I guess I was bashing a square peg into a round hole:) Using templates around hetergenous data structures makes a lot more sense than what I thought they were for.
A special syntax since it acts very much like a structure. And, as the Sun docs state, "Arrays are supported directly by the Java programming language; there is no array class. Arrays are implicit extensions of the Object class, so you can assign an array to a variable whose type is declared as Object." There is no class to implement the length member like the original poster wanted. Implicit isn't quite the same as is, IMO.
"Not messing around with "dirty details" is one of the goals of almost every language."
One of the goals, yes, but that doesn't mean you don't sit down and work with them somewhere. Smart programmers abstract it away, as I suggested to the original poster who stated that he hates mucking about with the primitive types. Based on how he was complaining about it, I don't think my suggestion that he abstract it away was at all off base.
You can sit down and write out a native code output setup for "common" machines, but then you've just gone and wasted a lot of effort for a sub-2% performance increase (assuming you can duplicate the OO latebinding arbitration and garbage collection any faster in "native" mode without a supporting runtime like the JVM). Each native output compiler would take at least as much man power as the one which outputs the code for use with the JVM. And then you'd need to write some sort of runtime library which duplicated the JVM for the functionality I mentioned above.
So rather than spending thousands of man hours working on that, why not wait until 18 months from now when your code runs 200% faster? The tiny little "god" of performance is tempting, but don't go towards it if it means sacrificing all the gains from computer science in the past 20-30 years. Assembler is fast, but no one uses it except in device drivers and careful cases where it's found to be more beneficial than doing it in a higher level language.
An Array is not an object. You merely are accessing a data field in its structure which is R/O. How is this hard to understand? Is is hard to understand that a vector is multidimensional (unlike a string), so its size, not its length is what you want? It makes logical sense to me.
As for the data types, if you don't want to mess around with the "dirty details," stick to pure Computer Science languages and scenarios. In the RealWorld(TM), you write code that deals with things. I know you want to do things in less code, but it's about working smarter, not complaining about working harder. Write a class which does all the nitty gritty in an easy-to-use interface, and use only that interface. Make it generic and useful, and you'll be able to re-use that object in all your projects.
As an example of working smarter, take Glade. With it, rather than spending 5-10 lines of code laying out and initializing a widget or part of a widget in a mega-huge init call, I can simple create an xml description file that also has the names of the callbacks for each widget. Then I just write the code to handle the call backs, and include one call that loads my template and populates it. The same is true with PHP. Why should I include hard-coded strings everywhere, when I can load a template and just ereg_replace all the escaped variable names? I can work alongside people using Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and I need never tear my hair out because of it.
" > hash tables. We could write methods that > operated on all variables and data.
What you really need is generics (as in C++ templates). "
No, he missed it. OO has a great feature called polymorphism. Granted, templates can work better (less code to write) for small situations, but for large, complex situations where different types do need to be handled differently, polymorphism is the answer he's looking for.
Templates for powers will work great on all number types where the power operation is the same, but when you need to also have a member which takes strings and converts and powers and converts back and returns that, you'll want polymorphism.
Misuse of computers is covered in Canada's criminal code.
Part IX -- Sections 321-378 ("Offences Against Rights of Property") Part X -- Sections 379-427 ("Fraudulent Transactions Relating to Contracts and Trade")
Specifically, s342.1(1) and s430(1.1) talk about misuse of computer systems own by other people.
As another poster mentioned, I'm sure every country in the world has laws regarding (mis)use of computers without permission. Does this stop the RIAA? Does the DoS attack count as misuse of the RIAA owns all the machines DoSing? Are these laws clear enough on denied access to services as well?
Considering the large numbers of legal systems involved, that's really hard to say.
Could you please reconsider your position on having underlined links on your website?
I don't know about you, but I hate playing "magic mouse cursor" and "computer user, 1st day" as I relearn a new interface for every website I ever browse.
I know I try to keep my site dead easy to use. It still looks good, IMO, and it has such features as underlined hyper links for easy finding. Wonder of wonders, I also have it setup so that if you visit a link, it changes colour. Stops people from accidently revisiting stuff.
Greg Egan is an author, programmer, and scientist.
In one of his short stories, he mentions having a setup where a whitelist of people you know are allowed to send you email for free, and anything else requires a minimum payment (which can be set from 0 to as high as you want). Tired of spam? I wouldn't be, for 25 cents a spam. That'd pad my bank account nicely.
How could it be done? There are already proposed extentsions to the SMTP command set so that clients and servers could agree on an amount and pass a token to each other (be sure you're using a TLS aware MTA, like Postfix), and it could be verified by both sides with the 3rd-party escrow server (which manages the money). Paypal is the only current online money system with enough momentum to make this work well for everyone, but maybe another one will come up:)
Either way, it makes it easy to stop spam by removing the one thing that spammers like -- the cheapness. Only people who want spam (haha), or people who don't live in the 21st-century (MTA wise) will have to deal with the 20th century scourge known as spam.
I'm sure they would've released sooner, but all us regular subscribers have been chomping at the bit for War3 support (too bad I beat the game already). Shipping without War3 support would piss off way too many people.
And, if you can't afford 5$ a month, you should rethink your current career. I make practically nothing, but I can handle 100$ a year (CDN) no problem.
"Sometimes I think that the first experience most slashdotters had with being 'online' was in the 14.4k era. Very few remember the fun of war-dialing and looking for BBSes."
Fun? It was bad enough when our BBS lists had old numbers that had become "home" numbers again. I'd hate to think how annoyed you'd make customers now, plus war-dialing will get most phone companies to flag your number nowadays:)
Sasktel has no cap on any traffic. With their business plan (2 static IPs, allowed to run "servers"), you have NO CAP.
So for 70$ a month, you get 150k/s (Moz daily in 1.5mins about), and 16k/s up. For double that, you get 300k/s down and 80k/s up. No caps!
Granted, you need to use some traffic shaping. Going full on sending 80k/s causes the DSL routers to generate large packet queues which leave your latency ever higher and higher until you reach some timeout limitation in IP. No caps means I can push/pull terabytes a month:)
Many locations use static configurations loaded from a remote server. If the company really likes security, each system would have a burnt CD for booting + a remote share for home directory data. Or a mainframe style setup with thin clients.
A small, low power, low noise, inexpensive box that can be placed somewhere in a building that will find its own way is very much a sophisticated solution, much more so that a trojan attack.
Alan Cox was calling Theo to task because he didn't like how Theo concealed the exact security problem until a workaround was given out. This is an attitude some developers have. It's not the best attitue from a customer/end-user standpoint, but some people who write code and give it for free use still don't understand it. Alanx Cox sounds like, despite him being a valuable asset to the community, he does not understand this.
If he'd have said, "for all we know, OpenBSD could attract near-earth bodies" would you post this comment as "eerily prescient" on the recent asteroid stories? Sometimes things just aren't related. Despite what Mulder may think.
This is an important point. Sacrificing perceived performance on today's machines for easier use and design on all future machines is something people just can't handle.
But everywhere is moving to this approach. Don't believe we? Check out Glade. Write your interface in an XML file, then load it via libglade. Wowy. spiffy, it also makes i18n and l10n easier since the interface is (tada) more flexible and easier to change.
Laying out things in Win32 API calls is slow, buggy, and hard. Using a visual form designer in Visual Studio for MFC or VB apps seems fun, but do people bark about it being slow? No. Because it's not that slow at all, and you win so much more from it.
"The interface is inconsistent," Inconsistent with what? Office Outlook? Outlook Express? Mutt? Pine? Eudora? Juno?
All email clients I've ever tried had different interfaces within a few bounds (like the 3 pane layout most graphical clients share). Mozilla is no different. In fact, it's even less different since it looks entirely like the NS4 email client.
" and it doesn't make it obvious what is going on at any one time."
But it does. When I click a message, it throbbs and loads the message. Most of the time (except when reading large directories on the server), it's so fast that I don't even notice it's taking time to do anything. But when it's slow, it does update the status bar. Plus if I do something I don't want to do, there's a nice stop button.
"There's nothing like the big 'Send/Recv' button in OE, and when you collect mail, you have no idea what's going on."
The big "get mail" button not turn your crank? Message dirs that receive new mail being in bold, with new message counts in brackets, and a little green down-pointing arrow like in the getmail button just not obvious enough for you? Maybe you should switch to AOL. They have a nice sound file to tell you that you have new mail. Oh, that's right, you can configure Mozilla to play a sound file just like AOL for that. How is it hard again?
If you're done trolling, let's get down to the facts: Mozilla is the only IMAP4 with SSL supporting open client which will also check my IMAP subfolders (which I have told it to check) for mail. Balsa/Sylpheed just do a brute force check every subfolder (last time I tried them). If you don't understand why that's good, that's probably why you're so happy with OE that you're spreading lies on message boards. For people like me who have big IMAP trees, one entry per mailing list/email alias, Mozilla is really the only choice. I practically live in it on my workstation.
If you're smart, capable, and under 18
on
RIAA Smacked by DoS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This kind of thing, short of FLYING over to their HQ and having a sit in, is the only means you have of expressing yourself.
"$1 a month from every one of the lwn regulars would pay their requested salaries with NO problem. "
Then why not? 12$ US a year + an option to buy a year of content on CD for 5$ US seems pretty good. You get to read all the time if you just want the news, and for reseachers you can buy all their back news for 5$/year. That's pretty cheap compared to some archival places. Maybe they have a special 16$ offer for regulars which gives them automatic CD support, 11 months, + 1 free bonus month.
That's something even I, on minimum wage (currently 137$ US a week where I live) can afford.
Their drives were always whisper quiet, and very cool to the touch. The only drives I used for the longest time were Fujitsus. Then Fujitsu went out of the consumer HD business to focus on the high-end business (where the big margins are).
My 20gb Fujitsu of only a year started to not work in my PC a few weeks back, and it's been replaced by a 20gb WD. It's also quiet, and seems to be about the same speed. However, it took WD 1.5 years to catch up to Fujitsu in this respect. And it doesn't (like my Quantums) have any S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensors, even though every Fujitsu I've ever tried supported this:-/
The movie Gandhi is very accurate. In fact, it's a video biography by another name. Ben Kingsley does an amazing Gandhi. It was used for my high school 20th century history class, in addition to the books.
Now, for the media coverage, don't push the computer angle. Push the usage angle. Always talk about fair use, the ability to watch things how YOU want to watch them -- once you've paid for them. If you always emphasize that you paid for it and were just using how you wanted, the average joe will sympathize. They like their VCRs and DVDs, but they don't like how DVDs won't let them skip FBI warnings (I think those are stupid, if I ever touched the internals of a DVD player program, I'd have it automatically skip segments which disable navigation controls).
Gandhi didn't get sympathy, he inspired. MLK did not get sympathy, he inspired. Mother Teresa inspired. If you want to win this, you must inspire people to see things differently. It can be hard, and it can be lonely, but it is a power which can move any mountain.
Yeah, you get thrown in jail. That happens when you're involved in an unjust system. Should I be arrested for walking on the sidewalk while black? Should I be arrested for listening to my music from a CDR instead of the CD master copy?
No. But you'll be thrown in jail until you can attract enough attention to the problem. Even then, you will still be thrown in jail. However, by doing this and publicising it, you educate the public about the system. If Bruce Perens does this, geeks will know and care. If YOU are thrown in jail, and more like you are thrown in jail, and you explain this to the media, average people will know and care.
They are out of money for professional writers. However, why not continue in another form?
LWN was run voluntarily at first. Can it continue in this fashion? I mean, I like reading the excellent editorials, but I can also live with fewer of them. Say, the amount one person would willingly write in their spare time and contribute to the community.
Paying jobs are nice to have, I know. But LWN could continue as a hobby, like Kernel Traffic exists today. As long as you have hosting which provides bandwidth and the archives, everything can continue.
If all else fails, at least let other people mirror your archives. This way the great work LWN has contributed to the community will not go away. I only wish my financial situation were better, so I could give back some money to make up for all the times I've read LWN since 1998 (I've been reading every weeklf edition since 1999) until present and found the content to be useful.
Yea, but then you save CPU time GZIPing the whitespace. There is a trade off for enefficiency somewhere, wether you pay for it with bandwidth used or CPU time used. I'm sure you guys aren't upgrading the cluster anytime soon, so why not switch to a less CPU-intensive-to-compress base page?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I was bashing a square peg into a round hole :) Using templates around hetergenous data structures makes a lot more sense than what I thought they were for.
A special syntax since it acts very much like a structure. And, as the Sun docs state, "Arrays are supported directly by the Java programming language; there is no array class. Arrays are implicit extensions of the Object class, so you can assign an array to a variable whose type is declared as Object." There is no class to implement the length member like the original poster wanted. Implicit isn't quite the same as is, IMO.
"Not messing around with "dirty details" is one of the goals of almost every language."
One of the goals, yes, but that doesn't mean you don't sit down and work with them somewhere. Smart programmers abstract it away, as I suggested to the original poster who stated that he hates mucking about with the primitive types. Based on how he was complaining about it, I don't think my suggestion that he abstract it away was at all off base.
Because it's less efficient in a man-hours way.
You can sit down and write out a native code output setup for "common" machines, but then you've just gone and wasted a lot of effort for a sub-2% performance increase (assuming you can duplicate the OO latebinding arbitration and garbage collection any faster in "native" mode without a supporting runtime like the JVM). Each native output compiler would take at least as much man power as the one which outputs the code for use with the JVM. And then you'd need to write some sort of runtime library which duplicated the JVM for the functionality I mentioned above.
So rather than spending thousands of man hours working on that, why not wait until 18 months from now when your code runs 200% faster? The tiny little "god" of performance is tempting, but don't go towards it if it means sacrificing all the gains from computer science in the past 20-30 years. Assembler is fast, but no one uses it except in device drivers and careful cases where it's found to be more beneficial than doing it in a higher level language.
An Array is not an object. You merely are accessing a data field in its structure which is R/O. How is this hard to understand? Is is hard to understand that a vector is multidimensional (unlike a string), so its size, not its length is what you want? It makes logical sense to me.
As for the data types, if you don't want to mess around with the "dirty details," stick to pure Computer Science languages and scenarios. In the RealWorld(TM), you write code that deals with things. I know you want to do things in less code, but it's about working smarter, not complaining about working harder. Write a class which does all the nitty gritty in an easy-to-use interface, and use only that interface. Make it generic and useful, and you'll be able to re-use that object in all your projects.
As an example of working smarter, take Glade. With it, rather than spending 5-10 lines of code laying out and initializing a widget or part of a widget in a mega-huge init call, I can simple create an xml description file that also has the names of the callbacks for each widget. Then I just write the code to handle the call backs, and include one call that loads my template and populates it. The same is true with PHP. Why should I include hard-coded strings everywhere, when I can load a template and just ereg_replace all the escaped variable names? I can work alongside people using Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and I need never tear my hair out because of it.
"
> hash tables. We could write methods that
> operated on all variables and data.
What you really need is generics (as in C++ templates).
"
No, he missed it. OO has a great feature called polymorphism. Granted, templates can work better (less code to write) for small situations, but for large, complex situations where different types do need to be handled differently, polymorphism is the answer he's looking for.
Templates for powers will work great on all number types where the power operation is the same, but when you need to also have a member which takes strings and converts and powers and converts back and returns that, you'll want polymorphism.
Java 2 was Java 1.2. Java 3 is Java 1.3. Sun released Java 4 a while ago (Java 1.4).
;0
Solaris 9 anyone? Oh, right, 2.9...
Misuse of computers is covered in Canada's criminal code.
Part IX -- Sections 321-378 ("Offences Against Rights of Property")
Part X -- Sections 379-427 ("Fraudulent Transactions Relating to Contracts and Trade")
Specifically, s342.1(1) and s430(1.1) talk about misuse of computer systems own by other people.
A good break down of the pros and cons of s342.1 right here.
As another poster mentioned, I'm sure every country in the world has laws regarding (mis)use of computers without permission. Does this stop the RIAA? Does the DoS attack count as misuse of the RIAA owns all the machines DoSing? Are these laws clear enough on denied access to services as well?
Considering the large numbers of legal systems involved, that's really hard to say.
Could you please reconsider your position on having underlined links on your website?
I don't know about you, but I hate playing "magic mouse cursor" and "computer user, 1st day" as I relearn a new interface for every website I ever browse.
I know I try to keep my site dead easy to use. It still looks good, IMO, and it has such features as underlined hyper links for easy finding. Wonder of wonders, I also have it setup so that if you visit a link, it changes colour. Stops people from accidently revisiting stuff.
Greg Egan is an author, programmer, and scientist.
:)
In one of his short stories, he mentions having a setup where a whitelist of people you know are allowed to send you email for free, and anything else requires a minimum payment (which can be set from 0 to as high as you want). Tired of spam? I wouldn't be, for 25 cents a spam. That'd pad my bank account nicely.
How could it be done? There are already proposed extentsions to the SMTP command set so that clients and servers could agree on an amount and pass a token to each other (be sure you're using a TLS aware MTA, like Postfix), and it could be verified by both sides with the 3rd-party escrow server (which manages the money). Paypal is the only current online money system with enough momentum to make this work well for everyone, but maybe another one will come up
Either way, it makes it easy to stop spam by removing the one thing that spammers like -- the cheapness. Only people who want spam (haha), or people who don't live in the 21st-century (MTA wise) will have to deal with the 20th century scourge known as spam.
" Anyone else notice that in the last couple of days Microsoft's ad..."
Nope, haven't seen a thing.
I'm sure they would've released sooner, but all us regular subscribers have been chomping at the bit for War3 support (too bad I beat the game already). Shipping without War3 support would piss off way too many people.
And, if you can't afford 5$ a month, you should rethink your current career. I make practically nothing, but I can handle 100$ a year (CDN) no problem.
"Sometimes I think that the first experience most slashdotters had with being 'online' was in the 14.4k era. Very few remember the fun of war-dialing and looking for BBSes."
:)
Fun? It was bad enough when our BBS lists had old numbers that had become "home" numbers again. I'd hate to think how annoyed you'd make customers now, plus war-dialing will get most phone companies to flag your number nowadays
Sasktel has no cap on any traffic. With their business plan (2 static IPs, allowed to run "servers"), you have NO CAP.
:)
So for 70$ a month, you get 150k/s (Moz daily in 1.5mins about), and 16k/s up. For double that, you get 300k/s down and 80k/s up. No caps!
Granted, you need to use some traffic shaping. Going full on sending 80k/s causes the DSL routers to generate large packet queues which leave your latency ever higher and higher until you reach some timeout limitation in IP. No caps means I can push/pull terabytes a month
Many locations use static configurations loaded from a remote server. If the company really likes security, each system would have a burnt CD for booting + a remote share for home directory data. Or a mainframe style setup with thin clients.
A small, low power, low noise, inexpensive box that can be placed somewhere in a building that will find its own way is very much a sophisticated solution, much more so that a trojan attack.
Alan Cox was calling Theo to task because he didn't like how Theo concealed the exact security problem until a workaround was given out. This is an attitude some developers have. It's not the best attitue from a customer/end-user standpoint, but some people who write code and give it for free use still don't understand it. Alanx Cox sounds like, despite him being a valuable asset to the community, he does not understand this.
If he'd have said, "for all we know, OpenBSD could attract near-earth bodies" would you post this comment as "eerily prescient" on the recent asteroid stories? Sometimes things just aren't related. Despite what Mulder may think.
This is an important point. Sacrificing perceived performance on today's machines for easier use and design on all future machines is something people just can't handle.
But everywhere is moving to this approach. Don't believe we? Check out Glade. Write your interface in an XML file, then load it via libglade. Wowy. spiffy, it also makes i18n and l10n easier since the interface is (tada) more flexible and easier to change.
Laying out things in Win32 API calls is slow, buggy, and hard. Using a visual form designer in Visual Studio for MFC or VB apps seems fun, but do people bark about it being slow? No. Because it's not that slow at all, and you win so much more from it.
"The interface is inconsistent,"
Inconsistent with what? Office Outlook? Outlook Express? Mutt? Pine? Eudora? Juno?
All email clients I've ever tried had different interfaces within a few bounds (like the 3 pane layout most graphical clients share). Mozilla is no different. In fact, it's even less different since it looks entirely like the NS4 email client.
" and it doesn't make it obvious what is going on at any one time."
But it does. When I click a message, it throbbs and loads the message. Most of the time (except when reading large directories on the server), it's so fast that I don't even notice it's taking time to do anything. But when it's slow, it does update the status bar. Plus if I do something I don't want to do, there's a nice stop button.
"There's nothing like the big 'Send/Recv' button in OE, and when you collect mail, you have no idea what's going on."
The big "get mail" button not turn your crank? Message dirs that receive new mail being in bold, with new message counts in brackets, and a little green down-pointing arrow like in the getmail button just not obvious enough for you? Maybe you should switch to AOL. They have a nice sound file to tell you that you have new mail. Oh, that's right, you can configure Mozilla to play a sound file just like AOL for that. How is it hard again?
If you're done trolling, let's get down to the facts: Mozilla is the only IMAP4 with SSL supporting open client which will also check my IMAP subfolders (which I have told it to check) for mail. Balsa/Sylpheed just do a brute force check every subfolder (last time I tried them). If you don't understand why that's good, that's probably why you're so happy with OE that you're spreading lies on message boards. For people like me who have big IMAP trees, one entry per mailing list/email alias, Mozilla is really the only choice. I practically live in it on my workstation.
This kind of thing, short of FLYING over to their HQ and having a sit in, is the only means you have of expressing yourself.
"$1 a month from every one of the lwn regulars would pay their requested salaries with NO problem. "
Then why not? 12$ US a year + an option to buy a year of content on CD for 5$ US seems pretty good. You get to read all the time if you just want the news, and for reseachers you can buy all their back news for 5$/year. That's pretty cheap compared to some archival places. Maybe they have a special 16$ offer for regulars which gives them automatic CD support, 11 months, + 1 free bonus month.
That's something even I, on minimum wage (currently 137$ US a week where I live) can afford.
Amazing. Microsoft must be ahead of everyone else in utilizing Java for the backend, based on their latest release of MS Office ;)
Their drives were always whisper quiet, and very cool to the touch. The only drives I used for the longest time were Fujitsus. Then Fujitsu went out of the consumer HD business to focus on the high-end business (where the big margins are).
:-/
My 20gb Fujitsu of only a year started to not work in my PC a few weeks back, and it's been replaced by a 20gb WD. It's also quiet, and seems to be about the same speed. However, it took WD 1.5 years to catch up to Fujitsu in this respect. And it doesn't (like my Quantums) have any S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensors, even though every Fujitsu I've ever tried supported this
The movie Gandhi is very accurate. In fact, it's a video biography by another name. Ben Kingsley does an amazing Gandhi. It was used for my high school 20th century history class, in addition to the books.
Now, for the media coverage, don't push the computer angle. Push the usage angle. Always talk about fair use, the ability to watch things how YOU want to watch them -- once you've paid for them. If you always emphasize that you paid for it and were just using how you wanted, the average joe will sympathize. They like their VCRs and DVDs, but they don't like how DVDs won't let them skip FBI warnings (I think those are stupid, if I ever touched the internals of a DVD player program, I'd have it automatically skip segments which disable navigation controls).
Gandhi didn't get sympathy, he inspired. MLK did not get sympathy, he inspired. Mother Teresa inspired. If you want to win this, you must inspire people to see things differently. It can be hard, and it can be lonely, but it is a power which can move any mountain.
Either everyone resists an unjust law, or the unjust law stands.
Have you seen Gandhi?
Yeah, you get thrown in jail. That happens when you're involved in an unjust system. Should I be arrested for walking on the sidewalk while black? Should I be arrested for listening to my music from a CDR instead of the CD master copy?
No. But you'll be thrown in jail until you can attract enough attention to the problem. Even then, you will still be thrown in jail. However, by doing this and publicising it, you educate the public about the system. If Bruce Perens does this, geeks will know and care. If YOU are thrown in jail, and more like you are thrown in jail, and you explain this to the media, average people will know and care.
The difference? A law standing or a law falling.
They are out of money for professional writers. However, why not continue in another form?
LWN was run voluntarily at first. Can it continue in this fashion? I mean, I like reading the excellent editorials, but I can also live with fewer of them. Say, the amount one person would willingly write in their spare time and contribute to the community.
Paying jobs are nice to have, I know. But LWN could continue as a hobby, like Kernel Traffic exists today. As long as you have hosting which provides bandwidth and the archives, everything can continue.
If all else fails, at least let other people mirror your archives. This way the great work LWN has contributed to the community will not go away. I only wish my financial situation were better, so I could give back some money to make up for all the times I've read LWN since 1998 (I've been reading every weeklf edition since 1999) until present and found the content to be useful.
Yea, but then you save CPU time GZIPing the whitespace. There is a trade off for enefficiency somewhere, wether you pay for it with bandwidth used or CPU time used. I'm sure you guys aren't upgrading the cluster anytime soon, so why not switch to a less CPU-intensive-to-compress base page?