents this guy from having stolen chunks of Mozilla or something, and then bolting some bits on.

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?)

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

[reynaert]

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?

This already exists, look for example at mod_gzip for Apache. This will compress pages before transmitting if the browser claims to support it. Mozilla does, I believe IE does too.

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

[Sycraft-fu]

Yes, all of the big 3 support it. IIS supports it too. I've tired it before on a site of mine and yes, it did cut download size but it wasn't worth it since it caused problems due to the dynamic nature of my site.

At any rate it's a technology that basically anyone can use since all teh big browsers and servers support it.

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

[Des Herriott]

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?

Sure is. So much so, that its already been done. Mozilla, for example sends a HTTP header Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9. If the server understands that (e.g. Apache with mod_gzip), it's free to compress the data on the wire. IE (as of 5.5 anyway, don't know about 6.0) doesn't appear to send any "Accept-encoding" headers. I'd very surprised though, if this led to anything like a 400% speedup in anything but highly controlled test conditions.

I'd hazard a guess that this new browser is quietly doing some background-caching. What articles I could find about this, however, are short on detail and kinda long on BS (web browsing and watching DVD's at the same time is a revolutionary feature? riiight), so it's really difficult to tell what substance there is behind all this. Time will tell, though...

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

[JabberWokky]

There is also CWNet's DSLBuster. That does the same thing by having a proxy sit upstream on a fat pipe and compress a whole webpage (images, etc) and sending it down to a IE plugin. It works fairly well, and some people swear by it, while others don't really notice a difference. My theory is that it does speed up browsing but the first part of the page appearing takes longer to appear so the percieved time is slower, even though it does finish faster. On the upside, even DSL users say it works for them.

I could disclaim that I work for the same company, but I have squat to do with dial up services, so it's kinda pointless. I just know about it because I walk through tech support every day to my office.

--
Evan

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

[Fweeky]

IE6, Opera 5+, Netscape 4, lynx and w3m also support gzip and compress encoding. w3m even claims to support bzip2 encoding, although that's probably a bit heavyweight for this sort of thing :)

Anyway, gzipping content can easily make for an 8x size reduction on a large page, especially if there's a lot of repetition in there, e.g. lots of tables. Whether this translates to a significant speedup in browsing speed depends heavily on the size of the page and the speed of the connection; certainly on a modem, going from 80k to 10k is very noticable :)

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

[mcelrath]

The speed-up is indeed approximately 400% (or larger). Just gzip an html document and that compression ratio is the speedup. (as you say though this is server-side) Of course, the real killer for web page speed is images. The killer for modems is latency. The more items you have to request, the slower it is. Most modems have 300ms ping time to anywhere. That's why you want to strip out the banner ads to remove excess annoying images. In my experience the combination of the two makes for a significant speedup in load times over a modem.

I was downright alarmed at how fast my proxy was when running on a fast server, and I was pulling pages over the modem.

-- Bob

no footprint ?

[mirko]

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...

Re:Not necessary

[orthogonal]

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.

Writing the whole thing?

[MoobY]

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/>.

Re:Different Calendar

[byolinux]

Yes, every Jan 13th, the Irish come together to celebrate 'St Slashdot Day' where everyone gets together, drinks caffeine and then posts bogus tech stories to make Taco and Hemos look silly.

Well, okay, they don't but it'd be nice if they did... instead of the year round crap.

Hardware requirements...

[Darlantan]

...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.

Re:Not 6x -- six FOLD! That's 64x56k

[Queuetue]

No, it isn't. Check a dictionary first.

fold adj : (used in combination) multiplied by a specified number; "`fold' is a combing form in expressions like `a fiftyfold increase'"

Re:Paper clip feature too!

[mmol_6453]

On the bright said, though, there'd eventually be an R-rated hack to change the pixmap. :)

Pattern matching?

[horza]

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:

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 /table.

This would be a 'faster' browser with no compression or pre-caching.

Phillip.

Re:Pattern matching?

[jonathanclark]

Another possible way to speed up transfer is by using upstream traffic as well as downstream traffic. Normally when you download a web page, the server assumes the client knows nothing about the content, but as other post mention the difference between two pages or updates of the same site will likely be much smaller than a complete resend. So the client can use it's upstream bandwidth to start transmitting data it already has for that site (or partial data hashes), while the server transmits new data. This would require a change to the web servers or use of a proxy server, but in general I could see this dramatically improving download speeds for sites that have a lot of common XML/CSS/menus etc.

I think 90% of page traffic occurs on the top few websites through regular visitors, so in most cases the client will already have some data available.

Re:Pattern matching?

[Hard_Code]

I've wondered myself why there couldn't be a set of pre-installed dictionaries for general web content, that could be used in compressing downloads. Obvious candidates are: HTML, major languages, preambles/postambles/structures of common types of files. Hell, just take the top 10 download sites and create dictionaries out of their binaries, figuring that at some point users will download something from one of those places. Or, just create synthetic preloaded dictionaries, and compress towards them. Lots of possibilities.

Re:Pattern matching?

[nautical9]

That is an interesting concept, but with modern equipment, I'd expect it to actually be slower than how it's done now.

The major bottleneck with today's browsing isn't (typically) the browser - it's first and foremost the network (especially with this article - a 56k modem!), and second is the server's capacity to handle traffic (not normally an issues until /. posts a link to it...).

Even on a slower computer, and a very complex web page with layer-upon-layer of embedded tables and javascript will still "render" in a matter of seconds - but to get a 50k uncompressed page over a 56kbps (~7kB/s) connection will take over 7 seconds (not including images, external scripts, etc). The reason everyone's so doubtful of any major improvement here is because it's highly unlikely for him to have modified how the modem works. (Now if the claim was that a page can be rendered 4 times faster, it's entirely possible).

Now the reason I think your suggestion would actually be slower is because of all the extra computation needed to dynamically check two pages for similarities, and therefore know which parts are new and which are old - in the best case, it's as if it's rendering the page twice (once with the old content, and then filling in the changed parts with new content, thereby forcing a recalculation of text wrapping, table sizes, etc, for each piece - plus the expense of doing the effective "patch"). It of course would become much worse if it needed to do this calculation on all pages in the cache, and not just the referring page.

Not to shoot down an interesting idea, mind you - I certainly encourage creative thinking for all computer problems. That's what discussion sites like this are all about, no? (ok, don't answer that...)

(ps. most modern browsers will indeed render a table before the ending tag, at least after a certain small timeout period - the reason you don't typically want to is because an unfinished table likely won't look a thing like it's supposed to.)

Re:Pattern matching?

[Phroggy]

I'm surprised that the majority of posters are resorting to unimaginative "what BS" posts instead of thinking up innovative ideas.

So, you're new here? Welcome! ;-)

Re:Pattern matching?

[photon317]

There are already methods in the existing HTTP protocols implemented by popular browsers and servers to do this, but not by sending the data to the server. The HEAD method (as opposed to GET) requests from the server the last-modified date and a hash of the requested URL. Smart browsers first use their cache if it hasn't expired yet - then if they have the request in cache they send a HEAD request to see if it ever changed on the server - if not display cache, if so download new page.

Re:Pattern matching?

[photon317]

Well yes, dynamic content can't be effectively cached. The solution with existing protocols is to isolate dynamic content from static content. This is already acheived to a large degree by the nature of images. In the case of a dynamic page containing several static references, the images are still effectively cached and HEADed while the dynamic html content itself is re-served. You could extend that a bit by, for instance, putting the 95% of your front page that's static into a seperate static html file, and using IFRAMEs or some other method to load in dynamic snippets where appropriate.

So, Jim, I'm concerned with your performance...

[Spoing]

PHB: Jim! Did you fill out your TPS report?

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...

Re:So, Jim, I'm concerned with your performance...

[Drakonian]

Jim, if you could go ahead and come in on Sunday that would be greeeaaaaaaaaaattt. Mmmm kay? Thanks.

Re:So, Jim, I'm concerned with your performance...

[Spoing]

I know it's supposed to be funny, but it still made me cry.

Someone gets it...posts as an AC...and they get modded -1!

Science project?

[MondoMor]

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.

Next year he'll win another big prize

[techstar25]

2003's Vaporware of the year!

have you ever been 16

[oliverthered]

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.

Re:have you ever been 16

[dubstop]

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.

Re:have you ever been 16

[Charlotte]

Including testing, debugging and jerking off (hey, he's 16 right?), a typical software engineer will write 10-20 lines of actual code a day. Mind you that's including the analysis phase and excluding empty lines which are there for readability.

I've always been proud that when looking back on my own projects I had something like 20-30 lines a day. On really good days you can write hundreds of lines but sometimes you have to throw everything out again because it's crap.

I hope this guy isn't for real, he'll be burnt out by the time he's 30.

Re:have you ever been 16

[mark_lybarger]

and some days you just read /.

My guesstimate is...

[zloppy303]

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...

Accurate and not...

[SerpentMage]

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....

Re:Accurate and not...

[ipjohnson]

There is no such thing as partially lossless compression. You either loss data or you don't. The meaning of lossless is NO loss.

You are right on the presentation bit ... people like to point and stare.

Re:Accurate and not...

[SerpentMage]

What I am thinking is the following....

Lets say that you want to increase compression of some data. EG HTML. Could there not be a technique to speed things up? Sure there is, get rid of the spaces, remove some tags, etc.

Well lets say that with each compression technique there are levels of what can be thrown away. And maybe when he tweaks to level 7 he throws away too much. At that point the app does crash since he may be throwing away something interesting.

That was my point of partially lossless....

Re:Accurate and not...

[arkanes]

That would be a sever side optimization. You can't do that on the client.

As for the 780,000 lines of code, thats probably including all the MFC and windows headers - I agree with the (grand?)parent that this is probably just an IE wrapper with the WMP and MS Agent interfaces tossed in.

Re:Accurate and not...

[Istealmymusic]

Well...HTML is mostly 7-bit ASCII. So the high bit could be thrown away resulting in a 1/7 compression ratio, partially lossless. Of course, non-ASCII entities would have to be encoded; but HTML has provisions for exactly that.

Re:Basic math[s].

[praedor]

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.

Very skeptical

[Washizu]

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.

Re:Very skeptical

[deanj]

He can render it faster if he caches the data from the links on the current page in the background, renders the pages in the background and then pops up whatever link was clicked on.

Personally, I think he probably did it on a local network too, so there wasn't much testing, and probably used DirectX plug-ins from MS to do whatever he did.

All in all, I'm sure he had to have do something like this and it's a complete resource hog.

Re:Very skeptical

[Washizu]

Yeah, that's not a bad idea though. Any website with a lot of links would use up a lot of memory. When he says "it crashes when I make it seven times faster" I wonder if he's actually caching 6 levels of links.

No. Make it GMT

[EnglishTim]

2:00am - 5:00am GMT would seem much more reasonable.

What's that you say? that's 6pm - 9pm EST? Shame.

No Wil !

[roalt]

C'mon Wil !

Stop playing with time-shifting, and go out and play with the kids...

Increases "surfing speeds"

[Doomrat]

It doesn't say that it increases bandwidth, it says that it increases surfing speeds. It smells like precaching/'intelligent browsing' to me.

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:Irish Patent Office does not know about this

[Des Herriott]

You try again. Ireland doesn't use the US's MM/DD/YYYY date system. 8/1/2003 is the 8th of January in Ireland.

Re:Irish Patent Office does not know about this

[Alsee]

it doesn't seem he applied for the patent in Ireland then

Isn't filing for a patent in Ireland kind of like buying beach front property in Antarctica? :D

-

Re:Irish Patent Office does not know about this

[Des Herriott]

What on earth are you on about? He searched 8/1/2003 - 10/1/2003 - that's 8th-10th January. It's you who brought up this August red herring (assuming you're the same AC who posted first time).

Actually, something did come of that

[Bazzargh]

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

Duh

[brx.o]

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.

Then why the hell did you post it?

[kramer]

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).

Re:Then why the hell did you post it?

[Etone]

Then why the hell did you post it?

So that we may mock and gesture wildly at the perpatrator of this hoax, as is our custom. -E-

What methods are possible? Hard disk are cheap?

[npendleton]

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"

Cut and Paste???

[mustangdavis]

spent 18 months writing 780,000 lines

Anyone that wrote that much code in that little of time (1500 lines per day!) MUST not know what a function is ... but we may never know if he doesn't open the source ...


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 .... very important

-- Mr. Miagyi, The Karate Kid

Proof by the masses

[SomethingOrOther]

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"

The Magic Formula

[Anonymous Coward]

Youth+Enthusiasm+Amphetamines=Achieve the impossible.

1500 lines a day

[jamie]

I knew a programmer, a real hotshot, who really could write 1,500 lines of code a day.

Then he discovered loops.

Re:1500 lines a day

[SuperDuG]

Did you tell him that you can put more than one thing on a line as well?

Technically you can make an entire program out of C++ in one line, not one semi-colon, but one line none-the-less.

ah, the irish!

[zephc]

Why, those Irish are good for nuthin' other than drinkin', fightin' and scammin' technology pundits!
</grandpa simpson voice>

No press release from school

[SomethingOrOther]

Looking at St Finian Collage website there is nothing about this under there press relese section...
Did the /. edditors not want to make a single phone call (1pm in Ireland) or e-mail to cheak this out?

TV news article on this

[andrew_duffy]

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

Cloned Himself

[Joel Ironstone]

Is he part of the Raelians?

Perhaps he's cloned himself to be able to write so much groundbreaking code so quickly.

But does he read /.

[UniDyne]

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.

Re:Ulimate script-kiddie

[technix4beos]

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." ;)

Possible explaination for LoC

[Fjord]

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).

Re:Possible explaination for LoC

[pz]

YES! This is a good observation, I too have seen ridiculously high line counts because of source code fragemented across many files. All because of the included headers 10,000 lines of code gets reported as 1,000,000!

Re:Great, yet another browser...

[orangesquid]

Why would I not be surprised if it was the IE control (with perhaps a hack to disable the stall-on-connect problem when talking to non-IIS standards-compliant webservers), some media player controls, and another little hack which supports gzip compression of webpages?

Let's hope he patented his interface or something, and didn't try to patent uncompressing gzipped files... ugh, intellectual property laws applied to functional property are the most awkward and annoying things in the world; maybe someday I'll understand why patents are good, and how they protect the "little guy" (how come big companies are in a much better position to enforce their patents, then?), but until then...

Re:Is current HTML renderers just that slow?

[Pinky]

UDP is very datagram packet protocol on top of IP. What does that have to do with *rendering* speed exactly?

Besides, you wouldn't be able to get HTTP to work properly over UDP anyways.. UDP is datagram based. HTTP assumes a stream. You would have to re-write HTTP to work on UDP. It's not obvious how this would work to improve latency or throughput. UDP is not magic bullet.

Giant VB Applicaiton?

[Dr. Evil]

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.

Re:Giant VB Applicaiton?

[GregWebb]

Speaking as a 56k user no, it can't make that much difference. I could agree with you about the windows components thingy.

It's the avatar that gets me, though. Just can't see how (or even why) it's there.

Re:Giant VB Applicaiton?

[SoCalChris]

It's the avatar that gets me, though. Just can't see how (or even why) it's there.

That would be the Microsoft Agent.

Agent is simple to use. There are several dozen "agents" you can easily download that are ready to use, or you can make your own fairly easily. Here is a module I created to use the Agent in Visual Basic almost 4 years ago. Notice how easy it is to animate the Agent, and make it interactive. Once the character is loaded, you can make it do almost anything with a single line of code.

The code for the agent module can be found here.

Re:Giant VB Applicaiton?

[GregWebb]

I hate to say it but that's actually kinda cool in an AOL way...

It does all begin to add up, though, as a cool download thing (somehow) and a bunch of Windows components. And I'm very suspicious that he might be doing some funny cacheing.

Utter cobblers

[DrXym]

This story sounds like utter, complete nonsense to me. Simply put, it would be absolutely impossible for one person to write an acceptably working browser let alone one that can play DVDs, 4x surfing etc. in that space of time. I strongly suspect the chap has filched a bunch of code from various other projects (e.g. Mozilla, Xine), lashed them together and claimed them as his own. Even worse would be if it transpired he just glued a bunch of ActiveX controls together with VB onto a form.

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.

Re:Utter cobblers

[Zork the Almighty]

Why settle for 4x faster. I can get 10-15x faster by turning off images.

This isn't necessarilly fake...

[telstar]

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...

ESAT Young Scientist Competition

[batgimp]

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.

Re:ESAT Young Scientist Competition

[batgimp]

...amazingly, the ESAT site lists Slashdot as a good resource when doing research. The mind boggles...
http://www.esatys.com/science_set.htm

1.5kloc/day is easy...

[autopr0n]

Anyone can write 1.5kloc/day. That's just about one line per minute.

Now, getting it all debugged is another issue...

some newsgroup discussion about it all

[dieScheisse]

this is all i could find: google groups

Patent a broswer?

[linuxislandsucks]

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..

No data for patent

[Pranjal]

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.

Yeah, right

[autopr0n]

"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

Re:Yeah, right

[Dirtside]

I also don't think he wrote 780kloc

I didn't know there was a metric standard abbreviation for "kilo-Libraries of Congress". Cool. ;)

Stephen Wolfram writes 1500 lines of code

[Raiford]

per day. Or at least he did while developing the Mathematica kernel. Maybe this kid has the same stuff.

IE already does gzip

[autopr0n]

Which is a huge help for me and my 200mb/day bandwidth cap...

Re:Speed up internet by factor of 100,000X

[DJProtoss]

not to be flippant, but since they were talking about 56k modems, which get about 4k/s average, and a typical (ide) harddrive has a (sustained) data throughput of approx 10mb/s that gives a speed-up of (10*1024*1024)/4 = 2,621,440x faster, more for SCSI, although the time taken to search the fat for the addresses of the chunks would probably bring it down a bit...

'selling out'

[ardiri]

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?

Re:Basic math[s].

[(trb001)]

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

MIT is better

[HanzoSan]

He should go to MIT, Harvard for computers and science is a stupid idea.

Re:MIT is better

[the gnat]

Harvard's science departments are some of the best in the world (I'm a Yale alumn, so it hurts to admit this). Their medical school is among the very best in the country, and this means that the biomedical sciences there are almost unparalleled. It is not, however, an engineering school. There's a world of difference.

Re:MIT is better

[HanzoSan]

No ones going to argue about harvard medical, and harvard law, but as for computer science harvard isnt even in the top 10.

MIT ranks first
Caltech Ranks second
then you have a ton of private colleges like Amherst College which all rank above Harvard and Yale.

Harvard is just a Name, the best college in massaschusettes is Amherst College, the best science / math school is MIT.

Re:MIT is better

[the gnat]

Um, yeah, "Biomedical Engineering". I think you missed the point of my post. Harvard is one of the best in the world at pure research. Not the best, but among the top.

Re:MIT is better

[HanzoSan]

hahahhahaha you arent from Mass, I am.

AC, Umass Amherst over Amherst college? Are you crazy????????? Amherst college has an absolute FORTUNE and only a few thousand students. They have the best teachers and learning enviornment according to the Princeton Review.

10-20?!

[autopr0n]

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

Re:10-20?!

[oliverthered]

How old is Linux and How old is windows.
Well I know windows is at least 10 years old.

Most programmers can knock up a few hundred lines a day, but they don't programme every day.

Re:10-20?!

[entrox]

That's 10-20 tested, documented, reviewed and functional lines of code excluding tests. A Software Engineer (as opposed to a code monkey) should spend most of his time testing and documenting his code - besides, don't forget code reviews - they also take some time.
Of course, if you only spew out code and do nothing else, then yes, 10-20 LOC is not very much.

Besides, how many programmers does Microsoft employ? How long are they working on Windows now? Let's assume the Windows source code contains about 10 million LOC - that's 500.000 days if one programmer writes 20 lines a day. Let us further assume, that 100 programmers are working on Windows. That's around 1.400 man-years or 14 years in our case. That's not unreasonable, is it?

Re:10-20?!

[angel'o'sphere]

I think a good software engineer will write as few lines of code as possible without sacrisfying maintaneability and readability.

Probably you should look exactly at the programs you mention above: microsoft windows and Apachee and Linux.

a) on all thre programs is allready written since decades

b) on all three programs(well, lets call them software systems) write far more than 100 programmers.

c) of course a good software developer will write more than 100 and even more than 200 lines on 'a' day. But not on every day. And definitly not on the same project :-)

A lot lines of code are usualy written in areas which are well understood or in wich a clear vision how to get the end result running exists.

Adding 100 lines to the linux kernal will very likely take far more than a single day.

angel'o'sphere

Re:10-20?!

[jericho4.0]

All these statements about programmer productivity being ~10 lines a day are referencing several famous studies, most notably 'The Mythical Man Month' , by Frederick P. Brooks. This book, IIRC, was the first to document the huge variability in code productivity during software development. Brooks found that (programmer hours)/(lines of code in the final project) = (a stupidly low number)

The projects studied were things like unices, control systems, banking, etc. IOW, projects that got a huge amount of testing, review, QC, revisions, etc. Any programmer knows than they can write more than 10 lines of good code a day, and for many jobs might in fact do so. But a large company working on a mission critical app will see much lower levels of output.

Re:10-20?!

[parabyte]

Microsoft had more than 1000 people working on Internet Explorer alone.

The 10-20 LOC/day rate also includes a lot meetings and excessive documentation before, during and after coding, and endless debugging sessions.

Working 40 hours per week almost alone in a two-people office without phone on a familiar task with guru level programming language skills some people can churn out complex tested high quality code at a sustained rate of few hundred lines per day.

On the other hand, if you are sitting with fifty other people in one room with frequent interruptions, several six hour meetings per week, coordinating with some hundred foreign programmers in different timezones around the world trying to implementing something specified in this six-thousand page document nobody really understands, working under high pressure twelve hours every day including weekends. you will easily find your output below 10 LOC/day.

p.

This has widespread implications

[teamhasnoi]

If we were able to catch a Leprechaun and make a deal: I won't reveal the location of your Pot o' Gold if you get your wee friends to come over and code me a browser that can speed up my web surfing 500%.

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.

oh come on

[recursiv]

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.

Re:Great, yet another browser...

[Jerry]

BUY?

Surely you jest. Microsoft will just send him a "cease and desist" order followed by a patent infringement lawsuit. He'll be 50 years old by the time the kid gets out of the legal swamp and finishes paying his 'fines'.

I know how he did it ...

[telstar]

He got rid of those Classmates.com and X10.com popups...

Re:access to 120 search engines...

[Lionel Hutts]

Finally, an explanation that makes sense! That would explain the alleged speedup and number of lines, but can it explain the crashing-at-7x nonsense?

I'd give him first prize...

[podperson]

...for faking all this well enough to fool a bunch of idiots in the press / online / and judges.

This kid could go far

[Gord.ca]

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.

4X 'Surfing' Speed no big deal.

[ZombieFrog]

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.

predator browser

[zogger]

--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 B0NZI BNZI BONZI BONZI

[gl4ss]

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

Re:It's ~800K lines of VB code

[iapetus]

Nice, but a little obscure. Wouldn't it be better if you added a comment above each line to explain what it's doing? That way you get double the lines of code. Treble if you leave a blank line as well...

Of COURSE it's harvard...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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?

I visited the stand during the exhibition

[cobyrne]

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.

Full program source code revealed

[Rui del-Negro]

#include

void main(void)
{

_spawnl( _P_OVERLAY,"Opera.exe", NULL );

} // (+ 749992 empty lines)

FTL Browsing

[MichaelPenne]

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!

Re:Basic math[s].

[praedor]

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.

Double your surfing speed - free

[Animats]

Install WebWasher, and your bandwidth consumption goes down by about half, just because you're not loading the ads.

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.

Simple.

[Inominate]

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)

Some verification was done!

[bfree]

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.

Its not that impressive...

[powerlinekid]

He probably justed used the Win32 api and embedded gecko. Thats good for 700,000 lines right there ;).

faster pr0n !!!

[b17bmbr]

think how many more times a day i can..........uhh, uhh, uhhh, ahhhhhhhhh

But this one goes to ELEVEN!

[Stealth Dave]

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

Sorry Folks... looks for real

[daveirl]

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...

The Competition is Real

[kevfuzz]

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.

Patent Pending?

[Robotech_Master]

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?

What do you mean?

[autopr0n]

Just write code for MS, Real, and Quicktime APIs, and you'll have everything you need.

Re:Great, yet another browser...

[Archfeld]

so he's 50 and poor, but the rest of the world is still using his code and not MSIE :) Not an all around victory by any stretch but better than nothing.

Why only a two day window?

[autopr0n]

Think there's a chance he filed the patent on some other days then last wenesday and last friday?

MOD THIS UP... From a witness at the event

[Jboy_24]

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.

Re:MOD THIS UP... From a witness at the event

[Jboy_24]

Here's the link properly Here

Looks like he's acutally tricking IIS into increasing the priority of the particular thread your running on. Nifty, maybe a new exploit. But patentable, 1.5 Million lines of code?? The kids still a fraud.

Although, my first analysis about him just upping the win-modem task priority still might just work.

Re:Great, yet another browser...

[Patrick13]

Hmm let's see. It contains a player for every media type known to the internet, it has an animated, talking "assistant" named Phoebe...

It may very well make surfing up to 6 times faster, but it must take 10 minutes to load all that garbage, even on a P4!

The only reason explorer loads so quickly is because 95% of it is loaded when you boot windows. That's why all the competing browsers try to get you to use their "quick launch" feature, which loads the "enemy" browser during the windows boot cycle.

Re:TRS Reports

[swb]

Where I work we have to fill out time sheets. Many of the people I work with have some percentage of their time billed to the client, or, in the case of fee-based work someone internally figures out how many hours should be spent on a job, totoal, so that it remains profitable.

My time, however, isn't billable (it all goes in the INTERNAL column), but they still make me fill out a time sheet. I've even been told to include my time spent on the weekend, even though as a salaried employee the company is accruing no costs.

The timesheets are collected by the client accounting department, and they are not used by HR or payroll for counting time off or other pay-related items (those would be attendance sheets and timecards, neither of which I fill out).

I've worked here 10 years and they've never told me why I have to fill them out when none of my time is ever billable and I don't make any overtime. Can't they just assume that I cost salary+benefits/2080 per hour and be done with it?

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear about your timesheets. Unless its executed really well, time sheets in a non-client-billable environment are usually the sign that management has been taken over by petty micromanagers, control freaks and information addicts and that they've lost sight of the big picture.

Before long they'll be inventorying your pencils and demanding pencil usage progress reports detailing what you've been using your pencils for. They're convinced there's too much erasing and too much sharpening going on, and they're going to back up their hunch with SOLID DATA and catch the offender!

More technical details here

[3trunk]

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

Irish word

[chris_sawtell]

WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]

boloney n : pretentious or silly talk or writing

[syn: baloney, bilgewater, bosh, drool, humbug,
taradiddle, tarradiddle, tommyrot, tosh, twaddle]

Re:Media gullibility

[surprise_audit]

No way! "Gullible" is in my dictionary - i just looked to make sure!

tech companies in ireland

[Paul Jakma]

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.

As for tax "less is better", are you mad?? :) 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.

Ah

[autopr0n]

And so, patents in ireland only take one day to be aproved and/or posted to their website? That's pretty impressive!