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.
Re:Great, yet another browser... (Score:3, Insightful)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:suspicious (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Writing the whole thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
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/>.
Pattern matching? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Science project? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Basic math[s]. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:have you ever been 16 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Pattern matching? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Then why the hell did you post it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
But does he read /. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Giant VB Applicaiton? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Patent a broswer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does this story sound fishy?
Come on people think when you read the article..
'selling out' (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
10-20?! (Score:4, Insightful)
A good software engineer should be able to write at least a few hundred lines of code in one full day
Re:Basic maths. (Score:4, Insightful)
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:10-20?! (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Basic maths. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Hmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell me, have you stopped by the mplayer site [mplayerhq.hu] 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:10-20?! (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Sorry Folks... looks for real (Score:3, Insightful)
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... [weblogs.com]
Re:Basic maths. (Score:2, Insightful)