Recently there has been an increase in the development of technologies for resource discovery. This development is mainly because resources such as printers, mail boxes, memory space, and disk space are available in every network, ready to be used by any host. This has been caused, in part, by the growth in the popularity of portable devices such as laptops, PDAs , and cell phones which require configuration each time they attach to a new network segment. Since the configuration of such devices is tedious and sometimes complicated there have been some attempts in recent years to solve this problem, such as the DHCP approach.This thesis focuses on the bandwidth analysis of two new approaches dealing with resource discovery: the Service Location Protocol (SLP) and Jini. This work is particularly important since communication among the devices is often wireless, where the bandwidth is a limited resource. This thesis is presenting equations for characterizing the usage of bandwidth consumed by SLP and Jini based on their specifications, experiments and previous work.
The explosive growth of the Internet and handheld wireless devices is widening a large gap between mobile clients. Mobile clients vary in their hardware and software resources such as screen size, color depth, effective bandwidth, processing power, and the ability to handle different data formats. This makes it difficult for servers to support a wide range of client variations. Application-level adaptation is required to provide a meaningful Internet experience across the range of client capabilities.In this research we introduce an image transcoding proxy server placed between the generic WWW servers and the heterogeneous mobile hosts. The main function of this proxy is to reprocess, on the fly, the most common image formats used on the web for quick transmission of reasonable quality. The transcoding proxy uses the mobile device characteristics as input parameters and can adapt to dynamically changing bandwidth on the proxy-client link. The policy decisions are used to select the most appropriate operations in order to achieve the smallest file size and acceptable image quality. Moreover, our proxy can perform on-demand specific image compression operations, tailoring content to the specific constraints of the user.
This study will examine the relationship between punitive reforms to provisions of the youth justice system dealing with violent young offenders and patterns of violent youth crime over time in order to show that the current trend of government to increasingly transfer violent young offenders to adult court is inappropriate and unwarranted. This thesis will show that there has been relative stability in the patterns of violent youth crime both historically and in recent years but that changes to the way the youth justice system deals with violent young offenders to make its approach more punitive dictate that there is a crisis in the violent youth crime rate. The reality is that Canada’s violent youth crime problem is neither out of control nor changing in such a way to warrant a more punitive approach towards dealing with violent young offenders. Approaches to youth justice that emphasize the welfare of young offenders are more appropriate to deal with violent young offenders.
This thesis attempts to situate and reconstruct the cross-cultural encounter between Basque fishermen and Mi'kmaq in the 16th and early 17th centuries before the first permanent settlements of Europeans were established in "Canada." Basque- Mi'kmaq contact constitutes one of the earliest forms of regular contacts between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in this country. To provide a clearer picture of the nature of contact between Mi'kmaq and Basques five centuries ago, an overview of their histories and cultures prior to contact and at the time of contact, as well as evidence of contact itself, is given. This evidence is based on ethnohistorical, historical, archival, cartographical, archaeological, linguistic and oral historical sources. The author argues that given that this contact was seasonal, and that Basques were off the shores of Mikmaki to fish, not to settle or initially to trade, this contact was different to most European-Amerindian contacts. The thesis is written in the larger context of growing interest in the social sciences in cross-cultural contact as well as the re-examining and re-writing of established histories.
Agent technology offers an interesting computing paradigm: a program is capable of executing —autonomously or in co-operation with other programs— a particular task on behalf of a user. This has offered a new means for the development of complex distributed systems. However, due to its multi-disciplinary nature, most of the approaches in this field are not consistent with each other and are usually difficult to combine. On the other hand, not only the integration of agent platforms developed is a hard task: security is also a crucial issue for the development of agent applications, since without the appropriate methods, the functionality of agent-based systems may be severely affected. This thesis presents a thorough overview on the fundamentals of agent technology, focusing on mobile agent systems, consolidating its main notions and ideas. It also explains the security issues and technical countermeasures associated with mobile agents. Additionally, the most important unsolved issues in both agent technology and security in agent systems are discussed.
