Estimating the number of fish that return to spawn using capture-recapture methods.

Hardware and Software Requirements

Software requirements

All platforms (UNIX, Macintosh, and non-Macintosh) will require XLISP-STAT and Netscape or equivalent. The bulk of the software testing has been done on a Macintosh machine with only occasional testing on non-Macintosh machines. We've tested the simulation program with:

XLISP-STAT 3.44. There have been reports that it will not run on earlier versions, but this should not be a problem as XLISP-STAT is freely available for all platforms and can be upgraded at any time.

Netscape 2.02 and Netscape 3.0. Some students have reported a minor printing problem where certain pages containing inline images will not print completely (typically the last 5 lines on a page are not printed). If that page only is selectively reprinted, it prints completely.

Hardware requirements

Because of widely differing hardware and operating system options found on UNIX workstations, we are unable to outline any hardware requirements with any degree of certainty. However, most workstations usually have large amounts of RAM so we don't expect a problem in running the WWW-browser and XLISP-STAT simultaneously.

Our student computer lab is equipped with Macintosh PowerPCs running System 7.5 with 16 Mb RAM. We have had no reports of problems from students in running the simulation program on these machines. The authors have also tested the program on a Macintosh 040 machine with 16 Mb RAM and also found no problems.

Some students have smaller Macintosh machines at home, and they (along with a referee of this paper) have experienced problems when they only have 8 Mb RAM. It appears that the System software requires over 3 Mb RAM, Netscape another 4 Mb RAM, leaving insufficient memory to also run XLISP-STAT. In these cases we recommend that the students print the pages describing the simulation module, save the simulation program to their local disk using the browser, quit the WWW browser, and then launch XLISP-STAT alone and run the simulation program.

We have had only limited experience with non-Macintosh hardware. Some students have tried to use the software on their non-Macintosh machines at home. The most common problem reported is the 8 Mb RAM is again insufficient to run Windows, Netscape, and XLIST-STAT simultaneously. We again recommend that they proceed as outlined above for Macintosh machines with small amounts of RAM.