Creating The Ultimate CD-Burning Machine?

Joe Schwendt asks: "Since CD Burners have become so cheap, almost everyone has one. But there are still problems associated with them, especially the faster ones (8X or 12X). It pretty much ties up your machine during the burning process, otherwise you run the risk of creating yet another coaster. If you were going to create a dedicated CD Burning machine on a network with higher speed burners, what would that be? Is a 486 enough? How much RAM? IDE or SCSI? Is Linux the ideal burning platform, or do we still have to use something from the dark side of the force (stripped down Windows95/98/NT/2000 install)? What about burning applications? "