Slashdot Mirror

Commenting Anon to avoid undoing moderation.

Your correct about the training being the issue. Training and handling aspects are going to be very important when deciding if the dog and handler are 'doing their job'. The evidence for various breeds of canine having sufficiently developed nasal senses and intelligence to be trained is hard to refute. From centuries of hunting and tracking dogs as anecdotal evidence, to the long recognized work of bloodhounds for tracking people on the run ( including a well demonstrated mythbusters episode ), through to the scientifically analyzed work in medical testing and other more rigorous modern study. I have seen plenty of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of dogs to smell several kinds of cancer and other assorted chemicals. A selection of Citations to show I'm not talking out my ass, and exonerate the humble canines sense of smell. One, Two, Three, Four,Five,Six.

Now the issue is clearly not the dog itself. Its the handlers. Handlers are fallible humans who need to be tested with a specific animal. If a handler over time trains his dog to signal at the wrong times, its the handlers fault, unfortunately it can be very hard to un-train this behavior and thus the animal is now a less effective tool for the job it was trained for, and the employee either needs to be reprimanded or given other duties. The application of an external performance pressure to the task, the handler 'wanting to find', is the root cause of the issue. Dogs cant be reliably used when their handlers get bonuses, prestige, or any kind of incentive that could bias the handler.

The short version of this is that organizations using sniffer dogs are clearly degrading the effectiveness of their sniffer dogs based on poor management practices either implicitly or explicitly encouraging the handlers to skew the behavior of the dog.

An example I can recall of good management (may not be an 100% correct recitation, since I heard it some years ago) is that the Australian Customs & Border Protection Services have a required level of accuracy, not exceeding thresholds set for both false negatives and false positives during training and on the job. Keep pulling over the wrong guy, you might loose the job. And they also have a degree of separation between the dog handlers and the people that do baggage inspections and other security tasks, a dog handler is primarily a dog handler, his job is to handle the dog as part of a team.

In this case, they can go nuts here http://os.cqu.edu.au/oswinsdvd/, someone seems to have rummaged all over the web, looking for answers to that exact same question and even created a downloadable disc image, good work by Neville Richter.

Is the Mainframe (and COBOL) Dead? ... No way!

Mainframes can (and often do) run Java & Linux via ZAAP (Hardware JVM) and IFL (Hardware Integrated Facility for Linux).

System Z (the latest IBM marketing name) is the best platform for transactional processing bar none. (Check the independent TCO studies). !

Factoids...
"200 Billion lines of COBOL code in existence" eWeek!
"5 Billion lines of COBOL code added yearly" Bill Ulrich, TSG Inc.!
"Between 850K and 1.3 Million COBOL developers" IDC
"Majority of customer data still on mainframes" Computerworld
"Replacement costs $20 Trillion" eWeek
Researchers at Aberdeen Group recently found that about 70% of the world's business data is still processed by mainframe applications written in Cobol. According to Gartner Group, that number is closer to 75%.


Links...
http://www.arcati.com/dinomyth.pdf
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=19147 25230&rid=-500


Note: Universities are reintroducing COBOL to their IT Courses due to growing demand. See: http://courseprofile.cqu.edu.au/profile.jsp?course id=16508

Life gets better for the COBOL, PL/I or Assembler code cutter, IBM now have Eclipse based tools for editing, debugging, etc. on the mainframe (Eclipse runs in Wintel or Linux Desktop and it connects to you mainframe resources via TCP/IP). The tool even lets you generate / edit / manage z/OS JCL and execute batch jobs etc. (WebSphere Developer for Z)

CICS transaction can be deployed as a Web Service at a click of a button, which means that the traditional transaction processing engine can be easily integrated into the latest SOA based business processes.

"Although most people are blissfully unaware of CICS, they probably make use of it several times a week, for almost every commercial electronic transaction they make. In the whole scheme of things, CICS is *much* more important the Microsoft Windows." Martin Cambell-Kelly, "From Airline Reservations to Sonic Hedgehog" (a History of the Software Industry), MIT Press 2003

Back in the SVR3.2 days, 2GB must have seemed like an unimaginably large file. Afterall, hard disk drives topped out at about 80 megs back in those days.

Now, admittedly, openserver 5.0.7 was released somewhere in 2002... providing much needed drivers for modern hardware, and of course bundling lots of open-source software.

Now they've finally gone and provided large file capability, loadable kernel modules, and other "new" stuff.

Hey, at least they're not Microsoft, who'd call them "innovations".

tcsh is a marked improvement over csh. csh is actually harmful. However my favourite is still bash. I might switch over to zsh though...

Applets and other software that demonstrates mathmatical principles.
http://www.edinformatics.com/il/il_math.htm

http://smard.cqu.edu.au/Database/Teaching/JavaMath .html

[Physics]
http://faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/Fl ash/

Another point worth to be noted is that, under Un*x, the DLL Hell is a non-issue, as we've had libraries versioning since day 1. So, I might as well install multiple versions of a library, and yet do not have the need to recompile an application.

Unix versioning is based on sym links. Given that it doesn't look like sym links came into play until somewhere around SVR 3.2 which seems to have come from 4.2BSD (I base the "come from" on a diagram on page 5 of The Design & Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix OS), and Linux didn't get them until .95.

Now, I don't know what your definition of "since day 1" is but if it's 14 years (First Edition released in 1969, 4.2BSD released in 1983) then you're absolutely correct.

I'd also point you to the fact that Unix didn't have passwords on day one. They were added later. So much for security can't be added on, it's gotta be designed in. Not that you claimed that they did but it's an example of where Unix came from.

You see when Unix was designed it was a stripped down Multics. Multics was too big, too bulky, too much operating system with too many features. But if you look at the features of Multics we all have them on our desktops (and Unix systems). So Unix barely had anything from day 1. You wouldn't want to use day 1 unix today. Oh, maybe you'd find some level of nostalgia in it - it'd be like whipping out a Pong console - but you wouldn't ever make it your desktop, let alone attempt to install multiple versions of software on it.

My uni has cracked down bigtime and just decided it would be best if ALL traffic aside from web browsing is firewalled, and I'm talking everything, ftp, ssh, telnet, PING everything. As you can probebly tell this pisses everyone off. Want to upload your files to your home computer? Can't do it sorry. Want to see if your computer is still online, Can't do it sorry. Want to stream real... buffering... media? Can't do it sorry.

I should write a letter

Aix is a microkernel design, At the time I started using it ('93 / aix 3.1) this was 'common knowlege' and the basis was Mach. I beleive that's with extensive IBM mods. Yes I also remember the time when 'Workplace shell' was going to sit on a microkernel under aix, os/2 ... That was also the days of IBM's SAA :-).

You may also remember that the (ca) '96 timeframe was when IBM was offering it's microkernel investment to competitors. I (still) beleive that this was on the basis that they had migrated os/400 off of it's mini-platform onto RISC and DEC and HP were looking at the same problem with a need to move VMS and MPE respectively onto their RISC platforms.

I know for a fact that the AIX VM has the same design (benefits and limitations) that Hurd has been dealing with in their Mach underpinning. IT's an approach to the VM which to my knowlege is unique to Mach/osf1.

I'll offer the following assertions that AIX is based on Mach.

AIX/ESA, runs native on S/370 and S/390 mainframes, based on OSF/1. AIX [rs/6k] was to have been base for OSF/1 until Mach was chosen instead. I hope this subsection is converging : ref

The Mach microkernel technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University serves as the basis for IBM's microkernel work. On the Mach base IBM is experimenting with new ways of implementing low-end environments, developing stand-alone file servers, integrating multiple operating system personalities on a single computer, ... For instance, the low-end AIX implementation on Mach currently runs as a dominant personality and supports an environment for running DOS programs as a secondary personality. ref

MACH isn't a UNIX system either but is the basis for interesting UNIX kernel dev elopments. The DEC UNIX kernel is build on MACH (as well as the GNU Hurd, NextSt ep/OpenStep, Apple's forthcoming Rhapsody and IBM's OS/2 for the RS/6000). ref

IBM's own AIX operating system is based on a different Unix kernel, called the Mach kernel, which was created at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but many of the layers of Unix functions that ride on top of this kernel are apparen tly based on Unix System V ref

See also e2[microkernel]

Check out this one : which includes practice tests, a study guide, etc. ...very nice.

The course home page also has links off to "online lectures" (slides + audio) and a bunch of other stuff.

The copyright of the material resides with CQU but feel free to use them for personal use. Other use will probably require some additional discussion.

The course home page also has links off to "online lectures" (slides + audio) and a bunch of other stuff.

The copyright of the material resides with CQU but feel free to use them for personal use. Other use will probably require some additional discussion.

The course home page also has links off to "online lectures" (slides + audio) and a bunch of other stuff.

The copyright of the material resides with CQU but feel free to use them for personal use. Other use will probably require some additional discussion.

The course home page also has links off to "online lectures" (slides + audio) and a bunch of other stuff.

The copyright of the material resides with CQU but feel free to use them for personal use. Other use will probably require some additional discussion.

You could try 85321
I once exchanged mails with one of the authors of this fine material. He said that I could print out as many copies that I wanted to, and he'd even send me the CD-Roms if I would in exchange send him a photo of pupils using the material! (Un)fortunately I got another job before I got to use the book, but it's a very cool book

I'm helping out a friend who is learning programming by correspondence. As a professional programmer I am amazed by the fact the lecturer is teaching some incredibly bad programming practices, and requires all programs to be either DOS executables or EasyWin (Win16) executables compiled with Turbo C++ 4.x!!

If you have difficulty believing that an "educational" institution could be inflicting the horrors of 16 bit DOS/Windows programming on people who are just learning to code then check out their web site: http://www.infocom.cqu.edu.au/Un its/win2000/85102/

Some things I should point out:

• Students are shown how to override the << and >> operators on their classes to get data from a stream. When doing this they are told that prompting the user using a hard coded 'cin' or 'cout' is a good idea.
• When overloading the stream operators, in some of the lecture notes (Week 4) they completely ignore the stream passed to the override and use cout or cin directly.
• While encouraged to start assignments early they are not given the actual skills they need until about a week before the assignment is due. In correspondence work this makes it almost impossible for them to do any work other than a mad rush in the last few nights.

If there's anything looking back at my own education and looking at what is happening to others has taught me, it is that Universities exist (in Australia at least) largely for their own purposes and not for the education of students. I learned more about programming and computers in my first four weeks of work than I ever did in five years, one honours degree, and one bachelor's degree of University. All those five years seem to be good for is to get my resume past the HR departments and into the interviews.

John Wiltshire