A Really Scary Gulf of Mexico Scenario That Might Be Plausible.

I followed a blog link - I already forgot whence - to an "article" on Mother Jones magazine doing several things Mother Jones is good at:

1. Pointing us to something really interesting elsewhere.
2. Quoting extensively without bothering to follow up.
3. Sensationalizing a bit to increase page views.
4. Adding no other value whatsoever to the discussion.
5. Attracting commenters who engage in passionate meta-arguments.
6. Attracting commenters who wish for the apocalyptic end to everything, somehow naively assuming they will not be eaten by my livestock weasels when Anarchy finally descends.

I realize the burden of passionate leftism is hard to bear if you don't happen to be South American, but hey, since when did Communists believe in Journalism? And who cares, if the end is nigh? Seriously, it might be.

Are you curious yet? Have you already gone and googled it?

OK, so let's have some more background. But only a bit. I've been thinking lately about scale as it applies to our current British Petroleum-induced nightmare. In short, we're thinking about the wrong sort of scale. A bunch of corporate geologists punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean, and it's leaking oil. We need to think in terms of geologic scale.

What if our little corporate geologist hole keeps leaking for four more years, nonstop, without any sign of abating? Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Four years? WTF?!

Go ask the folks in East Java how they like their mud. MUD. Oh yeah, and the mud is freely accessible, open-air mud, not five thousand feet below the friggin' ocean mud.

So, my point, which I freely admit I wouldn't be qualified to make if BP and the US Government weren't lying through their clenched teeth and enforcing a data blackout, is that we may be radically overestimating our ability to control this situation. And the scale on which it works itself out may be deeply uncomfortable for us: think hundreds of years without any fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, think permanent abandonment of all the relevant shorelines and as far inland as the hurricanes drop their black oily rain.

Even if I pretend BP is telling something resembling the truth, I think that all sounds eminently possible.

But here's a way scarier idea: What if the BP well is broken deep under the sea bed, and it's going to turn into some kind of massive expanding undersea gusher in the highly likely event that BP fails to relieve the pressure? What if the most optimistic version of success would still vastly increase the amount of oil being spilled? What if "bleeding" the well at, say, double the current release rate, for the rest of our lives, is the absolute best we can hope for?

Yep, that's the conjecture I ran into on the Innernets.

Here's the link you've been waiting so patiently for, thanks to the source, The Oil Drum.

Read the comments. Keep in mind that it's a largely anonymous forum in which both experts and paranoid cranks can be found. But of course also keep in mind that Tony Hayward is going to have to shoot his way out of the bank if he wants to live in anything other than infamy, and he's controlling your access to the truth accordingly.

I can see two potential upsides to this: first, it might maybe be the wake-up call to the dangers of our petroleum addiction, and thus trigger a real energy revolution; and second, there's no way in Hell we can fight two foreign wars while we deal with this.

A strange feeling about Google.

I have this strange feeling about Google. About how they seem dead-set on competing with Apple everywhere they can, even though they're really terrible at the things Apple is good at. And even though Apple isn't particularly good at the things Google is good at. And even though Google has such a mind-numbingly large head start in their two crucial technologies - search and contextual ads - that a company like Apple most likely can't pose any kind of existential threat any time soon, even if they do end up dominating the "rich mobile ad" market. Google was never any good at rich media ads to begin with.

The feeling: it's as if Schmidt went to a board meeting at Apple one day and a lightbulb went on above his confused little head, and he heard a choir of angels on a stack of pinheads say: they're making serious money with this shit! We can do that too!

But the thing is, on the evidence they actually can't.

Google has already proven, with YouTube, that it's perfectly willing to lose billions of dollars, and possibly never recover them, preventing someone else from dominating a potentially lucrative market that might be a good match to Google's talents. But in this case you already have a leader, the market's already proven very lucrative for that leader just as it was for the pack that leader just displaced, and there's very little overlap - possibly none at all - with Google's in-house talent. Not to mention there's a little company up in Redmond that's going to take its gloves off as soon as it can find the laces; and there's a little company in Palo Alto that just placed a small bet on following Apple's lead.

I'm curious what's going to become of Google's efforts here. I could easily see them spending many billions of dollars, which they do of course have, just to somehow stay in the game. But remember, Google makes money on advertising. It would be so much cheaper for them to simply extend their domination of that market into the mobile world.

I suppose it's at least theoretically possible to beat Microsoft and Apple at the same time, each on their home turf. But it's a little like racing your sailboat against Larry Ellison: are you really sure you've got the silicon cojones for that?

Early iPad Impressions

I just got back from a trip to Italy. While there I ate a lot of salted pig parts and picked up a shiny new iPad - and by shiny of course I mean smudgy. No, the Italians have not figured out now to make iPads out of salted pig parts and finely worked leather: I had a private courier bring it over. Here now are some initial impressions of the Jesus Tablet.

Smudgy and Reflective

The first two things I noticed about the iPad - literally before I turned it on - were its oleophilic qualities and the mad reflectiveness of its screen. As a MacBook user I long ago made peace with the reflectiveness, though I do wonder whether there isn't some kind of overlay one could use to make that go away, for example when writing in anything other than a dark tunnel. The iPad continues this Apple trend, and seemingly pushes it further. But then, the backlight is so powerful your experience is usually one of "wow this screen is gorgeous," except when it's not, and then you're shading the thing and trying angles like a geometry teacher and seeing little but your own self.

Oh, but did I say oleophilic? Isn't that supposed to be oleophobic as in repelling the oil of your dirty, dirty fingers? Isn't a single wipe across your equally dirty jeans all that's needed to make the iPad all shiny and hygienic again?

In a word: no.

This thing is a fingerprint magnet, a smudge magnet, and as such quite unsettling at certain angles. And while it's relatively easy to get it nice and clean, it's not a one-wipe operation: with a good glasses cloth it took me about 30 seconds to get the bugger fully clean. Clean enough to not bother me is another story: I get there in about 5-10 seconds with any old cotton cloth. Except of course the one I keep soaked in turpentine: don't want to mix any finger oil in there.

Fortunately, with the brightness of the screen you usually don't even notice the smudges. But even though I have no plans to share this iPad - mine mine mine! - I have a feeling I'll be giving it a good scrubbing once a week and also whenever I take it out of the house. Otherwise it just looks... icky.

As my private courier was testing the device in the US and is a mysophobe, I'm very lucky the iPad wasn't soaked in hand sanitizer for an hour after sneaking through customs.

And Yet So Much The Future

Smudges and reflections pretty much complete my complaints about the iPad's industrial design, and I even think the reflection problem is probably beatable. Beyond that, I think this is so obviously the mid-term future of general-purpose computing devices that it's laughable to think of "normal" people using anything else for their immediate computing needs.

The lack of a camera is puzzling only until you have an iPad in hand. Then you realize you'd never really want to take pictures with it. Video chat would of course be grand. We all expect a front-facing camera in the next version, and I strongly suspect they only left it out in order to have a single "must-have" upgrade feature in a year.

I encounter quite a lot of people, mostly online, asking "why not a Netbook?" Well, for me of course, and for my class of user - tech professionals, basically - it's really about which thing is the more useful extra computer. I have three laptops, two of them professional-grade; access to hundreds of servers at work; two smartphones and one dumbphone; and an iPad. This is by no means unusual in my line of work. And weirdly, the loudest anti-iPad, pro-Netbook voices are coming from people like me, for whom the issue is only about replacing the last in a chain of devices. Yes, it's true: you're never going to compile a Linux kernel in your hotel room on an iPad. But why would you want to? Ever heard of AWS?

So that leaves the other 99.5% of the developed world, for whom the iPad seems a great option as a second, portable computer (where the first might also be portable actually); and for many of whom it's more than sufficient as an only computer.

Remember that almost everything you're not satisfied with can be improved by Apple and provided in a free update. Including the need for another computer through which to get the updates. And I think that's the future: an iPad, or if you like an HP WebOSPad or an HTC DroidPad; and basta if you are not an actual professional producer of either code or some other crazily CPU-intensive product such as video. Even casual videographers will one day just have a tablet and a camera. Whatever they call "HTML Programmers" now, they'll need only an iPad. Ditto every garage bandista.

People Who Need No Computer Other Than a 2011 iPad

A partial list, assuming the iPad is fully untethered and has a videochat camera and a year's worth of software updates. Other devices might also fit the bill; I really hope they do, but I'm not holding my breath for five years.

1. Journalists, including Bloggers
2. Salespeople
3. System Administrators
4. Chefs
5. Doctors
6. University Students
7. Clinical Researchers
8. "HTML Programmers"
9. Editors
10. Tour Guides
11. Senators, MPs et al.
12. Zookeepers
13. Teachers
14. Kids
15. Astronauts

The Keyboard

First let me say that I love my iPhone's virtual keyboard, and I also love my Apple Wireless Keyboard. So the iPad should be that much better, right?

Not quite. I haven't tried Apple's Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad yet but I expect it to be just fine - at a cost, of course, of portability. I've also seen some other interesting Bluetooth keyboards in use. But the virtual keyboard - really two keyboards, one slightly too wide in portrait orientation and one almost right in landscape - take a lot of getting used to.

I can touch-type a bit faster with large virtual keyboard than I can hunt and peck. With the small one I hunt and peck reasonably fast with two hands, but with one hand it gets very slow. I haven't clocked it yet but I strongly suspect I type faster with one hand on my iPhone virtual keyboard than with two on the smaller of the iPad keyboards (portrait orientation).

I imagine this will just take some getting used to. And maybe a little Mavis Beacon along the way. Dan Moren wrote a nice little MacWorld article on the keyboard situation, after using his iPad for a whole month.

While I don't expect Apple will change anything about the keypad, I do expect that a lot of people will start making highly portable Bluetooth keyboards in the next year or so. Why now, when so many have tried and, er, discontinued before? Well, we've long had mobile devices that could somehow talk to external keyboards. But this is the first one with which you can actually do serious shit. Sorry Palm, it's true. Good luck with the acquisition.

The Forming Apposphere

I was more than a little surprised to find that, despite Apple's practically taunting us with the 200,000 iPad/iPhone apps, there really isn't that much of high quality available yet.

Maybe my quality expectations are high. But no Facebook? No proper editor of Office files? (Pages is nice, but it isn't that.) No really serious photo editor? No full-featured blogging app?

All of these have apps either close to release or released and close to serious, but a month into it none of these fairly predictable needs has been met.

Of course, for me, a software guy, lack of iPad apps is an opportunity. I'm actually thrilled by the dearth of compelling apps, simply because it's going to take quite a while for me to learn how to make my own and become even slightly competitive. But I can also imagining it slowing the adoption rate, especially in conservative countries like Germany, where I currently live.

The Brushes app deserves special mention as a fun, creative, and very iPadesque program. In short, it's a finger-painting program, but it's a very very good one. It's been around for a long time for the iPhone, but that was more of an affair for fetishists. With the iPad it's a much more realistic proposition.

And even if you're not an artist, I recommend Brushes for two needs you will definitely encounter over the next year or so: giving the iPad up to kids (supervised of course), and showing it off to strangers. For the latter case you need something that "does something" without, say, showing off your e-mail. Brushes will play back your drawings as they were made, and with the bright iPad screen that's a hell of a demo.

I'll discuss more specific apps and app categories in depth at a later date, but in short there are a few categories I thought would be very well served out of the gate but were not:

• Newspapers - there are few dedicated apps, and what there are suck, with the New York Times giving the most egregious face-plant.
• Magazines - same story, plus no consensus on whether to sell issues as new apps or do them in-app (the latter being the obvious solution).
• News aggregators - yep, no good ones for iPad yet. WTF?!
• Social networking - duh. Double-WTF?!
• General informational apps, like... wait for it... weather. There's buggy WeatherBug, but not much else.
• Professional productivity.

That last category deserves a separate note. Pages is very interesting, and a steal at $10, and a good first cut of a document composer. But it's fairly unpolished on the usability end - no doubt because of the necessarily limited pre-launch testing - and it's not at all suited to serious composition. It's great for making a good-looking, short document in a hurry on the go, but you'd be a little crazy to try to write anything serious with it. I've read similar things about Numbers, though I haven't tried it yet; and Keynote is said to be quite awesome but with serious compatibility and sync issues.

I see no reason why Microsoft doesn't come in here and offer Office for iPad for $99. OmniGroup has already successfully (so far) set the price bar for software with which you actually get professional work done: $50 for OmniGraffle. I think a real, almost-fully-compatible package of Word, Excel and Powerpoint would fetch double that. Hell, I'd pay that much for Word and Excel.

Oh wait, I can think of one reason why they're not there. They're not agile enough to come up with plausible names for their products at the moment, so breaking this sort of new ground is asking a bit much of Redmond. Well, OK, I believe they'll get there within two years, and I'm patient - but I'm not sure they'll be able to charge $99 if they wait that long. I paid $30 for OmniFocus for iPhone way back when, and then saw the market drop to dollar apps.

Price Wars?

Lurking around the App Store I discovered an interesting thing. No, it's not that there are thousands of apps that are made of duct tape and sawdust for an audience of three; we both knew that already. It's that the magic price point is $4.99.

I think Apple moved the needle there by charging $10 each for Pages and Numbers and Keynote. They had the bully pulpit and could have charged more - I certainly wish they'd moved the needle higher, but I'm not sure they could have. iPhone apps have mostly been a race to the bottom both in price and in quality.

So if you want to charge more than $10, you have to either be very coveted (maybe a popular video game) or have a case for why you're "worth more" than something like Pages. Not that you could ever break even investing an iWork-like amount of software development into an app you sell for $10, but never mind: people have to think it's "worth more."

OmniGraffle can make this claim pretty easily: it's a tool used by professionals, for whom the convenience of doing even a small part of their diagramming on a plane or a train is worth radically more. If you use an app like that for work, $50 is a steal.

But others can't. If you don't have a very obvious selling point for well-compensated professionals, you're pretty much doomed to be called too expensive if you charge more than $4.99.

The good news, of course, is that you can charge $4.99 for anything bigger than a throwaway app. Remember, probably 99% of the Apposphere is throwaway apps, for which free is the only reasonable price but $0.99 is a commonly acceptable approximation of free.

It appears that $10 is also a key price point: the basic professional app. If you have something that's not earth-shattering, that won't necessarily make people money nor save the time of highly paid individuals, but is at least a professional tool - even for aspiring professionals - then $10 is your price point. But be prepared for some negative comments.

And the bad news is that if you charge $10.99 you might as well charge $50, since people will complain all day that you're too expensive unless you're obviously not.

I don't mind, but I find it interesting. Why that price exactly? And will it hold? Or will $0.99 be the new "cheap" with $4.99 the new "expensive" and anything above that only appealing to the pros?

The Awkwardness of Holding

Another thing that has surprised me about my iPad: it's rather awkward to hold the thing. I have not yet found a good angle at which to hold it even for watching videos, much less for surfing the web or reading an iBook or typing an email.

I predict this will create a huge, lucrative and hopefully also innovative market for accessories: stands, holders, cases, the like.

I also predict that over time it will influence Apple to make the thing lighter. It's already much lighter than a laptop, but it's also much heavier than a normal book: that is, it's a bit awkward to hold it in bed or on the couch, and your hand tends to get tired interacting with it. If I'm right and most people find this the defining ergonomic hitch, I believe Apple will be strongly motivated to go lighter before they go more powerful (or go for longer battery). Once the competition wakes up, there will be competitors who will try to offer more raw power and more battery, but I have a very hard time seeing anyone get close to the power/battery/weight ratio the iPad already has. Making it lighter would be a much faster way to increase the distance from the competition.

When and if there is competition, of course. At the moment there is none. Nothing. Nobody. Not even close.

HP, with its acquisition of Palm, is the most likely contender. Google's Android OS and/or Chrome OS (designed for Netbooks) still needs a credible hardware partner, and neither Nokia nor Sony has it together right now (they could though, soon, if they wake up).

Mine Mine Mine!

One truly glaring deficiency in the operating system itself has been noted elsewhere, and I'll note it again: we need a way to either have multiple user accounts on one iPad or, better, to lock the thing into a single app.

Even in a world where every man, woman and child has their own iPad, you're still going to hand your iPad to someone else to check out that one app or that one photo album. And then you're stuck in an awkward position: you don't want to hover over them and watch what they're doing, but you also don't want them to stumble into your email (or other important document), let alone trigger one of the juicy porn links in your browser history.

And I think I really have the One True Profitable Answer to this problem. Instead of having multiple accounts on an iPad - and thus an incentive to buy fewer, and a nightmare of resource management - simply have a fast and easy way for a user to lock to one app.

There's already a bit of a precedent for this: the Picture Frame app doesn't require login, it runs - if you like - instead of the normal iPhone home screen, until and unless you enter your PIN code.

So I envision an easy way to lock an iPad into a single, running app. Say, double-click the Sleep button and you get a dialog asking if you want to lock into the current app. Once locked, the Home button just gets you the PIN-code entry option. If the app crashes, the iPad goes to sleep. And you can put it to sleep in the normal way, and if you really want to quit an app but don't have the PIN code, just hold that Home button for a bit.

I'm sure if they did this, people would immediately start screaming for the ability to lock to a drawer full of apps instead of just one. But my problem would be completely solved if I could lock to one app. I don't even want multiple accounts on my iPad: it's mine mine mine, but I'll let you use it for this oooone little app, just don't break it.

Parting Thoughts

I've had my iPad for just over a week. Yes, it's magical. Yes, it's revolutionary. Yes, it's a steal for the price. Yes, it's much more - or at least much different - than a big iPhone. No, it's not fully baked. No, the keyboard isn't easy to use. No, the App Store isn't a magical repository of life-changing software. No, we don't quite know what we're going to use it for.

But I'm old enough to remember when we figured out what to use home computers for. You felt the potential in the machines, you were sure it was a turning point in history, and of course it was. You just had to figure out what to do with them, and write or build the software or hardware or accessory to make it possible.

Ever since the iPhone came out, I've had that same feeling about mobile computers. And now I feel it with the iPad - as if Apple were trying to pull the world of "home computing" into its iPhonetastic realm of the future - the Magical Jesus Tablet Future™ but hey, it was this or flying cars, right?

Robert Hughes: Charismatic, fun, sloppy - and out of touch?

I was recently pointed to Robert Hughes' Mona Lisa Curse, which is available in 12 parts on YouTube. It's a documentary about the influence of the modern market on the art world. It's also something of a polemic against that influence.

Hughes sees the Mona Lisa's American tour in the 1960's as the starting point, or at least the symbolic kickoff, of an historic realignment of art collecting. Art has come to be seen by its collectors primarily as an investment, and that activity has both priced art museums out of the market and had undue influence on the public perception of relative artistic quality.

Unfortunately, for all his gruff style and contrarian hipness even at 70, Hughes only makes half an argument.

The high prices of blue-chip contemporary art today undoubtably make high-stakes collecting a game for the rich. And it certainly is beautiful to think of a postal clerk and a librarian amassing a major collection, which was once possible and now apparently not.

At least it's not possible if you look to the activities of the rich as your arbiter of artistic quality, which Hughes of course suggests we should not. But at the same time an enormous number of people are making contemporary art, and most of them sell, if they sell at all, at prices quite compatible with a modest income dedicated to collecting.

The same argument can be made for museums: if the rich collectors are skewing the meritocracy of art, why should the museums buy what they collect? And they are not then where exactly is the problem?

Hughes doesn't tell us how this world of the rich setting the public art agenda is any different than it always was. I would argue that it's more democratic by far, even if it's more crass: a Farnese wielded far more power over the art world than a Cohen ever will.

But Hughes argues that the Cohens are lacking taste, whereas the Farnese had it. This may be true, though it could also have to do with the fact that contemporary artists are fairly autonomous and don't do their best work on commission, whereas the Pope could once upon a time tell a Tiziano to paint and the painter would give it his all.

The Mona Lisa Curse also has nothing to say about the personal enrichment of the artists themselves. Much is made of the feelings of betrayal in the early days of aggressive dealership in the US, but that was long ago. Bob Rauschenberg was already a very wealthy man by the time I first saw his work. There is a scene in which Rauschenberg confronts Mr. Scull, who has just made a tremendous profit on work by Rauschenberg and Johns. The dealer tells him, in effect, that he's just made him permanently rich, since his prices will now be much higher.

Scull is right. Rauschenberg is an ingrate. At the moment it probably seemed like precisely the opposite was true, but watching the scene in 2009 it's glaringly apparent how symbiotic that relationship was. Hughes seems to wish it weren't.

And what about the artists?

Hughes spends a fair amount of energy airing his contempt for Andy Warhol, both the man and his work. While quoting him on the Mona Lisa tour, Hughes also calls him stupid. And when discussing a collector who owned 800 Warhols, Hughes is clearly disgusted by the very concept. You can't miss the point of Warhol by a wider margin than that.

Some of the anti-Warhol tirade may also be personal. Considering how central Rauschenberg is to the Hughes canon, and considering how famously Rauschenberg disliked Warhol and his queeny tribe, there is a whif of argumentum ad hominem about the whole thing.

Another artist who takes a beating in the documentary is Damien Hirst. But here it's more deserved: the shark really hasn't aged well, neither physically nor conceptually. And the big visible woman scultpure is truly, breathtakingly awful; freshman work with an industrial budget.

However, I remember being quite inspired by some of Hirst's work when I was studying. Particularly One Thousand Years is still a strong idea. And of course For the Love of God is held up as the ultimate example of the depraved art market, but - Earth to Critic! - it's a work specifically about the depravity of the art market. He might as well have titled it For the Love of Bob.

There are plenty of other artists who have made a lot of money from the modern collecting machine. Would the world somehow be better if they hadn't? Would their art be more pure? Maybe - maybe Brice Marden would make a new picture instead of painting the same old one over and over again. But shouldn't the artists have something to say about that?

And as for the museums being priced out of the game, I see no reason why that matters or is particularly new. Collectors are not the only people who can donate artwork: if major artists don't themselves keep major works for public collections, that's hardly the art market's fault.

Finally there is a segment in which Hughes bullies a rich but clueless collector. This comes across as an utterly unfair fight. And I think Hughes enjoys it precisely because it's unfair, which is sad. The collector has already been shown earlier in the show to be no great thinker on art.

It could have been left at that, but Hughes corners him and effectively requires him to prove that he isn't very bright but thinks his possessions matter anyway. Congratulations. Having now proved, against all odds, that dumb people can also inherit great wealth, which universal conundrum shall the Critic tackle next?

So what is it that Hughes wants artists, collectors and museums to do?

As far as I can tell he wants artists to use their own hands to make works that have to do with contemporary society, as long as it's still recognizably "art."

Collectors ought perhaps to spend less and be less competitive. Less, you know, >new money.< Right, I'll get back to you on that, or my people will.

Museums should be less commercial, less sponsored, less in thrall to their donors and less crowded. I suppose the Getty has achieved that, by having the One Greater Donor and being hard to reach. I'll take crowded, exciting, whorish and available any day. And a knock-off Murakami bag from China.

Hughes is a tough and charismatic contrarian. I highly recommend the documentary. But I can't help thinking he's out of touch.

iTunes Store: Purchase HD, Download Kitchen Sink

Weird: I just purchased a full season of a TV show in "High Definition" on iTunes for the first time, and it kicks off downloads for both the high-def and normal-def versions of every episode. I'm curious whether I'll be charged for both. If not then it's no big deal, but I still have some trouble imagining what having both versions is good for.

Top Searches in Germany, Tuesday at 3am.

Scary.

Two cool (and underreported) things about Snow Leopard.

I recently upgraded my various Macs to Snow Leopard, Apple's streamlined new operating system. So far two things have caught my eye, both of them very nice surprises.

1. System Perl is now version 5.10.
2. The Activity Monitor now shows Safari Plug-Ins such as the disastrous resource-hog Adobe Flash as separate processes.

So now when your fans start going nuts over a YouTube video, you can see exactly who's to blame. As usual, Adobe is to blame. I have yet to try killing the Flash process to see if it can be done without affecting the rest of Safari, but I'm hopeful it might. As for the Perl, here are the geeky details:

kfrost@mbp ~/bloc $ perl -V
Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 10 subversion 0) configuration:
 Platform:
   osname=darwin, osvers=10.0, archname=darwin-thread-multi-2level
   uname='darwin neige.apple.com 10.0 darwin kernel version 10.0.0d8: tue may 5 19:29:59 pdt 2009; root:xnu-1437.2~2release_i386 i386 '
   config_args='-ds -e -Dprefix=/usr -Dccflags=-g  -pipe  -Dldflags= -Dman3ext=3pm -Duseithreads -Duseshrplib -Dinc_version_list=none -Dcc=gcc-4.2'
   hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
   useithreads=define, usemultiplicity=define
   useperlio=define, d_sfio=undef, uselargefiles=define, usesocks=undef
   use64bitint=define, use64bitall=define, uselongdouble=undef
   usemymalloc=n, bincompat5005=undef
 Compiler:
   cc='gcc-4.2', ccflags ='-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include',
   optimize='-Os',
   cppflags='-g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include'
   ccversion='', gccversion='4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)', gccosandvers=''
   intsize=4, longsize=8, ptrsize=8, doublesize=8, byteorder=12345678
   d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=16
   ivtype='long', ivsize=8, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t', lseeksize=8
   alignbytes=8, prototype=define
 Linker and Libraries:
   ld='gcc-4.2 -mmacosx-version-min=10.6', ldflags ='-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -L/usr/local/lib'
   libpth=/usr/local/lib /usr/lib
   libs=-ldbm -ldl -lm -lutil -lc
   perllibs=-ldl -lm -lutil -lc
   libc=/usr/lib/libc.dylib, so=dylib, useshrplib=true, libperl=libperl.dylib
   gnulibc_version=''
 Dynamic Linking:
   dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=bundle, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags=' '
   cccdlflags=' ', lddlflags='-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup -L/usr/local/lib'


Characteristics of this binary (from libperl):
 Compile-time options: MULTIPLICITY PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV
                       PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT PERL_MALLOC_WRAP USE_64_BIT_ALL
                       USE_64_BIT_INT USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES
                       USE_PERLIO USE_REENTRANT_API
 Locally applied patches:
       /Library/Perl/Updates/ comes before system perl directories
       installprivlib and installarchlib points to the Updates directory
 Built under darwin
 Compiled at Jun 24 2009 00:35:27
 %ENV:
   PERL5LIB=""
 @INC:
   /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0
   /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0
   /Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /Library/Perl/5.10.0
   /Network/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /Network/Library/Perl/5.10.0
   /Network/Library/Perl
   /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level
   /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0
   .