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The news is basically good. Bowing to the inevitable, perhaps, and certainly to the wishes of Mac users who own third-party DVD burners, Apple has added support for the DVD+R and DVD+RW formats to Panther, according to CNET New.com. This doesn't yet extend to Apple's software like iDVD, however.

Someday your editor will live in a universe where all of this makes sense. We do understand that Apple has been pushing the DVD-R format and that the battle has been going on for years. No doubt if we engaged in serious DVD work, we'd be ready to whup up on the lot of them. Just look at this:

The company has shipped some machines with Sony-made drives that can write to both the +R and -R standards, but in those cases it turned off the +R capabilities.

And for sheer eye-glazing lunacy, try to penetrate the following:

Although they are both formats for recording DVDs that can be played on PCs and in many consumer DVD players, DVD+RW drives cannot write to DVD-R or DVD-RW media, just as DVD-RW drives can't write to DVD+R or DVD+RW media. Increasingly popular are drives that are capable of writing both formats.

We think they should call one format "Freddy," another "Oswald," another "Tina, the last "Gloria" perhaps. And while we're at it, let's substitute "pumpkin pie" for the medium itself. All right, here goes:

Although they are both formats for recording pumpkin pies that can be played on PCs and in many consumer pumpkin pie players, Freddy drives cannot write to Oswald or Tina media, just as Tina drives can't write to Gloria or Freddy media. Increasingly popular are drives that are capable of writing both formats.

After rewriting the above several times, we're still not sure we have it right. Have we made our point?

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