A close, dear friend of mine had asked the question. I replied in an email. I liked it, so I wanted to post it here. I cannot, however post his question. So my abruptly beginning answer will have to make do. I am pasting it here unedited, as I have typed in the email - enjoy.

[MyFriend]
blah blah blah blah? blah blah! some blah another blah some bang and a douche bag

[Me]
not really. you are missing some of the crucial points of power play, muscle flexing, history and regional dynamics. it's not as simple as how you put it. you have to consider a lot of fluctuations, a lot of different variables before we can even begin to elaborate. nothing is as black & white as they seem when it comes to international politics (poly: multi; tic/a: face | poly-tics: multi facedness).

you need to consider a turkey becoming a major player again in a region that was once its own front garden for over 600 years. it wants its power back and now has the guts to do it. it actually knows the territory, it actually knows the residents. and the arab countries are slowly beginning to yearn for a stronger turkey, sort of a semi-Ottoman turkey that can stand strong against the west and protect them. turkey removed visas with its neighbors, not just near, but even far away countries. it began talking with armenia. it has close, dangerously close relationships with the russians. now they want the arabs back on board. but arabs have always been back stabbers. the only way to win their hearts is to take part in the palestinian issue. this was their plan. it sort of still is.

israel has a mess in his hands with gaza. the blockade is a problem. no matter how correct their assesment and reasoning is, it is bad, bad publicity. what the turkish government planned to do (with help from its european allies - never think that turkey is acting alone in this) was to do a poking at the issue. show the arab world that turkey cares and tries to help whoever needs it (arab / turk relations have always been wary. ever since the ottomans took the caliphacy from them by force. so it's not as easy as it sounds. and the turkish muslim way is not regarded as kosher by most arab nations. alas, arabs have the money, arabs have the power - though they dont know how to wield it).

israel's handling of the situation was horrific. an absolute mess in terms of military strategy, planning and execution. they played right into the hands of the turks. all turks wanted to do was to show off. all of a sudden they became martyrs, self-proclaimed saviors. israel could easily have stopped the ships and not let them pass without even touching them. instead they tried to board them first, the crew defended their ships (they were prepared for a defense without weapons) and they actually succeeded in that (they had cameras to record everything because they were going to use it for propaganda) and then afterwards Israel commandos escalated the situation and raided the ships and lost control because now they were faced with an agitated angry mob. In the end, instead of a "barking turkey", Israel has half of the world angry at herself. UN security council is coming up with warnings, Nato has been involved, an American is killed, 8 people were shot in international waters. dirty sticky mess.

what turkey is doing right now is acting up to the bully and doing it in agression. I have no idea whether they have the stamina to keep it up, but they endured and actually came out stronger from the last financial crisis; this enboldened them. So they are doing the correct maneuver in terms of international powerplay (it's pretty text book). Over aggressive response, lots of words and fists, public fury and frustration. So, when they are forced to calm down by the international community, they will end up with a better hand than they have started (sort of asking for a higher price for the good so that you will end up with a higher price than the net worth after the negotiations approach). That's how these things work, there is nothing interesting in how Turks are acting right now.

I can't say I approve of how Turkey approached the entire thing, but then again I don't even like that bunch to begin with. One thing for sure, Israel played a very, very poor set. The not so strange things to observe are - sadly - the opportunists who jump on the band wagon. eg: The latest slaying of a priest. This incident, I am afraid is the first of many. There will be a lot of propaganda, a lot of provocations

[My Friend]
But blah and the blah when the blah with the blah and the big bada boom and bada big boom and frank miller and herman hesse when siddartha and not swedish chicks

[Me]
Well. You are approaching to the issue as a person living in the US isolated from the rest of the world. “the west” no longer exists in the world. To each, his own. There is china, there is india, there is EU and there is middle east. There is a power gap in the middle east and it is by far the most important region of the entire globe. It is where the civilization started. Turkey is not aligning with Syria, it wants Syria back. Syria has been a sovereign country for 80 years only. Before that it was part of the empire for 600 years. There is nothing in there to align with, the same goes for other arab countries. They have no future and they have nothing. The person you call “the president of Iran” is a puppet that is there to talk and occupy the news while Russia firmly grounds itself in the peninsula. You may or may not agree but that’s how things operate there. From here, afar, most people try to filter the events and try to come up with a sanitized, black & white view of things because that seems to be the MO of the US foreign policy. I think it works fine for waging war but not so much when it comes to carrying out diplomacy.

[My Friend]
There is an article on Washington Post; pretty close to your analysis.

[Me]
Nice. Watch the progresses, this thing will get messier and messier if Israel cannot come up with a clever move. It's like a chess game with multiple opponents. I find watching the US really funny; we (the US) have no idea how to handle middle east - as it appears. I wish somebody would employ Bush Sr. as advisor, he is/was the ultimate authority and I am sure he has a plan to smooth things over even right now.

Here are the funniest scenarios / funny to watch:
Iran sending aid
Iraq cooperating with Iran on sending aid together
Turkish prime minister jumping on a boat and personally carrying aid
Arabs boycotting Israel by trying to use the "oil card" and messing up the game and causing financial shockwaves (arabs cannot play poker) and ending up getting beat

There are so many and none of them are as scary as they seem. And the mere result WILL be a peaceful solution and everything will go back to normal in the end. They will NOT let Turkey become a superpower and they will NOT let Turkey fall into disarray. Israel will come up with a solution soon and Turkey and Israel will kiss and make up.

[My Friend]
Blah blah and more Swedish chicks and a bucket list

[Me]
Well, they ARE testing Israel and US, that’s for sure. Nobody is happy about the US’s handling of Middle East affairs. Almost everything we’ve done in the middle east have brought more and more destruction and instability to the region and the population purely hates us. What Turkey is doing is filling up the gap. If the Turks act cleverly they will know when to draw the line and make the point and get the US involved; there is NO solution without the US in the middle east. And what Israel needs to do is simply apologize for the aggravation and ask for a dual consortium led by Turkey to find a solution to Gaza issue, that’s it. Quite simple really, insist on Turkey’s large involvement, and keep it at that; they need to keep the Arabs away. Once Turkey promises security WITHOUT military involvement than Israel can blame Turkey if it does not work out and Turkey’s hands will be tied. It’s impossible to lead Arabs (three Arabs cannot even decide on the color of a bird shit) the only way to keep them at bay is through money and intimidation (something that Israel is half good at) and Turkey knows all too well but does not have the means (they feel like they do, but they don’t). And the US needs to play the mediator until Turkey starts losing grip and then get involved like the big brother he is, but not sooner. Arabs will welcome US only if they need to/have to (first Gulf War). They will never accept Israel, but they have no other choice (and they hat this). Arabs inherently hate Turkey but they will get in bed with Turkey rather than Israel or the US. So it’s a game of balances with no clear winners.

I wrote this email as a response to a very un-interesting and stupid email discussion in NewTech-1 discussion list. But I enjoyed it so much, I wanted to post it to my own web site too. Go figure.

I have worked in mixed environments for over 17 years. As support, software developer, product manager, system admin. I am one of the first beta testers of Quicktime VR, I was there when Acrobat was introduced, when Eudora came out, and I was using Macintosh PowerPCs. I was there when they launched Windows 95 and I laughed my ass off. Then again, I was there when I bought my first 286 and started using MSDos 5 because that was the only way to play incredible games (doom anyone. wolfenstein - I played it on mac too yes). Macintosh had a few games back then, I used a II E at school (aside from my Commodore, then Amiga 500 and a 1000). What I want to say is, I've seen it all (yeap played around with Wax/VMS too)

I am a Unix hater, by design, but not in reality. Because I was using a Macintosh when I first met Unix (Imagine what I said when I saw a mainframe in a bank's IT dept the first time, and the next time, and then the next time) Then again, I was one of the first to push mixed environment with Appletalk in a TCP/IP (Trumpet anyone?) network and try to work with Unix in an ISP. I had a lot of fun talking to overseas support techs trying to get things done (circa 1995). I adore, admire and respect Unix. In that regard, I want to underline once more that Linux is a reverse engineered Unix, hence it is a great system, but a Unix port none-the-less (I also refuse to pronounce it correctly to piss of my Linux sysadmin friends)

Mac OS, until it became Unix based, sucked!!! It sucked big time. It was amazing, compared to its competitors, but it was bogged down and had problems beyond comprehension. My PowerPC used to crash randomly even after various costly trips to the Apple service centers. But then again I was pushing it to its limits (Strata 3D + Maya: I am an architect by education). It was both frustrating and cumbersome. I was furious that I could not upgrade my OS (I believe OS 6 came out that summer) because it was incompatible with my hardware. These are the days I learned that saving often saves lives.

And Windows. I used windows 3.1 and hated its guts.

They fired Steve Jobs and I quit Mac and switched to Windows. Really. NT 4.0 came out around 1996 and I started coding on NT. I used Oracle 6.2.2 and NT to develop one of the 7 fully SET compatible e-commerce sites in Europe (e-commerce history anyone?)

Windows is an operating system. Microsoft DOES NOT produce hardware. This is very important. Try to remember this in future discussions. It is the first truly open environment, because the hardware layer is abstracted "truly". You build the driver, bring and the OS talks to the hardware. You control PLCs, you command factories. You do whatever you want. Yes, you could not access the source code of the operating system. But who the f*%ck cared! Microsoft built the operating system, you wrote the driver (or the hardware manufacturer) and the damn thing worked. Sound cards, graphics cards, 3d accelerators. An armada of manufacturers thrived on Microsoft, because they could. It was affordable. It was for the masses. It drove every body else out of business because of this. It was usable. And because of this, it was also problematic. Unless you bought your computer from HP, Dell, Gateway, IBM which made sure that all the hardware inside the case was compatible and built in a factory with air conditioning, you were taking crap shots in the dark. But then again, you were also able to buy the components in a grocery bag and put your computer together yourself and give birth to a mechanic child to which you got attached to emotionally because you knew exactly the story behind every missing screw, twisted IDE cable and bent CPU pin. And have occasional encounters with the blue screen of death or its ancestor - blank screen and continuous beep of "what the f$*%k?!?". Still, just remember, Microsoft is a software developer company, not a hardware producer.

All that time I watched Apple crumble in its closed circuit, small minded, narrow sighted world (1995-2000). Amazing computer, brilliant design. But you had to do what Apple told you to do (I hear it's more or less the same nowadays as well). You have to buy what Apple sells you. Your OS DOES NOT work on any other hardware. What a joke. (Mind you, this is past tense. motorolla chips tense. power pc 8500). I got stuck with a hardware worth thousands of dollars, and I could not upgrade it. Hard drive was so expensive, a new Targa card cost thousands of dollars. But what a computer... And a couple of hit and near misses (newton anyone?). But Apple never changed. Apple was and is a dictatorship. Steve Job is the dictator, he dictates and things happen. He decides, he says, he designs and everything is well. I don't see any problem with it, and judging by the claps I hear and the sales numbers I don't see a lot of worried folks around either. It's either iTunes or no Tunes baby. Don't be fooled, this is not always a bad thing. You won't find a lot of "committee statues" in parks around the world. A great leader is a great leader, whether it leads an army, a country, a class-room or a company.

If you don't know these things, this history, learn it. It's important. Don't be like Glenn Beck and connect irrelevant pieces of data using scotch tape and call it information then cling on to them for dear life.

Windows networking is, and has always been easy. The problem is usually the person who is implementing it. It is so easy that anybody can do it, that also means most mess up the entire thing. (Not talking about OS security here, networking I say)

Apple networking is amazingly easy. Anybody can do it. But then again, what are you going to network? Three computers, one printer and that's it. All four components built by Apple, for Apple. You don't need drivers, because the systems inherently recognize each other. You can

Unix networking is very, very hard. Not a lot of people can do it. You have to know what you are doing. Setting up a Netware environment was no child's play. But that did not mean it was crap. Netware was lightyears ahead of its time. (That's why it had so many issues with those Digital (Alpha) repeater hubs. It needed layer 4 switches, it needed fast ethernet damn it. we didn't have it)

The above examples tell a lot, to the one who wants to hear.

Believe what you need to believe, do what you have to do to put food on the table. You have tools I could not even dream of 15 years ago. But, if you don't know a lot about a subject, maybe it's best not to say anything. Or make a few jokes here and there.

Active Directory (windows networking) is an amazing, amazing technology. If you don't know how to set it up, that is your problem. Setting up a Cisco router is even harder, would you call Cisco a terrible product because you messed up the setup and left the routing table like a slice of swiss-cheese somehow, causing all packets to route themselves to Lake Ontario and create huge black holes of unresponsive IP blocks? I can give better and longer examples with firewalls and security protocols, anybody interested? I don't know if there are any Mac system admins here, and I have no idea whether the concept of "locking down features" exist in the Mac networking world or not. But this is real: You can lock down / control every single bit of feature of the client operating system; from directory paths to "my documents" folders, from message boxes down to using USB ports for peripherals but not as external hard drives/flash drives in an active directory environment. Without active directory, you'd have to manage 5000 client computers in 30 different domains trees and 50 different sub domains, in two different continents one by one (have you ever thought how many client computers exist in a financial institution?). With AD, it's a group policy object. Is it simple? No. (Actually if you know what you are doing it is the simplest thing in the known universe) But it doesn't have to be, it doesn't need to be. Nothing above a certain complexity is simple in our lives. That's why we have training, that's why we have schools. But it's there. You can do a shitty installation, you can implement an even shittier policy rule and have the fun of your life (B.O.F.H. anyone?)

For the security issues: the truth of the matter is market share. Viruses, security issues, they don't exist because the systems are good or bad. They exist because the data incorporated on those systems are worth it. When Apple gains more than 30% corporate market share then we will see the viruses. Until then, well, why would I even bother writing a virus for a computer that a 17 year old uses to Facebook or Tweet? You can create the crappiest of operating systems. If you have that thing installed on 50 computers, who would care to exploit the vulnerabilities (I am not saying that apple has sold 50 computers). A bank may spend millions of dollars securing its valuables and create the worlds safest environment. But somebody WILL steal from that bank eventually if the heist is good enough. It's a practical matter of calculation and determination.

Same goes for Linux. Buy it from RedHat, then you see a secure OS. But it becomes controlled then. You have to give up some things for that security. When not purchased branded, it is not "that" secure really. Because there is no "out of the box" sense in it. It's rather "download from a web site". You may or may not end up with a compromised build, and unless you are a capable technical person, you will have no idea whether you are a part of the ghost net or not. It is an involved OS. Not all hardware vendors develop drivers for the peripherals. Not big enough market. Still, it is getting there. And it should. It's a good alternative. And for a capable company with enough sysadmins, Linux is the best way to operate a web farm - because it is free and it gets the job done. Yes, the system overhead is lighter than Windows, but hey, I can write an even lighter web server in Assembler. That is not a good comparison point for me :)) (side topic, don't jump on me)

What bothers me lately in some email threads is how anxious some are to become technological bigots. I see radical fanatics of all sides (windows, mac, linux) and that bothers me. I don't enjoy that. Passing judgments, condemning this and that, killing browsers, lynching companies. There is nothing constructive in some of the discussions here. Lots of peeing contests, lots of name calling but no sense of topic. I don't care who wins what, I enjoy competition, it drives innovation. I don't care who is wrong or right, I enjoy the discussion, as long as I learn something from it.

I wanted to stay within the context of the thread but I sort of lost it. And there does not seem to be an end to my useless mumblings, and I do not really know the ratio of people modeled after Southpark characters to real intelligent people reading this email. So I am afraid it may be a waste of time. If you are really interested, please let me know and we can meet at a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan and we can talk for hours. I will bring pen and pencil and we can draw pictures too.

My apologies and one more cup of coffee 'fore I go.

And Google dropping Microsoft? Hah. It's about time. It's like Oracle using MS-SQL internally - funny! This has nothing to do with security or any other bullshit. This is pure corporate politics. They will develop their own OS and they will push it to their own employees first and foremost. Dedication, determination and domination is the name of the game. And you start cleaning your own house first. Good for them.