Baseball, as an American Sport, is the subject of much love and loss,
angst and excitement, pleasure and pain.
Baseball, the game itself, is as enjoyable to watch as it is to play,
it is unlike any other popular sport, where a team responds
to the actions between two players-one throwing- the other batting- and
separate team support for these two in their moment
relies on the awareness of this play. An extremely democratic game,
where the confrontation between two opposing factions is
face to face-and the Teams must compete to support this confrontation,
much like a candidate and their party support. The game ends
when one side wins – there’s no real time limit on a game- an inning
may be minutes or hours, the pace can be rapid or
leisurely- patience may be tried, opportunities missed, a stolen base
here, a passed ball there, a clean up hitter left to
start the next inning. It is truly a wonderful pastime.
Baseball also gave rise to delicious sports reporting of such emotional
content that it rises above any other American journalistic
endeavor and influences other topical items with allusions to the game
in the coverage of American Politics, War, and Culture.
Our conversations are peppered with comments like “missed the ball”,
“struck out”, “home run”, “on deck”, and “in the bullpen”.
We root for our teams like they are our family. Ecstatic wins and
depressing losses, instances which defy logic, canonization of
a player’s achievement or demonizing failures make great matter for
opinion which may be interpreted as a stunning defeat or
a miraculous win -depending who’s root root rooting for the home team.
These are the facets of the diamond which have made Sports journalism
a lively read, and provides a full spectrum of interpretation
from logistical to the incredible, skill and chance make for an
unpredictable game whatever the statistics might suggest,
a good team can fail, a bad team can succeed in a game and that game
can be all of itself or part of season, it all makes for great
subject matter filled with human drama outside our personal dramas.

So as these Red Sox try to break the curse (it’s not achieved yet), be
certain it will matter not if they win or lose
but how they play the game. For if they win, they will be perceived to
do the same next year, and if they lose,
they will be perceived to try again. And that is what Baseball is all
about and someone will write about it one way or another.

The gigantic data corporation EMC has purchased Dantz and its software
titles like
Retrospect. I find this amusing because for YEARS I’ve wondered why EMC
supported
just about every Windows and Unix platform except Apple’s.

To me, this has been a glaring omission with EMC’s products. I find it
a welcome addition for I once toured the Hopkinton EMC campus where
you could see
every EMC product and thousands of servers and disk storage units and
computers from every major and a lot of minor companies-including
laptops-except Apple.
I mean, jeez, they claimed there was more storage in this one building
than the whole
country of Italy.

A search on supported systems on the EMC technical page had no mention
of Apple at all.

So now the big question is: How long will Dantz still support Macs?

I don’t know the answer to this question. We all know that there are
rabid Apple haters out there.
I project a conspiracy theory here: EMC is a major Republican
supporter, Al Gore is on the board
of Apple. It would conceivably be possible that EMC would want Apple
products to go away.

Another realm of possibility is that the Small to Medium Business
Server market is moving toward
Apple’s Xserve, which is an excellent product for a fantastic price
point WAY less than
any other major manufacturer’s offering (Anyone considering a new
server for their group
should consider this option- a stand alone G5 XServe with a 1000 user
licenses costs 4000$ or less).

And EMC is struggling in this market, not really sure how to deal with
smaller companies. Personally,
I think it’s the sales folk at EMC who can’t grasp why the smaller
markets would go to some other vendor.
It’s a culture thing- In the computing world there are two types of
“Professional” sales folk.
One is the Grey Suited Sales drone with briefcases and Dell laptops who
only regard you if you have
considerable cash $$$ to spend on. The other is the Lacrosse shirt and
blue-jeans folk who will sit down and
whittle away their product to your budget. EMC tends to be the former.
I suspect it’s their Banking and
Insurance clients that have insinuated this type into the Sales culture.

Apple could get by without Dantz (I have for years), but they would
need their own backup product
or partner with someone (Like Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner) to
make an Apple enterprise
Backup Program meaningful (and I don’t mean .Mac Backup). How about
Veritas? After some needling of tech support a couple years ago, they
did put up OS X support (since they already had bsd support), and now I
suspect OSX is fully qualified at this point. (I’ve not researched
this…) There are others in the market, mostly
small potatoes and Unix front ends to ditto and psync.

Meanwhile, what happens next remains to be seen. Is this a gentle move
into a smaller market for EMC or
a Microsoft-like gobble, chew, expel type move to diminish competition?