Science Project Quadruples Surfing Speed - Reportedly 646
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.
suspicious (Score:4, Informative)
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:Great, yet another browser... (Score:5, Informative)
it is doubtful that he will - according to the article he has applied for a patent on it.
Is current HTML renderers just that slow? (Score:1, Informative)
Speeding up browsing? (Score:2, Informative)
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:suspicious (Score:4, Informative)
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...
Apparently is was actually 1.5 Million lines... (Score:5, Informative)
There is no way.
no footprint ? (Score:4, Informative)
I however found out this thread in the news [google.com] 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 6x -- six FOLD! That's 64x56k (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ok, let's think this through.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.... (Score:3, Informative)
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:Strong sense of deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, something did come of that (Score:3, Informative)
The Cayley-Purser algorithm [wolfram.com] 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 [amazon.com] , which is a pop science introduction to crypto, and I understand from the blurb she's now studying maths at Cambridge.
-Baz
Re:Strong sense of deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. Get your facts straight before you malign someone. Sarah Flannery
She used Mathematica, so the Wolfram website has review [wolfram.com] of the book.
Here's a quote from Bruce Schneier in his 15 Dec 99 newsletter [counterpane.com].
All of this was easily found with a Google search [google.com] that garned 24,000 hits.
Re:suspicious (Score:4, Informative)
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.
TV news article on this (Score:2, Informative)
Possible explaination for LoC (Score:5, Informative)
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).
ESAT Young Scientist Competition (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.esatys.com/ [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.
some newsgroup discussion about it all (Score:3, Informative)
No data for patent (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Speed up internet by factor of 100,000X (Score:2, Informative)
Re:have you ever been 16 (Score:1, Informative)
They don't jerk off in Ireland; they have wanks.
This kid could go far (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Giant VB Applicaiton? (Score:3, Informative)
That would be the Microsoft Agent [microsoft.com].
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 [chrisnaimee.com].
I visited the stand during the exhibition (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Basic maths. (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:What a load of crap (Score:3, Informative)
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.
More technical details here (Score:3, Informative)
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 [www.skep.tk]