Make: Online reader Baz from Dublin, ireland, sent us this rad video of a low-tech robot lawn mower. He writes:
Self-propelled lawn mower guided by wrapping a string around a couple of posts so it mows a spiral of lawn. Quite hacky, but interesting idea!
In the MAKE offices we've been trying to guess what happens at the end. So far we're thinking the mower flips over, or perhaps it rips its tether out of the ground, mowing wildly amok. What do you think happened when the rope ran out?
Of course, this project is an incredibly great contrast to the R/C Lawnbot we have on the cover of MAKE Volume 22 (and show you how to make inside the issue).
Automate your world with remote control. From pet care to power outlets, from toys to telepresence, we'll show you how to add a joystick, push-button, twist-knob, or timer to just about anything. Don't forget, subscribers can always read the digital edition here.
Until now, you could not purchase an iPad with cash. Instead you had to swipe a credit card and make it easier for Apple to make sure that you're obeying the two-iPads-per-person limit. Things changed though, because of one woman. More »
$2 Charcoal Grill: "Basically, I needed a small grill really quick and cheap. It's pretty simple to put together, and easy to use. All steps in this guide are for informational purposes only. I am not responsible for any damages, explosions, or radioactive fishmen they may attack you and/or eat your first born. Gathe... By: sk8er6
MAKE subscriber subatomic from Chicago, IL wrote in to share his PVC didgeridoos packing 11 interchangeable extension tubes to change the pitch.
I've built two didgeridoos, with extension pipes to change the pitch. With a 2nd player, we'll be able to play chords together. I had been thinking about buying a didj for a while, and came across some ideas to build one out of inexpensive PVC with interchangable sections. This idea appealed to me for many reasons, one which is that I really don't know what note I will like, so this gives me an option to try out several. Another is that I once visited Hernan Battiato for a little jam session where he showed me how his alpine horn has a couple extra sections to add to the base horn to let him change the pitch. So after that it was always in the back of my mind that interchangable pipes would be cool. PVC's color is very boring (white), so I scouted youtube a bit for designs and found one that I really liked.
To think, it was about this time last year that Google first unveiled its collaboration tool Wave, and today the company's taking out the invitational step and opening it to the public at large -- which begs the question, did anyone not have an invite that wanted one at this point? It'll also be now available in the enterprise-centric Apps suite for no extra charge. On the developer side of things, expect some more open source code be unleashed, including most importantly the rich text editor. Can't say we've really dug around in the service ourselves since its beta launched, but co-creator Lars Rasmussen tells us we should be giving it another go. He further acknowledged that they've got some work to do on educating users on the best ways to use the service, which at this point seems to be mid- and small-scale collaboration. To that end, expect some new tutorial videos, and with any luck, some amusing animation.
May 30, 2007. Watch SeñorBill Gates describing the future of computing, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs next to him: An iPad-like device being used alongside an iPhone-like device. Then watch Jobs saying that, actually, the future was the PC.
First, Bill Gates' idea of the future of computing:
I don't think you'll have one device. I think you'll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you'll do dramatically more reading off of that... yeah, I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor [...] You'll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you'll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there, you know, there's navigation computers, there's media, there's phone.
Nowadays, Steve Jobs agrees with this vision. He thinks that the iPad is the futureand the traditional PC is dying. Like he told Ryan Tate: "The times are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away."
Back in 2007, however, he believed otherwise:
It will be the PC, maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree. So I think the PC is going to continue. This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it's a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that'll be something that most people have, at least in this society. In others, maybe not, but certainly in this one. But then there's an explosion that's starting to happen in what you call post-PC devices, right? You can call the iPod one of them. There's a lot of things that are not. … I think there's just a category of devices that aren't as general purpose, that are really more focused on specific functions, whether they're phones or iPods or Zunes or what have you. And I think that category of devices is going to continue to be very innovative and we're going to see lots of them.
In a way, you can argue that the iPad and the iPhone are personal computers. PCs evolved into different form factors, with different UI paradigms. But that's not what Steve Jobs meant back then. To the question about what device will be the future of computing, Jobs clearly answers "it will be the PC, maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that." It's not surprising. Back then, he was always repeating the same message: The PC as the digital hub, the center of our digital lives, with specialized devices like the iPod orbiting around it. That was Apple's marketing message at the time.
Only a few months later, the iPhone changed that vision. And the iPhone or the iPad are anything but specialized devices around the PC. They have a life on their own. They are general purpose computing devices in a phone and tablet format. Jobs later pointed this out:
We're getting to the point where everything's a computer in a different form factor. So what, right? So what if it's built with a computer inside it? It doesn't matter. It's, what is it? How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what's inside it anymore
That's true. But it's funny to see that, back then, Bill Gates was the one truly believing in a future beyond the PC, while Jobs was still playing the "PC as the digital hub" tune. I wonder if the latter ever anticipated the iPhone effect. If only I had a time machine. I could go back to 2007 and send him an email asking him about it.
An email sent from my iPad. [Thanks Daniel Smith!]
In any sensible system of institutional governance, negligence would be sanctioned. So why is it that leaders of major corporations often seem to escape punishment for negligent conduct? Why is it that Tony Hayward, the head of BP, can publicly admit that it was 'probably true' that the company should have done more to prepare for deep-water drilling emergencies and still keep his job? This is a company that as recently as March 2010 defined itself as the leading deep-water drilling company. It's also a company that has demonstrated a pattern of questionable conduct related to safety as exemplified by the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion and the criticism leveled by the Baker Report as well as the lack of care that contributed to the 2006 Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak. Why are heads not rolling up and down the leadership chain at the company?
So long as we fail to hold business leaders to an appropriate standard of care, we can expect these sorts of disasters to continue. The heads of corporations are seldom held personally accountable for the negligent acts of their organizations. BP and its contractors have caused, at the very least, hundreds of millions of dollars to damage to the Gulf of Mexico. Deep-water drilling is a core competence. The CEO admits the company could have done more, which is tantamount to an admission of negligence. But the very worst that can happen to Hayward is that he will lose his job ... along with an attractive financial package to ease the pain. And he may even get to keep his job!
How could we hold corporate leaders responsible for negligence? We would start by defining a standard of care. Negligence is 'conduct that is culpable because it falls short of what a reasonable person would do to protect (others) from foreseeable risks of harm.' That's a straightforward standard. If you fail to do what a 'reasonable person' would do and someone gets injured, you are subject to being sued and having to pay a penalty. For corporate leaders, this would mean establishing a 'reasonable leader' standard. Given that BP was specializing in deep-water drilling, and given prior experience of devastating underwater oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, it was reasonably foreseeable that these sorts of problems could occur and the company's leaders did not do what a 'reasonable person' would have done to prevent these problems.
Having established a standard of care, we then need two additional elements: penalties and a fair way to judge conduct. The former could be addressed by writing specific provisions concerning negligence into executive compensation contracts. 'If you are judged to have been negligent as a leader, you will forgo some or all of your severance payments.' The best predictor of what people do is what they are incentivized to do. If there aren't penalties for leadership negligence, we are encouraging leadership negligence.
Finally, we would need a fair way to judge negligence. This couldn't be credibly done by Boards of Directors or other interested parties. One answer would be to create a special panel to render judgments, consisting perhaps of highly respected retired executives.
Would this be easy to implement? Of course not. It would require a great deal of thought and careful design. But if we fail to fundamentally transform the incentives companies offer their executives, we should expect more of the same.
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