Slashdot Mirror
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.
CTRL-C then CTRL-V...
you see, it's not that hard to make 1500 lines of code per day!
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.
Well I have to confess to being mildly curious. I mean, a 16 year old school boy writing 780,000 lines of code in 18 months ? Well I am impressed, by my meagre calculations that equates to _roughly_ 1,400 lines of code a _day_ every day for 18 months. And this application makes the internet go upto 6 times faster [apparently 7 times make it crash]. Not only that, it has been a secret project for the entire time. I smell a rat, either that or a complete genius code writer.
But what really got me where the two most important features someone could ever want in a Web Browser - it can play dvd's [it incorporates ever media player!], and also has a handy animated assisant called Pheobe.
Now, I am most probably wrong, and will happily eat my hat, but I cant help but feel that this isn't an entirely accurate article.
ps. Does anyone know if it is standard compliant ?
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
They've claimed that a 16 year old student has written 780,000 lines of code. That it combines a browser accelerated way beyond what anyone else has ever claimed (and that could potentially run faster, just doesn't yet), multi-format media player (actually, I don't want to watch DVDs in a little side window while browsing the web, thanks...) a meta search engine and an avatar-based help system?
That's massive work _and_ a revolutionary breakthrough. If he's that good - and in a way that others hadn't thought of despite the efforts of several of the world's largest companies going into browser and network research - then this is remarkable. But without hard evidence (or even a mention on the competition's admittedly poor website) this just sounds way too much like a scam.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
A kid coding 780'000 lines of code in 18 months. All alone. In that time he have had to design and implement the whole shit including "every single media player built in".
It would require some sort of dial-up-server side module to compress and modify the contents of the data and this kind of system would most certainly be a lossy method for transferring data. It won't be possible to transfer binary data with this thing without corrupting the result completely.
And what kind of a piece of software would choke under the load of 7x56k modem ("At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six.")?
This is just a cheap attempt to gather some attention.
If this thing's really a web browser, and it runs completely on the client computer, any web pages it's requesting are coming down the line as HTML, uncompressed (except insofar as the modem's protocol might compress). Without a compresser on the other end, the speed's not coming from compression.
/., refreshing every five seconds to make sure I got a local copy of pages about to be slashdotted?)
If it does require a server side piece, it's not a web browser, per se; but as a general question, is it worthwhile to look into "compressed" web pages, e.g., foo.html.zlib? (I tend to doubt the savings are that much for the "average" page, but shoving graphics into an archive might keep down the number of requests needed to fetch a whole page and its graphics.)
If it's not server side compression, the only thing I can think of (and fortunately smarter people than me will think of other things I'm sure) is that he's pre-fetching and caching pages to make the apparent speed faster.
So is the "secret" that he has some hueristic that sensibly guesses what links you'll click next, combined with regularly fetching, oh say, your most requested bookmarks? (In my case it might look like: slashdot -- New York Times -- slashdot -- sourceforge -- slashdot -- freshmeat -- eurekareport -- slashdot.)
In other words, is he mirroring sites locally in the background? And if so, how must bandwidth is wasted just sitting in the cache until it's stale?
(On the other hand, could I point his browser at
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
Join the Free Software Foundation
I'm surprised that the majority of posters are resorting to unimaginative "what BS" posts instead of thinking up innovative ideas. Ok, here is my idea:
/table.
Most web pages have a lot of static content in, especially menus etc. You could start rendering the page immediately from the cache from the last page and rerender afterwards as the new page starts to differ from the cached version.
As the page comes in, keep switching to the page that is closest to same structure in cache (ie predominantly on the HTML tags). Don't render the text until the initial few chars are confirmed by the version downloading, then progressively render that (ie show old version then modify words where they differ).
This would have the effect of progressively rendering the page as a whole much like those progressive GIFs. It would show a large speedup on pages that contain tables, as most browsers these days won't render a table until it has recieved the
This would be a 'faster' browser with no compression or pre-caching.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Jim: Yes, I --
PHB: Jim...I'm concerned about your performance.
Jim: Er, wha--
PHB: You write, what, 30 maybe 80 "eL Oh Cee" a day? Right?
Jim: Well, the TPS and project plans take --
PHB: Says here, that this 16 year old kid can write 1500 "eL Oh Cee" a day. What do you think about that?
PHB: Don't laugh...this is serious.
Jim: Sorry. I ment --
PHB: Jim, maybe you need to put in more hours. Reconsider your work habbits.
Jim: I work till 10 most nights...
PHB: Jim, it's not the hours it's how efficiently you handle them. I expect todays TPS on my desk by noon, along with a status report on each programming task you've done today.
Jim: It's 11 --
PHB: That's it Jim! Keep up the good work. In the meantime, see if you can increase that "eL Oh Cee" to, say, about a hundread. It's good to make a good impression. Fine. Excellent. I knew I could count on you. I'll see you then! ... Brian...did you fill out that TPS report...
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Maybe he's a big fan of whitespace?
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.
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.
Searching Irish Patent Office:
:
:
Query
Application Date: 08/01/2003 -> 10/01/2003
Abstract: *internet*
Results: 0
Query
Date Of Grant: 08/01/2003 -> 10/01/2003
Abstract: *internet*
Results: One Result: 2000/0717 82661 Server-based electronic wallet system
Thats it, so it doesn't seem he applied for the patent in Ireland then...
P.S. The stars around "internet" are mine, I used them to indicate that I searched all abstracts that contained the word "internet"
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
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).
Bullshit. Get your facts straight before you malign someone. Sarah Flannery
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 .
All of this was easily found with a Google search that garned 24,000 hits.
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
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.
Then he discovered loops.
and some days you just read /.
One possible explaination for the LoC count may be that he's using Borland and trusting it's "count". At my first real job, we used Borland and I made a realtively complex program over the course of 18 months (coincidentally enough). The line count was over 1.5 million, but the reality was that it wasn't that long, Borland was counting lines processed, which included the header files, and the OWL and windows headers could add a lot to each module (of which there were over 100, since I was big on modularization).
I never really knew the true line count. I just remember the Borland one because I used to often do a global compile any time I wanted a half hour break ("Oh, the systems acting funny. Better do a global compile to make sure it's not a dependancy problem." If my boss came by and I wasn't there, he'd see the compile running on the screen).
-no broken link
Still, sustaining 1,500 LOC per day for a year and a half ... that's beyond the productivity level of anyone I've ever seen. I personally have managed 4,500 per day for a period of about a week on occasion ... but I wasn't sleeping much during that period.
I broke 1,000 LOC per day for about a week while working for an unnamed gigantic CPU monopolist. I was behind schedule, over budget, and had a hard deadline, and the code itself was fairly repetitive and not terribly efficient. Ordinarily, I'd figure I produce closer to 250 LOC per day during a normal coding period.
Provided this story isn't complete hogwash, my guess is that the reporter asked the boy about the writing the program and he answered that it consisted of 780,000 LOC and took him a year and a half to build. He probably neglected to mention that 90% of those lines were in libraries written by other people. He may not have even intended to be deceptive in any way, figuring that any fool would know that was the case, but not realizing that the reporter was a fool.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
well,
:-)
....
... 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.
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)
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.