Your biggest enemy to getting the short notice recordings set via RS is if the box is on standby. As has been said if you have enough time in advance it will wake up at 4:30 am each morning by default, or at your own discretion by adding sleep/wake events through the day if you want. Personally once I got my head around power consumption and working at about 16 pence per kilowatt hour I realised how little it costs to leave the box on all the time - although as I type I remembered the last time I had a last minute recording need I still have the three hour idle = auto off thing still set so having been out all day the box was off and I couldn't program it!! Note to self - sort that out!!!
During the development when we all asked if the restart was necessary (and it unavoidably was), we concluded that if you make some assumptions about the kind of time window that programs you'd want to record would fall into i.e. in my case it would be from say 7pm onwards, then I could set a Wake event at 6.45pm so any last minute schedule needs could be set on RS through the day. I include a reboot along with the schedule, then the box wakes at 6:45, picks up the schedule from RS and puts it in pending, then gets the reboot command there and then and that would get my last minute need to tape Man v Food all sorted in time!!
Even with no recordings in RS by 6:45 the Wake Event means the box is on for at least the next three hours in which case any other last minute needs will find the box awake anyway so I just program RS and send it the reboot command.
I know it's not quite as real time as the Sky stuff but I leave that bit out when I'm showing it off!!!!!!
so I'll edit in the new thread once I've done the first post.