Abstract: A golf swing practice mat for placement on an underlying base is provided to aid a golfer in improving his or her swing of a golf club having a club head, said swing comprising a swing arc having a bottom-most portion thereof, said golf swing practice mat comprising: (a) a low friction, flexible and resilient top sheet that is directly contacted by the club head, and has a rigidity of 40 pounds per square inch or less; (b) a supporting pad for supporting the top sheet and for providing space for the top sheet to yield to and accommodate the bottom-most portion of a reasonably well-aligned swing arc, the supporting pad being compressible to 50% of its resting height in any area near its center line by an applied pressure thereupon of 0.

Abstract: A cache management system for dynamically switching between record caching and track caching. Statistics are collected within the cache management system to determine the type and amount of locality associated with a specific data set currently within the cache. Using these statistics, metrics of the actual hit ratio, whole-track hit ratio, and other-record-hit ratio are generated. The metrics are periodically reviewed for a given band, and the band is placed into one of three cache modes accordingly. The mode assignment determines what type of staging will be performed for data within the band in the event of a miss. The possible modes are: track mode for track-based staging, record mode for staging of a single record only, or uncached mode if no data is to be staged. If a band has been assigned to either record or track mode, the assignment is re-evaluated after for a predetermined number of I/O's (128).

Abstract: A method and apparatus for efficiently transferring a data packet on a network. The efficient transfer of data includes compressing the data as the data packet is transmitted from a repeater to a management unit by determining if a destination address of a received packet matches a stored management unit address. When the stored address does not match the destination address, the data packet is compressed. The apparatus includes a repeater, a management unit, and a packet compression mechanism. The apparatus further includes comparator circuit means for determining address comparisons and count comparisons to control data compression.