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Hardware

Hacking Barney 19

Posted by CmdrTaco from the purple-is-scary dept.
Tom Rothamel writes "This site looks at the use of a Microsoft Actimates Barney in a human-computer interaction context. Be sure to download the pdf! "
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Hacking Barney More

Hacking Barney

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  • ... or is the phrase 'Barney Protocol Stack' amusing?
  • I think the Teletubbies ActiMates will open up whole new lines of inquiry for the PARC/MIT researchers. Their tummy-mounted display screens may prove to be more versatile output devices than Barney's hands and arms.

    Also, the Teletubbies are (if I am not mistaken) viewed with a lot less acrimony than Barney. Sadly, only Laa-Laa and Po are offered; apparently, Micro$oft felt that Tinky Winky was too controversial for their purposes. Pity; the use of Tinky Winky as an I/O device would offer whole new ways to piss off the Falwellites.

    The only drawback to this continuing research, as I see it, will be that it will be impossible for me to read the ensuing reports without busting out in maniacal laughter, inviting quizzical gazes from my fiancee...

    Eric
    --

  • Posted by Doctor P:

    You could always buy the poe and then dye it purpul...and squish the circle on his head into a triangle. Teletubbie buy-buy (M$ slogan)!

  • What we need now is for someone to strip the circutry out of a Barney doll, and refit it to a Tux doll. That would be a must buy toy
  • Imagine combining the speech unit from these with the moving parts of Minstorm. A robot(or whatever) that blinks it's eyes and sings^H^H^H^H^H warns you of errors.
  • Probably wouldn't happen until there was an RFC submitted for it and a protocol number assigned by the IANA. Somewhere John Postel is screaming. Or laughing madly.
  • PDF = Portable Document Format. It's essentially Postscript with bytecodes and compressed. With a viewer for just about every platform (Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, Sparc, RS 6000, SGI, OS/2, etc.) and PDF-to-Postscript converters for everyone else, PDF a great way to distribute content if you want the layout, graphics, etc. to be perfectly preserved. It's cross-platform.

    If you don't care about layout, then yes, HTML is better.
  • or Furbys? I mean like buffer overflows in the IR protocol, leading to hostile code execution resulting in reprogramming of actions and sounds. In essense, we could create aa Furby worm/virus. How cool would it be to have Furbys advocate Linux to 4-year olds?

    Ex Machina "From the Machine"
    xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
  • From the looks of the paper, a Tex file would have been very appropriate. I bet come Monday, when they get /.'d, they'll reconsider.
  • Maybe it's how they're going to "de-commoditize" network protocols...

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