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Misanthrope · Jan 13, 2003, 11:29 PM

Riiiight.

In order to write 780,000 lines of code in 18 months, you would need to do 1450 lines of code a day, with no breaks.

I'm calling shenanigans on this one.

Brien · Jan 13, 2003, 11:31 PM

Built in DVD player my ass.

Mac Zealot · Jan 13, 2003, 11:56 PM

hrm. ONLY 780k lines?

Who wants to bet that thing is just an IE or gecko based browser with a few additions?

ReggieX · Jan 14, 2003, 12:07 AM

Bollocks. I'll believe it only when I can run it myself, or there's an actual review by people who know what they're doing.

fat mac moron · Jan 14, 2003, 12:08 AM

Originally posted by Misanthrope:
Riiiight.

In order to write 780,000 lines of code in 18 months, you would need to do 1450 lines of code a day, with no breaks.

I'm calling shenanigans on this one.

No offense, but if it's based off open source, it sucks. Open source is a complete joke.

Axo1ot1 · Jan 14, 2003, 12:09 AM

animated assistant? Clippy anyone?

Cubeoid · Jan 14, 2003, 12:18 AM

Watching a DVD while surfing the internet is even more stupid then watching a DVD while driving. Almost a million lines of code, yea, sure.

Brien · Jan 14, 2003, 12:19 AM

Originally posted by Axo1ot1:
animated assistant? Clippy anyone?

Nebagakid · Jan 14, 2003, 12:23 AM

i'll believe it more if i saw a screen shot...

MacAgent · Jan 14, 2003, 12:30 AM

I must say I like Fark's description:

"16 year old writes webbrowser that magically speeds up download speeds. And plays all music and video in the browser, with 120 search engines built in. His father can beat up your dad, and his car is a perpetual motion device"

Fallout · Jan 14, 2003, 01:23 AM

Bhahaahah, if that's not BS, that guy must be the king of all nerds.

Misanthrope · Jan 14, 2003, 01:26 AM

I see it like this:

Usually a scientific work is meant to be subjected to peer-review, and this is far from being availble to the public.

If some of you might recall previous claims of cold fusion being constructed, and yet later incapable of being redone, you'll catch my drift.

It's in this little black duck's opinion that the kid is full of crap. Maybe that and some hard alcohol...

Of course, that's just my opinion, I may be wrong...

wataru · Jan 14, 2003, 02:23 AM

Originally posted by fat mac moron:
No offense, but if it's based off open source, it sucks. Open source is a complete joke.

Oh, I didn't know Bill Gates browsed here.

You are a farking idiot.

Cubeoid · Jan 14, 2003, 04:22 AM

Finally a good chance to use it

as2 · Jan 14, 2003, 08:14 AM

This has got to be a joke...

1) It seems to good to be true, and so probably is...
2) An Irish kid made it.. Did he have pointy shoes, and a big green hat?

Adam - not sceptical - just realistic!

as2 · Jan 14, 2003, 08:22 AM

Ok.. Just found this

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'...

Read the rest of the article here.

Adam

undotwa · Jan 14, 2003, 08:29 AM

DVD player in a browser? right. Who on earth would want to watch a DVD while surfing? Plus can't you just put DVD Player next to or under the browser window?

120 search engines built in? So what.

Media players? Quicktime, Windows Media, Real Player plugins anyone? That isn't that fantastic.

Built in clippy? Wow... so original.

Reads text allowed? Some Macintosh browsers can already do that using text-to-speech service.

This browser looks like bloat. A macintosh browser can do all this and it doesn't crash several times a day. No ones wants a DVD player in a browser, clippy is well reknown as the worst idea ever, and I didn't even know there were 120 search engines, Google is enough for me.

Mastrap · Jan 14, 2003, 08:36 AM

Originally posted by undotwa:
DVD player in a browser? right. Who on earth would want to watch a DVD while surfing? Plus can't you just put DVD Player next to or under the browser window?

---snipped---

Hey, Mr Positive, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel

daimoni · 10:59 AM

.

Misanthrope · Jan 14, 2003, 02:21 PM

Originally posted by daimoni:
It's not that hard to use copy-and-paste.

Touch�

But still, the kid and the judges for that competition should all get reprimanded. The kid (from what I can tell) did not do it all. That is, if he did anything.

mac-at-kearsarge · Jan 14, 2003, 02:33 PM

Wow! It's the 1st of April Already!?!?!

trusted_content · Jan 14, 2003, 02:47 PM

Who says its fake? Granted I haven't seen any proof one way or the other, but I know 16 year olds who have written kernels before, so I wouldn't put anything below the kid, aight?

Millennium · Jan 14, 2003, 04:03 PM

Originally posted by fat mac moron:
No offense, but if it's based off open source, it sucks. Open source is a complete joke.

Nice flamebait. I can't say I disagree with the "moron" in your name if you're that uninformed and, frankly, bigoted.

Ahem. I'm skeptical. I want to see this browser, because either it's a complete hoax or it's not nearly as remarkable as it would initially seem.

Browsing speed: Total BS, unless his line is really noisy and he's found a way to compensate. Physical limitations of a 56K modem will simply not allow you to go more than twice as fast as the typical user seems to get. Software can do a lot, but it can only go as fast as the hardware it's on.

120 search engines: It's called bookmarks. Or maybe he's come up with a Sherlock-esque system. Either way, this is actually pretty easy to do. I'm more interested in the UI he's presented for all these engines; how does one pick when there are 120 to choose from?

Media players, including the DVD sidebar: No chance in hell that he coded this himself, except maybe to hook up a UI. He'd have been sued from at least seven different companies if that were the case. Perhaps he embedded them via COM or something, but there's no way he wrote those players personally. Oh, and useless bloat as well.

Phoebe the Animated Assistant who Reads Pages: If anything, this is probably where most of the lines of code were spent, assuming this is even real. One person might be able to do this in 18 months, if they had prebuilt text-to-speech software. Last I checked, Microsoft had a toolkit out for making assistants like these; that's probably what he used.

But if this is essentially an amalgamation of prebuilt components, then there is no way it should have taken 780,000 lines of code. So either this is a hoax, or we have a weak developer with a moderately strong idea.

Mac Zealot · Jan 14, 2003, 04:14 PM

Yeah like I said 780k lines of code isn't really that much.

anarkisst · Jan 14, 2003, 05:16 PM

macvillage.net · Jan 14, 2003, 06:44 PM

Originally posted by Millennium:
Nice flamebait. I can't say I disagree with the "moron" in your name if you're that uninformed and, frankly, bigoted.

Ahem. I'm skeptical. I want to see this browser, because either it's a complete hoax or it's not nearly as remarkable as it would initially seem.

Browsing speed: Total BS, unless his line is really noisy and he's found a way to compensate. Physical limitations of a 56K modem will simply not allow you to go more than twice as fast as the typical user seems to get. Software can do a lot, but it can only go as fast as the hardware it's on.

120 search engines: It's called bookmarks. Or maybe he's come up with a Sherlock-esque system. Either way, this is actually pretty easy to do. I'm more interested in the UI he's presented for all these engines; how does one pick when there are 120 to choose from?

Media players, including the DVD sidebar: No chance in hell that he coded this himself, except maybe to hook up a UI. He'd have been sued from at least seven different companies if that were the case. Perhaps he embedded them via COM or something, but there's no way he wrote those players personally. Oh, and useless bloat as well.

Phoebe the Animated Assistant who Reads Pages: If anything, this is probably where most of the lines of code were spent, assuming this is even real. One person might be able to do this in 18 months, if they had prebuilt text-to-speech software. Last I checked, Microsoft had a toolkit out for making assistants like these; that's probably what he used.

But if this is essentially an amalgamation of prebuilt components, then there is no way it should have taken 780,000 lines of code. So either this is a hoax, or we have a weak developer with a moderately strong idea.

I agree. Good points.

My guess is he took Mozilla or Phoenix, made a new skin, and created a plugin that serves as a frontend for WMP.

thunderous_funker · Jan 14, 2003, 07:22 PM

The browser is real. He created something or assembled it. That much is clear.

I think it's obvious he used existing multimedia plugins. I'd say he's smart to do so. Why reinvent the wheel?

The rendering engine could be his. It's possible. Or maybe he used some open source code as a base and tweaked it. Again, that would a smart move and doesn't diminish this as the work a pretty good programmer (considering he's only 16).

The DVD sidebar thing isn't remarkable. It's not like to created the codecs or algorithms to decode DVD, he just created a UI within a browser that has questionable value. A nice bit of programming for a 16 year old nontheless.

What strikes me as remarkable (and what is thus far remained mysterious) is the speed boosts. What we know is that for a few websites, with a certain dialup connection he managed to show a marked improvement in speed. Is it an enhancement in the rendering engine? A streamlining of protocols? A caching technique? In my mind, this is the REAL innovation (or perhaps simply a trick) and remains to be seen.

As for size, the KHTML rendering engine (the one in Safari) is 140K lines of code. Sounds like this kid did a pretty damn good job if it's his own engine and even if it's just his tweaking of an existing engine, it's still a pretty good job of programming by an amateur kid.

ink · Jan 14, 2003, 07:51 PM

It's fake:

"At seven times it actually crashes so I have limited it to six."

Umm, does that even make sense?

/*
* WARNING!! don't change the following parameter unless you KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!!!
*/

#define BROWSER_SPEED_MULTIPLIER 6

Riiiiiiight...

macvillage.net · Jan 14, 2003, 07:54 PM

Originally posted by thunderous_funker:
The browser is real. He created something or assembled it. That much is clear.

I think it's obvious he used existing multimedia plugins. I'd say he's smart to do so. Why reinvent the wheel?

The rendering engine could be his. It's possible. Or maybe he used some open source code as a base and tweaked it. Again, that would a smart move and doesn't diminish this as the work a pretty good programmer (considering he's only 16).

The DVD sidebar thing isn't remarkable. It's not like to created the codecs or algorithms to decode DVD, he just created a UI within a browser that has questionable value. A nice bit of programming for a 16 year old nontheless.

What strikes me as remarkable (and what is thus far remained mysterious) is the speed boosts. What we know is that for a few websites, with a certain dialup connection he managed to show a marked improvement in speed. Is it an enhancement in the rendering engine? A streamlining of protocols? A caching technique? In my mind, this is the REAL innovation (or perhaps simply a trick) and remains to be seen.

As for size, the KHTML rendering engine (the one in Safari) is 140K lines of code. Sounds like this kid did a pretty damn good job if it's his own engine and even if it's just his tweaking of an existing engine, it's still a pretty good job of programming by an amateur kid.

Or he used Phoenix's source code and removed some debugging and anything else he thought he could do without it being evident.

suhail · Jan 14, 2003, 08:48 PM

As they say...
The mass of the ass is directly proportional to the amount of gas that you pass!

macvillage.net · Jan 14, 2003, 08:49 PM

Originally posted by suhail:
As they say...
The mass of the ass is directly proportional to the amount of gas that you pass!

suhail · Jan 14, 2003, 08:53 PM

Originally posted by macvillage.net:

mydog8mymac · Jan 14, 2003, 09:06 PM

Originally posted by Millennium:
[BPhoebe the Animated Assistant who Reads Pages: [/B]

So, Ellen Feiss graduated and got a job.

olePigeon · Jan 14, 2003, 11:02 PM

Originally posted by fat mac moron:
No offense, but if it's based off open source, it sucks. Open source is a complete joke.

fat mac moron, so I guess it's not just a clever name.

Earth Mk. II · Jan 15, 2003, 10:17 AM

Originally posted by as2:
Ok.. Just found this

Read the rest of the article here.

Adam

funny, in the article the blog links to the browser uses "1.5 million lines of computer code." So which is it, 750k, or 1.5 million?

also, it looks like the article's author did little more than interview the kid about his creation. I'm more than a little suprised that there's no quotes from anyone else, not even some of the companies apparently interested in the browser. I can understand a judge not wanting to comment quite yet - but looks like the author didn't even try. "The judges were highly impressed with Adnan's work." did they say that themselves, or is this adapted from something Adnan said? I'd expect to see at least a "...declined to comment before a final decision has been made.." or a "...were highly impressed, but couldn't say much until..." I mean, sometihing that showed the author tried to talk to anyone else besides the kid.