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As the new century approaches its one-year mark, speed seems to be the name of the game. No longer content to wait until we get home to check phone messages, we do so now with cell phone pinched between chin and shoulder as we cut off the guy in the silver Lexus. It's as if we've convinced ourselves that we're running out of time. The ever-increasing need for faster technology in transportation and data processing has us, in the words of poet Ishmael Reed, "jetting through the world, our tails on fire."
But perhaps we are speeding for a reason-the triple latte we just inhaled notwithstanding. For someone like myself who admittedly wastes most of his free time, I don't really have any extra left by the time I'm sitting in traffic trying to get halfway across town. For my money, the faster I can get through meaningless tasks like driving to work. the better. Whoever said that patience was a virtue certainly didn't have to worry about getting anywhere. In this world of personal assistants, time management courses, and a get-it-done-yesterday ethic, is it too much to ask for a faster CD burner? I mean, it shouldn't take forever to burn a doggone CD, right?
Clearly, Steve Jobs didn't have us speed-conscious CD burning fans in mind when he rolled out his initial post-PowerPC line of Macs. With the USB interface he slapped on all the new boxes-for all the iMacs' futuristic look-it was as if he meant to roll back time, to send Mac users careening back to the dark days when it took 40 minutes or more to burn a full CD-R. Perhaps it was some type of karmic punishment for the free ride Mac CD-R users had enjoyed through all those years when CD-R users on the PC side were slogging through buffer underruns, hard drive partitioning, and other indignities.
But with the G4 and second-generation iMac DVs we got a glimmer of hope in the form of FireWire (aka IEEE1 394), which promised to restore to Mac CD recording all the speed we had enjoyed with SCSI. In other words, to let Mac users take advantage of all the new 12X recorders rolling off the line,...