Young Scientist ot Year - ya wha ?

ozt9vdujny3srf

Personally, i am sceptical, but this years winner of the young scientist awards has made software that he claims wil increase connection speeds by 400 % on any connection.

I have seen this type of software on the net and dismissed it but this one apparnetly works.

Is the software a new development? Is it wat 56k useres have been looking for?

224 k connection speeds would be heaven on a pstn line, or, 512 on dual channel isdn.

Is it possible?

sunbeam

Hmm, I wonder would it do anything for those of us on 16.8k?

crazyasafox

Just watching Pay kenny and some guy was on who won the young science competition in the RDS for creating software that will make a normal 56k modem download 3-4 times faster on a normal pstn line,anyone know anymore.

cherrio

I only say the end of hte interview, but would be a little sceptical.

Any software would have to be server side as well, wonder how long it would take Eircom to comp on even if it did work.

At a wild guess, I would say its compression or something (which has been done before).

But who knows... live in hope! Wonder what it would do for an adsl connection;)

nahdoic

Some Irish guy won the 2003 Esat BT Young Scientist for making a web browser that speeds up your browser 4 - 5 times. It supposedly works. It had to pass 12 judges - and they were all satisfied.

It was just on Pat Kenny.

Anyone know anything about this?

If it's just a client side solution I don't see how it can speed up downloading files, by 4 -5 times over a normal 56k modem. but that's what they said it does.

Woden

no but i want to

Maj. TightAss

There's a theoretical maximum transfer limit of around 8kB/s on 56k, which in practice isn't possible because of line conditions.
I don't see how any protocol could make transfer rates any higher than this, using an ordinary 56k modem.

Meh

Originally posted by cherrio
I only say the end of hte interview, but would be a little sceptical.

I would be more than a little sceptical. Most web servers already use mod_gzip to compress the html they serve up. On top of that, there's the compression that your modem does. If this guy's invention manages to compress all that pre-compressed data by 400%, then he's probably in line for a Nobel Prize.

Anyone got more detailed information on what he claims to have done?

spooky donkey

Did he say that it would make web pages download faster and file downloads be faster?
Or is it just faster web page viewing.

Sounds a bit hard to believe.

theciscokid

i just heard that now too off a mate, i missed the late late show

lets kidnap this guy, (15 was he?)

thats it - boards should recruit him and get him to spill the beans

David C

According to RTÉ news: http://www.rte.ie/news/2003/0110/youngscientist.html
it's a browser...

Therefore, I am assuming it does not allow for faster file transfers, just faster page loading... I would guess by leaving out or ignoring certain parts of the HTML.
Won't get too excited until I see exactly what it does..

Rags

Well i'm afraid it wont turn your 56k connection into 224k. Thats impossible. What he has developed is a internet browser which he claims will speeds up browsing by 400% and it has email client and a dvd browser window. (my guess is that it multithreads and blocks ads etc.)

Maj. TightAss

He actually said that all files download 4 times faster (which is BS). But of course it could be Pat Kenny putting words into his mouth.

John2002

400% increase in speed according to RTE website

http://wwa.rte.ie/news/2003/0110/youngscientist.html

nahdoic

A Leaving Cert student from Mullingar has won the 39th Esat BT Young Scientist of the Year Award. Sixteen-year-old Adnan Osmani's project was the first ever technology project to win the award. The project, "The graphical technological and user-friendly advancement of the internet browser: XWEBS", concerned the construction of a net browser that incorporated a language translator as well as a human speech facility, to read the contents of web pages. A student at St Finian's College, Mullingar, Adnan received a cheque for EUR3,000, a Waterford Crystal trophy and the opportunity to represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists taking place in Budapest, Hungary in September 2003.

http://www.unison.ie/breakingnews/index.php3?ca=9&si=29038&breakingnews=1

pfft. i guess an increase in 400% is supposed to be how much faster you can work with this browser. what a joke. pat kenny asked this guy if it will download files 4 - 5 times faster, so people should reconsider getting ISDN, and he replied "yes". i guess it's nerves.

daveirl

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nahdoic

he said he got it patented yesterday. i wonder what exactly he was able to patent though.

sceptre

It's entirely possible that such a solution could exist, though I'm somewhat sceptical that this chap has done it. There's always been a tendency for tech solutions to start with very expensive hardware, eventually replaced with less expensive software. Sometimes later again this is replaced with inexpensive dedicated or shared hardware.

With regard to downloading faster over a regular phone line, the expensive hardware could be replaced with a software solution using the same technique as DSL technology - the higher frequencies unused by PSTN technology could be used to provide greater bandwidth to users. Unfortunately though (at least from our point of view) it's fairly likely that the same software would need to be deployed at the ISP/telco end of the line - assuming that there's also a bottleneck at their end (if there isn't it wouldn't need to be a problem).

Look at it from the point of view of this analogy:
The user (me) has a narrow laneway leading back to the ISP. At the ISP this laneway becomes part of a much larger road network - indeed a much larger road. Because of the technology deployed by the ISP, I'm still restricted to using that width of laneway the whole way to my destination. (If there isn't a bottleneck at the ISP end, my road gets as wide as I like)

I'm not saying the idea is rubbish yet at all - but I'd like to see the patent application before making a judgement on it - particularly if it's just a browser. DSL technology made sense to me as a possibility as soon as I read the technical specs. This however doesn't, at least not yet - deploying software just at one end of the line seems a little too much to swallow without hearing quite a bit more about it.

It could just be some kind of page prefetching software (and they've been unsuccessful in the marketplace for a few years now)

(edit: turns out "sceptical" has a c in it (this is of course Mike Megan's fault))

Guinness xtra

I'd say he just got the idea from the net. Downloaded all the necessary jargon. Manipulated it to suit himself. Then he made it sound so complex and ultra hip that the judges were confused. Then it was just a case of the Emperors new clothes. None of them wanted to look stupid so they gave him the prize. I mean come on, 16 years old. Don't think so. Arn't all the worlds telecoms engineers and programmers not searching for ways to increase bandwidth speed all the time. And if they cant get it faster than 8kb/s then it's hardly likely he can make it 16-20kb/s.
I think he'll have to read the patent laws.

daveirl

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daveirl

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Guinness xtra

I'l move my message to this thread me thinks

I'd say he just got the idea from the net. Downloaded all the necessary jargon. Manipulated it to suit himself. Then he made it sound so complex and ultra hip that the judges were confused. Then it was just a case of the Emperors new clothes. None of them wanted to look stupid so they gave him the prize. I mean come on, 16 years old. Don't think so. Arn't all the worlds telecoms engineers and programmers not searching for ways to increase bandwidth speed all the time. And if they cant get it faster than 8kb/s then it's hardly likely he can make it 16-20kb/s.
I think he'll have to read the patent laws.

nahdoic

his project was called "The graphical technological and user-friendly advancement of the internet browser: XWEBS"

so it has nothing to do with faster downloading.

it has to do with having lots of applications integrated into a single browser, that's all it seems

daveirl

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Guinness xtra

it was supposed to go into the young scientist thread but i clicked the wrong button

daveirl

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davros

Originally posted by sceptre
With regard to downloading faster over a regular phone line, the expensive hardware could be replaced with a software solution using the same technique as DSL technology - the higher frequencies unused by PSTN technology could be used to provide greater bandwidth to users. Unfortunately though (at least from our point of view) it's fairly likely that the same software would need to be deployed at the ISP/telco end of the line

It's more than fairly likely - it's certain. And a hardware change is needed too. There is a filter on your telephone line at the exchange end that chops off all frequencies above 4kHz. This filter makes it an absolute mathematical impossibility that you can transmit at more than 64kb/s on a standard phone line.

It would have been so easy for (engineer!) Pat Kenny to ask what was meant by a 400% increase. But he didn't ask the obvious question or ask for any technical explanation.

[edit: I'm adding a qualification to what I wrote above. The 4kHz filter (and implied 8kHz sample rate) *plus* the 256-level (8-bit) quantizer on the line interface at the switch limits the max data transmission rate to 64kb/s. It would have been simpler if I had just said that the switch hardware digitizes the voice signal at 64kb/s so you can never transmit data faster than that without a hardware change on the switch side :rolleyes: ]

elexes

if its just browsing it could be possible to make the code go faster but i dont see how dvd quality could come throught ... like a webpage is totaly different

how old was the kid that made decass

longword

Originally posted by John2002
400% increase in speed according to RTE website

http://wwa.rte.ie/news/2003/0110/youngscientist.html

Read it carefully. It claims to speed up internet usage by 400%. That's just a fluffy marketroid type claim which is not in any way related to bitrate. I didn't catch the Late Late myself but I can say with near 100% certainty that you won't be able to download the latest Windows patch four times faster without replacing your modem.

sceptre

Originally posted by daveirl
someone will fix it in the morning. Don't worry

Done (we never sleep)

Originally posted by davros
It's more than fairly likely - it's certain. And a hardware change is needed too. There is a filter on your telephone line at the exchange end that chops off all frequencies above 4kHz. This filter makes it an absolute mathematical impossibility that you can transmit at more than 64kb/s on a standard phone line.

That's that probably settled then - thanks for reminding me of that "thou shall not transmit at frequencies higher than 4KHz" rule -I'm sure it was on page one of the last DSL book I read but I've a memory like a sieve at times

(is this summat to do with Ohm's law?)

/struggles to remember secondary school physics

I'll say this much as fact: if, for the sake of argument, he's managed to do this, we'll all be hearing about this on every tech-related site within days. Not weeks, days. The possibility of DSL was hot news before it even hit the lab. If we don't hear about it, well, you get the picture.

Any hardware changes necessary basically make it a rehashing of DSL technology - which is hardly a new development.

sceptre

Originally posted by elexes
how old was the kid that made decass

Regardless of how many times that poor kid said that he didn't actually write DeCSS, the media pretty much refused to recognise what he was saying.

He was a member of the group (MoRE) that cracked it. He didn't write any of the code - two German members did. As a member of the group he got the code and then put it up on his website. He was prosecuted for putting it up on the webpage, not writing it.

15 btw.