Ceton card to have 4 cable-card tuners in my Media Center. I really hope they ship soon!

Even though we'll still have the locals, with analog going away, that means no real choice but cable company DVR's and set-top boxes for all non-local stations. Yeah, that's alarming. I buy digital cable service now and have a cable company DVR that I hate. I have that content for only one TV can view. I don't look forward to needing to rent boxes for each TV.

I was just in the market for one of these and came to about the same conclusion. I did buy a new Samsung TV that was compatible with this device, but I bought a Linksys DMA-2100 and a Harmony Remote to tie them together. This solution works out to be more "integrated" than the complete Samsung solution, and cheaper, since I could get a DMA-2100 for only $110 from Amazon. If I want to wall-mount the TV or get surround sound (that HDMI receiver trick won't work, by the way), I'd be out of luck. If I wanted to change TV's I'd be out of luck.

There just is about no good advantage to using the Samsung extender that I could find. The "cons" far outweighed the "pros".

Microsoft has been putting in datacenters at a fantastic pace. This was going to have to be done sometime to transition the backend services the new platform. While it won't show anything now, it will allow for new features this Fall.