If Google would leave this as-is, it's a huge flop with no real potential. It's buzz-generating, but a novelty.
However...
If they roll-out APIs for Search, GMail, Docs, YouTube, AdSense/AdWords, OpenSocial, etc, and they integrate these carefully with this App Engine... well.. that's a horse of a different color.
THAT would be something to talk about.
And THAT would be something on the order of a Next-Gen-Win32API-like-advantage.
Probably. Because if Google App engine is your first choice you're probably an amateur.
But if you're good at what you do, you'd write a data abstraction layer that interfaces w/ the Google Data Objects.
Migrating would only force you to adapt that abstraction layer to whatever platform you're migrating to.
This is a common practice since all current RDBMS implementations do things a little differently. Right now it's relatively easy to write such a layer.
W/ GApps it would be a little more difficult, since the layer would be abstracting not just minor syntax issues but also more cumbersome data model issues. But it's nothing extraordinary.
Document-based Databases have been around for longer than relational databases.
CouchDB is an interesting project, but it's not going to revolutionize anything. CERTAINLY not web-development which isn't even the target-market for Couch.
3. If it's just as easy to use an IR Pen as it is to use... uhh.. FINGERS.. then why don't laptop touchpads come w/ pens?
4. To accomplish that demo, the guy used a $1000 laptop, a $200 WII, a $500 projector and 2 half-assed pens that were connected by wire to a power supply.
Assuming you can buy such a pen for $25, that's a total of $1750.
5. Go read the/. story for your mini-projector. It'll give you good enough resolution for a cellphone projector (Think VHS resolution) but it's nowhere near precise enough to use for a computer desktop.
6. In other words, you're still talking out of your ass. You're still just so rampantly anti-MS that you let that trump your better judgement.
My point is that Surface is far more complex than the OP gave it credit for when he said it's 'basically an iPhone.'
And let me get this straight... within THREE years you expect to be able to purchase either a large LCD/Plasma display OR a quality projector unit (including bulb), AND the usual components of a modern media PC (fluff things like a including camera, remote control, etc as well as a C2D machine with ample storage and horsepower) for $100?
Seriously?
Even if you already have the PC, you're still going to contend you'll be able to build the display for $100?...If i were you, I'd just hang your head and admit rhetorical flourish because you know as well as I do that $100 is a HUGE hyperbole.
Tell me, how do you KNOW that? I mean, if you've got, ya know, FACTS, then by all means share.
But if it's just speculation, then, really, why?
Because the GP is correct. it DOES recognize Blue Tooth devices, and it does recognize WHERE you set them on the table. For example, you set your cell phone down, and it puts a "Drop Zone" circle around the phone so you can simply drag photos, contacts, etc, and drop them on the phone.
It uses cameras for this--to recognize objects placed upon it. And the software that powers the cameras can do OCI, object detection, etc. I mean, you can set two phones down, or two cameras, and drag and drop photos between them. They both are emitting Blue Tooth, yet the Surface can determine which physical camera matches which Blue Tooth signal.
Say what you want, unless you can explain to me why the iPhone can't do this, then you're over generalizing and you're dismissing a product that you seem to have little understanding of.
Of COURSE it's about money, but that doesn't mean it's not ALSO about morality!
The bean counters create a probability curve to estimate how much revenue they could lose if the perception were to become that GOOG is manipulating their results and giving preference to the customers paying DC for search engine marketing.
That is, how much would they lose by looking amoral.
Subtract that from the projected revenue from that DC unit.
If the number is negative on most points in the probability curve, then it's a no-brainer.
But even if it's in the "barely positive" territory, say, less than $10MM a year, I could still see an enlightened manager, thinking of that motto, making the decision to forgo that marginal revenue to maintain brand cachet that is difficult to value but that could be negatively impacted by the perception of conflict of interest.
So, certainly, it's an issue about money. But that doesn't preclude accounting for the morality of it.
Casinos, like all business, spend a healthy amount of time and money determining where they're losing money. And they put in place corrective actions to stem it.
The reason counting is so ineffective now is because it used to be profitable. There WERE dozens of teams, but we're talking 70's-90's.
Technology has helped casinos. But so has more than a few expose books written by people who did, literally, make millions from the casinos.
The threat of legal action is NOT the same as legal action.
It takes about 20 minutes, $0.50 in postage and one sheet of fancy high-bond paper to threaten. It's trivial. And probably rather successful.
And let's be real.. this kid isn't involved in an RIAA lawsuit, he's not being sued by SCO for some linux code that NOBODY cares about outside the people reading this website.
This is politics, a guy who made it easy to protest against BushCo.
I guarantee that he can raise $50,000 for legal defense in about 3 days if he publicizes it. This is the power of the NetRoots.
Actually, all you really need to do is look around.
Me, and the MILLIONS of other people in my (large) market have a choice, right now, as I'm writing, of a decent-sized Hi Def VOD library.
The only appreciable difference between this and Blu-Ray is that the VOD is currently 1080i, and that it's a VOD rental.
But when you talk of the "infrastructure investments" you're not talking of consumer-end storage, you're talking distribution. And it would be a trivial addition to this technology to allow recording on the consumer end, turning a rental into a purchase.
"People aren't going to buy machines strictly for video games when their dvr/computer/HD player/food processor already plays games" <br><br> Exactly! Which is why Nintendo is so lucky that PCs can't play games. <br><br>...Oh, wait.. <br><br> (And, not to rain on your second argument, but I can get Hi-Def Video On Demand from my cable co.)
One counter started at Zero, the other at One?...These kind of bugs are written all the time....Of course, this is why the software should be OSS. The more eyeballs, the more people running in debug mode just to play around and have fun, the more people slicing and dicing the source code, the better.
It's hard to believe this is even an issue. The problem is that the people making voting machines (like Diebold) come from Banking sectors, where privacy and private, proprietary systems are the modus operandi.
Seems to me a good way to fix this would be to get some high-profile Non-Profs and top-brand CS schools (I'm thinking MIT, Apache Foundation, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, etc) all working together to gather some grant money, build the hardware and software solutions, open everything up for scrutiny, and produce a working product.
We can wave our arms over what somebody SHOULD build, but if we had a compelling alternative ready to go, it'd be a lot easier to pressure governments to do the right thing.
I would never have used UnBoxed if it wasn't part of Tivo, I'll give you that. And sure, a big reason is that I'm already a Netflix subscriber.
But I can sit at work, buy a movie from UnBoxed, and have it on my Tivo by the time I get home at night. And they have new releases. (And for what it's worth, Tivo2Go lets me watch the UnBoxed movies on my laptop.)
And Rhapsody offers a similar proposition: The reason most music listening is now done on a PC or iPod is that it's so much easier. The content is virtually unlimited. Still, I've had an RCA-to-minijack cable plugged into the Phono input on my Amp for years so I can plug my iPod into my home stereo when I'm at home.
Rhapsody over Tivo S3 is compelling to me because the source quality of the music is the same as I get from music I buy on iTunes, but the Tivo has a digital-audio-out jack that gives far better audio performance than the RCA-to-minijack solution. And I can change songs using my remote.....Sure, nobody would buy Tivo for these things. But they ARE value-added services. ESPECIALLY for those people already using Rhapsody or Unboxed.
"That's just an iterative loop, inefficiently implemented using recursion. Why not use 'for' or 'while'?"
Not necessarily.
For example, a project I'm working on right now has a calculation-engine not entirely dissimilar to what you have in Excel. The major difference being that it doesn't implement a formula language. (Instead of a formula language, individual calculations are defined by creating a class that implements the ICalculation interface.)
Anyhoo, a major part of this system is a subsystem for identifying circular dependencies.
So it gathers all the dependency info for each calculation, combines it all into a single data structure, and recurses thru the structure looking for circular references. Originally, the class kept the data structure in a protected property, and the method doing the recursion would pass the current node and an array of its direct-line-of-dependents in the recursive call.
This created an overflow condition about 10% of the time.
So we made the original data structure a bit more complex, having it keep track of the current node and its direct dependents, and instead only passed a reference to that "bookmarked" node with each recursive call.
This is a problem that doesn't lend itself to iteration because we need to look vertically at the tree structure, looking directly up the tree to see what is in this direct-dependency line. That is, we need to process the data structure from Top-to-bottom, Left-To-Right. Whereas iterating thru the tree would be done in a (L2R, T2B) fashion.
And, sure, you CAN iterate in the needed fashion (T2B, L2R) but the code to do so would be MUCH more convoluted than iterating in a conventional (L2R, T2B) manner, and, indeed, more convoluted than the recursive solution.
Anyway, this is definitely an edge-case: There are many cases of recursion being used when iteration should be. But you can, indeed, limit stack space by keeping data outside of the method and only passing references down the stack, acting on the referenced data, and returning a boolean.
So the firewire port supports 2-way comm? So I PC can send a command to the cable box to change a channel via the firewire port?
If that's the case, that's awesome, and I didn't realize that. You're still left with the problem of dual tuners -- you'd need 2 cable boxes to emulate the functionality you get from Tivo -- but nevertheless, it's a workable, elegant solution if you can indeed control the cable box via firewire.
You're absolutely right about the ease of creating stack overflow conditions in Java.
I mean, this is an issue with recursion in ALL languages, but Java is worse than most. I'm not as learned in the internals of Java as I am of the languages I do daily, but my guess is that it has to do with the types that Java stores on the stack as opposed to the types that it stores on the heap.
Practically, the best way I've found to avoid overflow conditions is to limit the use of local variables as much as possible, and do most the work by passing down a reference to an object. Objects are stored on the heap, and the only thing on the stack in each recursive call is the local var that holds the reference.
Of course, it's impossible to entirely eliminate the use of local vars inside the recursive function, but limiting their use is essential.
And closures in JavaScript are awesome. JavaScript itself is a terribly awesome language. So many developers see JavaScript as, essentially, means to an end, only good for DOM manipulation. They're missing out on one of the better languages out there, right under their nose.
True, but if you don't like references, you might ask yourself why you're in this business.
I mean, sure, pointer arithmetic can be complex and convoluted, but, conceptually, if you find if HARD, you may not have made the right career choices.
Same thing with other techniques that get lumped in the "hard" category like recursion, closures, etc.
:: Oops. Ignore the previous post. I rewrote my post into bullet-point form and accidentally included the long-form at the bottom.::
1. Nice straw man. It's not about networking. It's about plug-and-play networking. About zero-setup. Contrast that with your DIY DVR.
2. I can backup and watch all my Tivo content on my PC and my Laptop. So no, I can't browse Tivo like any other Samba share, but I don't need to. Yes, Tivo has DRM. No, the Tivo DRM does not restrict me from doing what I want to do.
3. CableCARD doesn't work with a Dish. So you use an IR Blaster for that. With a DIY DVR, you use an IR Blaster whether you have a Dish OR Cable. So no, Tivo isn't perfect, but this is a far more elegant solution for Cable customers (vastly outnumbering dish customers) than using an IR Blaster.
4. Due to CableCARD, I can access my VOD services right thru my DVR, Including the HBO On Demand, Cinnemax On Demand, etc. Try THAT with an IR Blaster.
5. If you have issues with finding HD content on YOUR provider, you should take that up with your provider. I have 30 channels offering 1080i and another 10 offering 720p. And despite your claim, these stations are showing true HD content. Sure, a movie from the 40's, 50's, or even 60's won't look any better at 1080p than it will at 480p. But masters exist for movies and televison made in the last, oh, THIRTY YEARS that do contain enough source detail to produce flawless 1080p encodings. Seriously, do you think that the theaters way back in the stone ages of the 1970's were showing movies at 480i? Of COURSE they weren't.
6. I DARE YOU to spec-out a DIY DVR (PC Based) that gives you 2 HDTV tuners allowing the simultaneous recording of 2 1080i streams (1080i since no cable operator I've seen is offering 1080p yet), that has HDMI outputs as well as digital audio output, and a functional remote control. If you can build it all -- case, main board, disk, RAM, sound card w/ Optical-out, video card w/ HDMI-out, DUAL HD tuners, remote control, IR reciever, and IR Blaster for set-top-box control -- and you can do it for $900 (the cost of Tivo plus a lifetime subscription), then I'll concede the argument.
But i think you know as well as I do, just by looking at that shopping list, that doing so would be an awfully tall order.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree... sorta.
It's all about the APIs.
If Google would leave this as-is, it's a huge flop with no real potential. It's buzz-generating, but a novelty.
However...
If they roll-out APIs for Search, GMail, Docs, YouTube, AdSense/AdWords, OpenSocial, etc, and they integrate these carefully with this App Engine... well.. that's a horse of a different color.
THAT would be something to talk about.
And THAT would be something on the order of a Next-Gen-Win32API-like-advantage.
Probably. Because if Google App engine is your first choice you're probably an amateur.
But if you're good at what you do, you'd write a data abstraction layer that interfaces w/ the Google Data Objects.
Migrating would only force you to adapt that abstraction layer to whatever platform you're migrating to.
This is a common practice since all current RDBMS implementations do things a little differently. Right now it's relatively easy to write such a layer.
W/ GApps it would be a little more difficult, since the layer would be abstracting not just minor syntax issues but also more cumbersome data model issues. But it's nothing extraordinary.
Document-based Databases have been around for longer than relational databases.
CouchDB is an interesting project, but it's not going to revolutionize anything. CERTAINLY not web-development which isn't even the target-market for Couch.
1. No doubt that's an awesome setup.
/. story for your mini-projector. It'll give you good enough resolution for a cellphone projector (Think VHS resolution) but it's nowhere near precise enough to use for a computer desktop.
2. It's not the same as the surface.
3. If it's just as easy to use an IR Pen as it is to use... uhh.. FINGERS.. then why don't laptop touchpads come w/ pens?
4. To accomplish that demo, the guy used a $1000 laptop, a $200 WII, a $500 projector and 2 half-assed pens that were connected by wire to a power supply.
Assuming you can buy such a pen for $25, that's a total of $1750.
5. Go read the
6. In other words, you're still talking out of your ass. You're still just so rampantly anti-MS that you let that trump your better judgement.
Care to try again?
(You're still about $1650 above your $100 quote)
My point is that Surface is far more complex than the OP gave it credit for when he said it's 'basically an iPhone.'
/Plasma display OR a quality projector unit (including bulb), AND the usual components of a modern media PC (fluff things like a including camera, remote control, etc as well as a C2D machine with ample storage and horsepower) for $100?
...If i were you, I'd just hang your head and admit rhetorical flourish because you know as well as I do that $100 is a HUGE hyperbole.
And let me get this straight... within THREE years you expect to be able to purchase either a large LCD
Seriously?
Even if you already have the PC, you're still going to contend you'll be able to build the display for $100?
so basically you're just a conspiracy theorist?
Typical.
Isn't it tough being a cliche?
And, of course, cameras that are able to determine what, exactly, was placed upon the table top, including OCR, bar code reading, etc.
I mean, you can set multiple BT devices on the table top, and it will put draw a "drop zone" circle around each one.
It's cameras are able to match a specific BT signal to it's physical hardware.
It's a bit more complex then you're giving it credit for.
Tell me, how do you KNOW that? I mean, if you've got, ya know, FACTS, then by all means share.
But if it's just speculation, then, really, why?
Because the GP is correct. it DOES recognize Blue Tooth devices, and it does recognize WHERE you set them on the table. For example, you set your cell phone down, and it puts a "Drop Zone" circle around the phone so you can simply drag photos, contacts, etc, and drop them on the phone.
It uses cameras for this--to recognize objects placed upon it. And the software that powers the cameras can do OCI, object detection, etc. I mean, you can set two phones down, or two cameras, and drag and drop photos between them. They both are emitting Blue Tooth, yet the Surface can determine which physical camera matches which Blue Tooth signal.
Say what you want, unless you can explain to me why the iPhone can't do this, then you're over generalizing and you're dismissing a product that you seem to have little understanding of.
Of COURSE it's about money, but that doesn't mean it's not ALSO about morality!
The bean counters create a probability curve to estimate how much revenue they could lose if the perception were to become that GOOG is manipulating their results and giving preference to the customers paying DC for search engine marketing.
That is, how much would they lose by looking amoral.
Subtract that from the projected revenue from that DC unit.
If the number is negative on most points in the probability curve, then it's a no-brainer.
But even if it's in the "barely positive" territory, say, less than $10MM a year, I could still see an enlightened manager, thinking of that motto, making the decision to forgo that marginal revenue to maintain brand cachet that is difficult to value but that could be negatively impacted by the perception of conflict of interest.
So, certainly, it's an issue about money. But that doesn't preclude accounting for the morality of it.
Casinos, like all business, spend a healthy amount of time and money determining where they're losing money. And they put in place corrective actions to stem it.
The reason counting is so ineffective now is because it used to be profitable. There WERE dozens of teams, but we're talking 70's-90's.
Technology has helped casinos. But so has more than a few expose books written by people who did, literally, make millions from the casinos.
The 2006 law regarding online gambling was not consumer facing: It's no more illegal now than it ever was before.
:)
The law prohibits financial institutions from transferring money in and out of gambling accounts.
But there are about 999 ways around that. Among them:
1. Mailing a money order to the poker site
2. Using an intermediary such as ePassporte
3. For what it's worth, FullTilt still accepts my debit card
The threat of legal action is NOT the same as legal action.
It takes about 20 minutes, $0.50 in postage and one sheet of fancy high-bond paper to threaten. It's trivial. And probably rather successful.
And let's be real.. this kid isn't involved in an RIAA lawsuit, he's not being sued by SCO for some linux code that NOBODY cares about outside the people reading this website.
This is politics, a guy who made it easy to protest against BushCo.
I guarantee that he can raise $50,000 for legal defense in about 3 days if he publicizes it. This is the power of the NetRoots.
10 years in a federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
Uhh... I'm using triggers. And transactions.
On MySQL.
And I have been, for 3 years.
Actually, all you really need to do is look around.
Me, and the MILLIONS of other people in my (large) market have a choice, right now, as I'm writing, of a decent-sized Hi Def VOD library.
The only appreciable difference between this and Blu-Ray is that the VOD is currently 1080i, and that it's a VOD rental.
But when you talk of the "infrastructure investments" you're not talking of consumer-end storage, you're talking distribution. And it would be a trivial addition to this technology to allow recording on the consumer end, turning a rental into a purchase.
"People aren't going to buy machines strictly for video games when their dvr/computer/HD player/food processor already plays games"
...Oh, wait..
Exactly! Which is why Nintendo is so lucky that PCs can't play games.
(And, not to rain on your second argument, but I can get Hi-Def Video On Demand from my cable co.)
"People aren't going to buy machines strictly for video games when their dvr/computer/HD player/food processor already plays games" ...Oh, wait..
<br><br>
Exactly! Which is why Nintendo is so lucky that PCs can't play games.
<br><br>
<br><br>
(And, not to rain on your second argument, but I can get Hi-Def Video On Demand from my cable co.)
One counter started at Zero, the other at One? ...These kind of bugs are written all the time. ...Of course, this is why the software should be OSS. The more eyeballs, the more people running in debug mode just to play around and have fun, the more people slicing and dicing the source code, the better.
It's hard to believe this is even an issue. The problem is that the people making voting machines (like Diebold) come from Banking sectors, where privacy and private, proprietary systems are the modus operandi.
Seems to me a good way to fix this would be to get some high-profile Non-Profs and top-brand CS schools (I'm thinking MIT, Apache Foundation, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, etc) all working together to gather some grant money, build the hardware and software solutions, open everything up for scrutiny, and produce a working product.
We can wave our arms over what somebody SHOULD build, but if we had a compelling alternative ready to go, it'd be a lot easier to pressure governments to do the right thing.
I would never have used UnBoxed if it wasn't part of Tivo, I'll give you that. And sure, a big reason is that I'm already a Netflix subscriber.
....Sure, nobody would buy Tivo for these things. But they ARE value-added services. ESPECIALLY for those people already using Rhapsody or Unboxed.
But I can sit at work, buy a movie from UnBoxed, and have it on my Tivo by the time I get home at night. And they have new releases. (And for what it's worth, Tivo2Go lets me watch the UnBoxed movies on my laptop.)
And Rhapsody offers a similar proposition: The reason most music listening is now done on a PC or iPod is that it's so much easier. The content is virtually unlimited. Still, I've had an RCA-to-minijack cable plugged into the Phono input on my Amp for years so I can plug my iPod into my home stereo when I'm at home.
Rhapsody over Tivo S3 is compelling to me because the source quality of the music is the same as I get from music I buy on iTunes, but the Tivo has a digital-audio-out jack that gives far better audio performance than the RCA-to-minijack solution. And I can change songs using my remote.
"That's just an iterative loop, inefficiently implemented using recursion. Why not use 'for' or 'while'?"
Not necessarily.
For example, a project I'm working on right now has a calculation-engine not entirely dissimilar to what you have in Excel. The major difference being that it doesn't implement a formula language. (Instead of a formula language, individual calculations are defined by creating a class that implements the ICalculation interface.)
Anyhoo, a major part of this system is a subsystem for identifying circular dependencies.
So it gathers all the dependency info for each calculation, combines it all into a single data structure, and recurses thru the structure looking for circular references. Originally, the class kept the data structure in a protected property, and the method doing the recursion would pass the current node and an array of its direct-line-of-dependents in the recursive call.
This created an overflow condition about 10% of the time.
So we made the original data structure a bit more complex, having it keep track of the current node and its direct dependents, and instead only passed a reference to that "bookmarked" node with each recursive call.
This is a problem that doesn't lend itself to iteration because we need to look vertically at the tree structure, looking directly up the tree to see what is in this direct-dependency line. That is, we need to process the data structure from Top-to-bottom, Left-To-Right. Whereas iterating thru the tree would be done in a (L2R, T2B) fashion.
And, sure, you CAN iterate in the needed fashion (T2B, L2R) but the code to do so would be MUCH more convoluted than iterating in a conventional (L2R, T2B) manner, and, indeed, more convoluted than the recursive solution.
Anyway, this is definitely an edge-case: There are many cases of recursion being used when iteration should be. But you can, indeed, limit stack space by keeping data outside of the method and only passing references down the stack, acting on the referenced data, and returning a boolean.
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this.
The restriction on these devices is that you can't AMPLIFY them. But High-Gain antennas are NOT amplifiers.
So the firewire port supports 2-way comm? So I PC can send a command to the cable box to change a channel via the firewire port?
If that's the case, that's awesome, and I didn't realize that. You're still left with the problem of dual tuners -- you'd need 2 cable boxes to emulate the functionality you get from Tivo -- but nevertheless, it's a workable, elegant solution if you can indeed control the cable box via firewire.
If you can't, you'd still need an IR blaster.
You're absolutely right about the ease of creating stack overflow conditions in Java.
I mean, this is an issue with recursion in ALL languages, but Java is worse than most. I'm not as learned in the internals of Java as I am of the languages I do daily, but my guess is that it has to do with the types that Java stores on the stack as opposed to the types that it stores on the heap.
Practically, the best way I've found to avoid overflow conditions is to limit the use of local variables as much as possible, and do most the work by passing down a reference to an object. Objects are stored on the heap, and the only thing on the stack in each recursive call is the local var that holds the reference.
Of course, it's impossible to entirely eliminate the use of local vars inside the recursive function, but limiting their use is essential.
And closures in JavaScript are awesome. JavaScript itself is a terribly awesome language. So many developers see JavaScript as, essentially, means to an end, only good for DOM manipulation. They're missing out on one of the better languages out there, right under their nose.
True, but if you don't like references, you might ask yourself why you're in this business.
I mean, sure, pointer arithmetic can be complex and convoluted, but, conceptually, if you find if HARD, you may not have made the right career choices.
Same thing with other techniques that get lumped in the "hard" category like recursion, closures, etc.
:: Oops. Ignore the previous post. I rewrote my post into bullet-point form and accidentally included the long-form at the bottom. ::
1. Nice straw man. It's not about networking. It's about plug-and-play networking. About zero-setup. Contrast that with your DIY DVR.
2. I can backup and watch all my Tivo content on my PC and my Laptop. So no, I can't browse Tivo like any other Samba share, but I don't need to. Yes, Tivo has DRM. No, the Tivo DRM does not restrict me from doing what I want to do.
3. CableCARD doesn't work with a Dish. So you use an IR Blaster for that. With a DIY DVR, you use an IR Blaster whether you have a Dish OR Cable. So no, Tivo isn't perfect, but this is a far more elegant solution for Cable customers (vastly outnumbering dish customers) than using an IR Blaster.
4. Due to CableCARD, I can access my VOD services right thru my DVR, Including the HBO On Demand, Cinnemax On Demand, etc. Try THAT with an IR Blaster.
5. If you have issues with finding HD content on YOUR provider, you should take that up with your provider. I have 30 channels offering 1080i and another 10 offering 720p. And despite your claim, these stations are showing true HD content. Sure, a movie from the 40's, 50's, or even 60's won't look any better at 1080p than it will at 480p. But masters exist for movies and televison made in the last, oh, THIRTY YEARS that do contain enough source detail to produce flawless 1080p encodings. Seriously, do you think that the theaters way back in the stone ages of the 1970's were showing movies at 480i? Of COURSE they weren't.
6. I DARE YOU to spec-out a DIY DVR (PC Based) that gives you 2 HDTV tuners allowing the simultaneous recording of 2 1080i streams (1080i since no cable operator I've seen is offering 1080p yet), that has HDMI outputs as well as digital audio output, and a functional remote control. If you can build it all -- case, main board, disk, RAM, sound card w/ Optical-out, video card w/ HDMI-out, DUAL HD tuners, remote control, IR reciever, and IR Blaster for set-top-box control -- and you can do it for $900 (the cost of Tivo plus a lifetime subscription), then I'll concede the argument.
But i think you know as well as I do, just by looking at that shopping list, that doing so would be an awfully tall order.