at work, yeah, i boot from a cd often. why in the hell don't they have a boot menu? it doesn't make any sense.
Because 99% of people don't have a need to boot from a CD or DVD very often, and when they do it is not much of a hassle to just press the c key. Besides, don't you have to hit a key to boot from a CD on most PC's? "Press any key to boot from CD" or something similar?
it is also a pain to eject a cd too.
Hitting the eject key that's right on the keyboard is a pain?
what is rEFIt?
An EFI boot menu. Macs don't use BIOS, they use the newer EFI "Extensible Firmware Interface" originally developed by Intel and meant to replace the older BIOS systems, but isn't used very much on PCs. Apple has boot camp that lets you run Windows, but rEFIt allows you to run more than just one OS, such as on my machine I run OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows 7.