Straight from Cisco:
"Digital subscriber line (DSL) is a modem technology that uses existing twisted-pair telephone lines to transfer high-speed data. Many types of DSL are used today; the most common are asymmetric DSL (ADSL) and symmetric DSL (SDSL). ADSL provides a higher downstream speed than upstream. SDSL provides the same speed for both upstream and downstream traffic."
Right. It would sure be nice if the amd64 releases of FreeNAS 0.7 are continued (apparently, there's a kernel panic upon bootup preventing them from releasing the amd64 alpha versions). The current i386 version is limited to 512MB of kmem (unless the kernel is recompiled), which is DEFINITELY not enough for ZFS (even a 1GB allocation is insufficient). With my max allocation at 512MB, I've had the kernel panic about 5 times in one day while transferring large amounts of data.
My advice to those of you who are using ZFS in FreeBSD: set the vm.kmem_size and vm.kmem_size_max in
I remember ripping DVDs about 4 years ago in Linux, and it was a painless GUI affair (can't remember the exact software I used then, sorry). I'm using OS X now, and I usually use Handbrake, which is also available for linux. It, however, doesn't offer anything but hard-encoded subtitles, which is a big pain in a multilingual environment.
In your case, however, I'd probably recommend just going ahead and learning Japanese. That way, you'd never have to worry about which audio/subtitle track you rip; both would do just fine.
Actually, I'm using a 100Mb line right now in Tokyo (roughly $50/mo. with a static IP address and all fees), and I do get the full 100 megabits, full duplex. Of course, I'm usually limited by the other party's connection, but when downloading things within Japan, the computer immediately slows down due to the hard disk sustaining writes at 8-9MB/sec.
I wonder if the 160Mb connection mentioned in the summary includes a gigabit router...
"Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan Perlis