I killed my cable several years ago now and I don’t miss it. Netflix and iTunes have filled the void quite well.

There was a time, many years ago (before my wife and I had children), when paying more than $60 a month in cable fees seemed like nothing. I know of some who pay over $100. One day it occured to she and I to ask ourselves whether we thought that the product we were paying for was worth it. We thought about it and came to the not-too-shocking conclusion that we felt we were getting ripped off. After all, together we watched SCIFI channel and Turner Classic Movies, I watched Wings on Discovery and she watched cable news.

So we canceled our cable, not down to the basic package (because those wouldn’t have left us with the channels we watched anyway), but all the way. Simultaneously, we started a Netflix subscription.

Many people are unaware that Netflix offers TV series on DVD. We began to get shows that we enjoyed, like Stargate, and movies of all sorts. What news we wanted we could get from the Internet.

But there was a slight hitch that has now been fixed by iTunes. If a show came out that we wanted to see, we’d have to wait for a really long time until its release on DVD. A perfect example of this is Battlestar Galactica. Friends had suggested it to us, but there was no way we would get a babysitter to watch the children while we went to a friends house to watch episodes.

iTunes offers Battlestar and hundreds of other shows 24 hours after they air on network television (cable). We can satisfy our fix for the one or two shows we want to watch that we can’t get on regular broadcast by buying them on iTunes. Later, if we’d like to see the show again or watch back episodes, there’s Netflix to fill that gap.

I have a feeling that this formula will work especially well for many who are like my wife and I. I’d say that most people only really even have time for a limited amount of media consumption, so hundreds of channels with thousands of programs just doesn’t make sense. A la carte media consumption is the wave of the future, but it’s already here in the form of a Netflix/iTunes hybrid.

This post is not a rant against rich people - after all (I think I’ve said this before), I want to be one some day. But reading about SpaceShip Two got me thinking about why it is that $200,000 a trip tickets are being sold for 4.5 minutes of weightlessness. What happened to the grand visions of the 1950s and 1960s, when man was supposed to have been half way around the galaxy by now?

I was tempted initially to blame NASA. They are the ones charged with getting us “there”, after all, and since we aren’t there it naturally follows that it’s their fault. Not so fast. The more I thought about it, I realized that our stagnation has little to do with NASA and everything to do with competition. Or rather the subtext of competition.

History lesson - in the late 50s and early 60s the United States faced an actual menace in the form of the Soviet Union. Our respective national space programs were the public fronts for propaganda and diplomacy. In effect we were able to communicate key strategic capabilities to our enemies through the proxy of our space programs - in other words, putting a satellite in orbit was an indication of the ability to deliver nuclear weaponry from space.

This doesn’t paint the whole picture, but it’s a large part of it.

The competition of the space race created the subtext within which NASA was able to make wondrous and very rapid advances. It’s amazing to see how many barriers fall, as well as how many resources emerge, when government wants something done badly enough. Our success in delivering men to the moon was a self-defeating success, however, as in the end we found that the subtext that drove our efforts vanished when we succeeded in outpacing the Soviets.

So complete was our victory, in fact, that for the last 30 years we’ve been the victims of our own success. The subtext of competition doesn’t work as a motivator to public sentiment when all the other competitors have quit the field. We have since been unable to come up with any other subtext compelling enough to justify our return to space en mass, and this is a failure of our society as a whole, not just NASA. Scientific research alone isn’t ever going to be enough to justify a continuance of our space efforts when we’ve got cancer, AIDS, crime, poverty and any of another hundred issues to worry about at home. What worked in the 60s worked because people had a tangible fear of the Soviets that was soothed when we launched bigger, better rockets than they did. Bigger rockets have simply come to be seen as wasteful in our modern era.

What’s to be done? A new subtext needs to emerge towards which the space program can strive. Competition in strategic weaponry is passe, but I’d suggest that striving to provide for strategic energy independence might be the trick - specifically, fusion powered by Helium-3 mined from the Moon.

This might be a little far fetched, so I’m not totally endorsing this plan yet. But seen in light of our current national crises of energy dependence and pollution, we have to start thinking big again. We have to start thinking about what things will free us from rogue nations who happen to sit on top of oil reserves and the effects of the use of those resources. Exploitation of natural resources outside our own planet seems to me to be the ultimate solution, and it will all be led by the newly refocused NASA.

Edit - More information about Helium-3 (this last article is very interesting).

Intel is running a competition for the sexiest PC. Moderately good loot is involved for the winner.

Intel must realize though that encouraging sexy design won’t result in viable products for any manufacturer. Apple has shown that sexiness must be combined with attractive applications on a modern OS to create a “platform” - that platform then builds an image that has sexiness only as one of many features. Sony has shown how sexiness alone can fail - I consider Sony computers, especially the Vaio W, to be extremely attractively designed. Yet Sony, without any differentiator but sexiness, found that few were willing to pay a premium for sexiness alone. It’s all about the platform.

Surely Intel knows all this and is simply running this contest as a form of marketing. Still, it seems to me that even if Intel is so enlightened, the rest of the PC industry hasn’t yet woken up to the fact that simply running Microsoft on Intel or AMD won’t allow any single company to trump the competition - even given sexy design. Rather, the only formula in the PC industry that works (lacking platform and brand) is cost. The big manufacturers seem to be content trying to undercut the other and when that cycle begins everything suffers - innovation especially.

I got broadband way back in the 90’s, back when the earth was still inhabited by strange beasts and when magic could be felt in the primordial air. I got broadband and began to host small sites for friends and myself. It was convenient to have a server in my house and liberating - I could offer what I wanted, when I wanted, without restriction.

Speakeasy only made it that much better.

But over time I became annoyed with having to do manual setup of applications and sub-domains, ensuring that I was throttling bandwidth between computers to keep things responsive. I began to think to myself that maybe it wasn’t so great trying to run the Internet out of my bedroom. Then I read that it costs about $10 a month in electricity alone to run a normal computer.

That sealed it for me, especially since Dreamhost only costs $10 a month, and it comes with a ton of great stuff. Setting up websites and services through Dreamhost is trivially easy - so easy that I feel a little like I’ve been spinning my wheels for a couple years, doing an excess of work that I’ve not needed to. At least I’m better now.

My visit to the Apple Store grand opening was part interest and part social experiment. Given the interest in the event that I had seen on sites like digg and Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop, I figured maybe I could get some eyes on my blog here if I delivered the goods. No go.

In fact, spectacularly so. I think I got a couple of people through the site here, but my attempt at doing anything more, in this instance, was pretty much a flop. Oh well.

The trip wasn’t a total waste, however. I did, after all, get to enjoy the whole “experience” that is Apple. The crowd was enormous, the store was really well done and I think that I determined a few other bits of information.

For example, I now believe that Apple brings in store opening “ringers”. That is, there were some very attractive and nice people running the show, and I find it hard to believe that Columbia itself could have produced that many beautiful nerds. That’s something that’s hard to do even on a national level.

There were a bunch of really professional photographers there, but I didn’t see many of them taking any pictures. In fact, I don’t think I saw any of them take any pictures. That’s not to say that there weren’t pictures being taken, because there were - just not so many by the pros.

All in all, though, it was a cool experience.

The Columbia Apple Store sports a new look so, seeing as how I live less than a mile from The Mall in Columbia, the wife and kids and I headed over. Here are some photos that I put on flickr.

* I took some videos and posted them, along with the hi-res versions of the pictures above, in a torrent. I’ve taken the torrent server down now, so if there is interest place a comment and I’ll post an archive link *

Japan is an interesting economy. It defies description as a manufacturing or knowledge economy because it spans these two descriptions and more.

This NY Times article points out something that I think is an inconsistency with modern Japanese attitudes. Specifically, the Japanese still see themselves as masters of manufacturing, with that being a valuable industry even beyond their knowledge and service assets.

I think that Japan needs to wake up to the reality that manufacturing excellence is not quite the thing it used to be. It used to be that the quality of goods could be determined, prior to having experience with those goods, simply by knowing what the country of origin was. Something from Western Europe was good, Eastern Europe bad. Japan good, China bad. North America good, South America bad.

Times have changed. When a modern company moves manufacturing, they move manufacturing know-how as well. China, South America, India and Eastern Europe are all becoming skilled at manufacturing high quality goods. The one time manufacturers are switching wholesale to enterprises based on knowledge and service.

The debacle with the batteries shows how much of a liability manufacturing can become to an economy that makes such high demands of quality simply in order to differentiate itself from the competition. When the perception of high quality is threatened, the basis for any price premium disappears. Japan is facing that threat because the quality margin between China and South Korea has been quickly shrinking in the last few years.

But Japan’s real asset is something other than manufacturing entirely - its asset is design and engineering and perhaps this latest crisis of quality will force Japan to realize and focus on this. Japan is in for some rocky times ahead as they are forced to shift entirely to a knowledge and services economy, but this is the inevitable and proper direction to take.

Apple isn’t going to come to rule the world through the iPod or the Mac mini and they’re fine with that. I think that the iPod is simply a device to drive activity to the iTunes music store, as far as Apple is concerned, despite the fact that it currently offers a higher profit margin for Apple. Similarly, the mini is intended to drive user interest and participation in the offerings of iTunes, particularly how the Mac platform can enhance the iTunes experience.

Why do I think this? After all, the numbers would seem to point out that the iPod is making Apple more money than song sales. Apple has sold, to date, 60 million iPods. Take this Forbes article for a dose of reality. Margins on the iPod, while good, are lower than in their other product lines. Apple is making, on average somewhere around $35 per iPod if the sales of all models are averaged together.

$35 profit on 60 million units is pretty good. That’s over $2 billion that can be attributed straight to the iPod. So why do I assert that iTunes is ultimately more important, and the real wedge for Apple dominence? Simple - just as you buy a car once in a great while, but fill it with gas quite often, Apple will be rolling in long term dough thanks to iTunes.

Apple has sold over 1.5 billion songs through its store. This, despite easy access to free (albeit illegal) media on the Internet. Apple is now the #5 music retailer in the entire United States and it’s gotten there in less than five years. Apple predicts it will be the #4 retailer by the holiday season.

Various analysts have been quoted as saying that Apple makes $0.04 per song downloaded, which would result in an astoundingly low $60 million in profit from the running of the iTunes store. That’s 33 times less profit than the iPod. But here’s the thing - iTunes is going to keep on accelerating in its’ growth, even while iPod sales slow down. Apple has added TV shows to iTunes and just added movies as well. The more that iTunes comes to dominate the music retail space, the better deals they will be able to cut with music distributors, leading to higher margins. Owners of iPods who feel no need to buy the latest model will still be returning to the store to get new tunes, TV shows and movies.

And with more content to sell every day - new studios and distributors - iTunes is becoming something far more than a simple retailer. It’s becoming a distribution channel and that puts it in competition with the likes of the cable companies. Unlike cable companies, iTunes is providing a significantly greater amount of consumer choice and that should help to endear, and even further accelerate, Apple’s rise through iTunes.