Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey there, everybody, My name is Chris Bollett, and I am an editor here at how stuff Works dot Com and cracking up across from me as usual because I said something goofy as senior writer Jonathan Strickland, just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It's in the computer. Everything your your your d MV records, your
your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It's all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It's like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just just begging for someone to screw with. And you know what, They've done it to me, and you know what they're gonna do it to you. Dune Dune, Dune,
I was gonna gonna do that? Or Hi everybody, since you kind of started off that way at any rate, Today we thought we would talk about some of the interesting tech that debuted or became popular in the last year that being and kind of give our impressions on it. So some of it's going to be stuff that we particularly like. In some cases it might not be, you know, technology that we particularly like or use, but we found it notable in some sense. So, um, would you like
me to start to do? Want to start? Um? Well, you know what mine is probably going to be. I can think of one or off the top of my head. Let's see if right, the one that I actually have in the office with me at the moment. It rhyme by dad, Yes it does. Okay, So you're talking about the iPad, Apple's device, which, uh, you know we made a prediction about last year. I mean, we had been sitting there. But I'm not doing this to torch you. I mean, you know what, frankly, I didn't expect it
to be as big as it it did. Well, I thought it was gonna be there, seven screen or five inch screen popular, as popular as it was. I kind of figured it would be sort of a niche market thing. But and it it's it is, but the niches bigger
than I thought. Well, And and part of that, I mean, you can't be blamed for that because, like we said back when we did our original podcast about the iPad rumors, uh, the tablet form factor had never really been successful, and so it was hard to imagine a product that would change that, and yet Apple did it. So yeah, that was a huge story in and of course, the rumors about a tablet device uh from Apple started years ago. Yeah, they were coming to um pretty much a frothy, steamy
head by the end of two thousand nine. So if Apple had not come out with a tablet device in two ten, we would have all been upset. I was imagining beer. I just want to I just want a lot. I want a lat taste so badly. I need some caffeine. Okay, Well, uh, and the thing is too, I was thinking like the Windows tablets, and this is a completely different well I'm almost completely different form factor from those larger, more laptop
like devices. So I think I think that that particular size UM and the fact that it already had an established base of software helped it a lot. So yeah, that that definitely was a big story this year. Of course, Oprah named it one of her favorite things well, and
and so that always helps with the publicity. Epple made a really savvy decision to create a device that could run apps but was not trying to replicate what you do on a computer because that that model had been tried many times before and that was the one that had failed multiple times. So Apple said, no, that's not how we're going to do it. We're going to design this so that it runs apps that are either made specifically with this device in mind, or are easily convertible
from our iPod Touch and iPhone platforms. So yeah, it was a really smart move and it paid off. So yeah, that was a that was a huge tech tech story in Okay, I'm gonna I've got one. This a little self serving. Actually it's a lot self serving, but I'm being sincere when I say this, the house stuff Works dot Com app, iPhone and iPod Touch. I actually really like it. Yeah, Okay, Now I don't own an iPhone,
but my wife does. She has an iPhone now and the second application that she downloaded was the house stuff Works dot Com app, and uh, I played with it on there. I played with it a little bit before that. I had written an article about the the app, uh to times so that it would come out at the same time at the app went public, and uh it really I like it a lot. And the reason why I like it is it it collects all our stuff
in a very easily accessible way. Because if you've visited how Stuff Works dot com, you know that we have these amazing articles on our site, articles, quizzes, games, that kind of stuff on our site. We have another site that houses our blogs, because you can read all the blog entries written by the people who do the various podcasts, as well as some blogs that that don't have a
podcast yet. Then we've got the podcasts, so you can go to an rss uh site or you can go through iTunes or whatever to get access to the podcasts. And then we have our social networking right so then you'd have to go to Facebook or Twitter in order to interact with us on those social networks. But this app collects it all in one place and makes it really easy to go back and forth. You know, I know I am not the only person who wants to know what the first app was, but I bet I
can guess. I will. I will put it this way, and without revealing what that app was, I will say that it relates directly to her job. So it was not Angry Birds. I thought it was gonna be Angry Birds. No. The first app I downloaded on my HTC G two, which by the way, another tech story that I like, uh was Angry Birds. Actually, you know that that was a big The HTC G two is a story, but so it was Angry Birds. It was huge. I actually have not on my list too. Yeah, which is kind
of amazing to think about. Uh, you know, just an individual game, and not even a console game or a PC game, but an app. I didn't think any game was ever going to really take the focus away from the discussion about Farmville. But then Angry Birds came out and that became the game everyone talked about. It wasn't Farmville anymore. It was Angry Birds. Not that not that you played the game on the same platform. You didn't,
but you can now. Yeah, But Angry Birds was was just the thing that everyone talked about so much so that I had to download it when I got my my G two because um, I just heard so much about it and I had seen videos, but I never played it, right, I mean, I've never had a chance to. And here's what I have to say about Angry Birds. Thank goodness, I now know what those strange noises are from the bathroom stall next to me. Because I thought
I thought we had people with severe digestive problems. But now I know it's just that people playing angry birds while they're in the John. Okay, that's way too much information about our coworkers. How do you think I feel? I lived it, and I don't. I don't have anger birds, so it's not me. Okay, Yeah, all right, yeah about Windows Phone seven, Windows Phone seven a big story. That's
one of those things. I was going to say it in our our Predictions episode, but I uh, we're recording this after we've recorded our episode about Predictions, so it did not make it into that episode. I can say that for sure because I didn't say it. But um, I think that Windows Phone seven is going to have a decent but not spectacular year in eleven. I think it's going to build a good foundation, and I think after it'll really start to become a contender in the
smartphone space. Because I gotta tell you, that is a flashy, nice looking OS or smartphone. Yeah yeah, I think. Uh. I think Microsoft's past in the mobile market is hurting it as far as this this OS is concerned, because I've from what I've seen, it's a nice operating system and the critical claim has been pretty pretty Critics have responded very well to it. I mean, all the first look stuff seems to be that you know, this is this is definitely a contender. It can go toe to
toe with iOS and Android in the smartphone space. I just think it's going to take about a year for it to really get its footing, and then it'll they'll I think will be when we see like some great competition in the smartphone space. I'm looking forward to that because no matter which platform you support, everyone benefits from competition, that's right, because everyone starts to innovate and invest in their platforms and everyone improves as a result of that.
And there will be more flame wars as people talk about how crummy the other yours. I hate you and the phones you like, yeah said, I hate you and the bands you like exactly very much. I've got one piece of tech that did not that that I wanted so badly to come out, but it it died in development, the Lenovo you One. Now, you guys might remember after cs I was talking about this a lot. I blogged about it. I think I talked about it on podcasts. The Lenovo you one was a pretty neat uh computer.
It was a laptop computer where you could detach the screen from the computer base and it would become a tablet. And not only that, but it ran on two different operating systems to when it was connected as a laptop, it ran I believe it was a Windows and when you detached the the screen it would become a Lenox tablet. Um It was supposed to launch in the summer of
Lenovo ended up shelving that. There was talk that Lenovo might relaunch the one, but use a different operating system for the tablet, possibly Android, but we still haven't seen it, and so I don't know if they if that project still has any steam in in Lenovo land, but I really hope so, because it was actually, I mean, it was the kind of tablet that I wanted because it meant that you could if you needed to use a laptop like capability, you just connected and then you can
type away and whatever. But if you just wanted something where you could, you know, read a book or watch a movie, pop that screen out and you're good to go. Um, let's see other big text stories. Really you want to do that one? Yeah? Google Buzz Yeah, Yeah, it's a tech story. Yeah, not a good one. Well at least not not the initial response. Yeah, Google, Google had a couple of sort of busts this year Buzz, which was
their answer to Twitter, sort of a microblogging service. But the problem wasn't with the service so much as it was with the privacy settings. Yeah, it allowed you to see another person's connect contacts essentially, that's their Gmail contacts, really is what it boiled down to. And it it revealed more information about people and the people they know
than a lot of folks were comfortable with. And so there was a pretty big backlash to Google Buzz early early on, just shortly after it launched, and as a result, Google actually apologized and went back and tweaked those settings so that it wasn't so open and um, and there are still people who use Google Buzz. It's it hasn't
gone away. In fact, I still use it, and a couple of my friends use In fact, one of my friends has stopped using really Facebook and Twitter for the most part, and she still uses Google Buzz, which pretty crazy to make I use all three, But then I'm a social media junkie, So yes you are, yes, well,
pot and kettle, dear Piette. Well, then there's then there's Google Wave, which was supposed to be a big tech story is a big tech story in two thousand nine, and then it just sort of People had a difficult time learning how to use it, and then came the news that they weren't going to support it anymore. Yeah, and you figured they're going to incorporate that technology into their other products. Oh sure, yeah, and it's not it's not gone. That was the initial word was that they
were going to just get rid of it. But you know, I still have access to my Google notebook. I checked the other day. Um, So I think they'll probably leave it there for people who want to and can use it. I just don't think they're going to make any significant improvements and not supporting it like they were. Yeah, they may just look at bits and pieces of it and say, you know what, this would work really well in Gmail. Let's go ahead and adapt this so that we can
incorporate into a Gmail feature. That kind of think. Chris and I actually found a really good use for for Wave back when we had Tech Stuff Live. We would use that to build our show order and uh, and it became pretty helpful. We could put in links and we could order the show exactly the way we wanted to. We would discuss the various news stories and narrow it down, and it became a nice way to have an interactive meeting without having to actually, you know, book a conference
room or something. But that's a very specific use and it's hard to argue for a tool that, you know, I couldn't really come up with another use that I could put it to use for, you know, on a regular basis. So, yeah, the writing was kind of on the wall for that one. Yeah, they they they sort of promoted it with you know, you're going to have Google Wave discussions with your friends and set up meetings and things, you know, get togethers, not not corporate meetings,
but parties, parties and things like that. And I just don't see how, Yeah, Evite has that. It's already so easy to create an electronic invitation using Evite or one of the many other services that have similar features that even Facebook you create a Facebook event, or heck, you even put it out on Twitter if you want to do an impromptu it thing. It just I think there were enough other tools that did it well enough that Google Wave was so not a really steep learning curve.
I mean, it was just one of those things where you're looking at that for the first day or so thinking what the heck can I do? Yeah, there's too much. There's so much stuff that I don't know how to use this UM keeping it kind of connected to Google UM in a way and talking about stuff that died out Cool c U I L Cool, the the search engine that was headed by former Google employees and UH
and other people as well, the Google Killer, the Google Killer. Yeah, they that search engine went away in the the plug was pulled UM. All the employees were let go and the servers were turned off, and now there is no cool an you can't find it. I mean if you go to the website, there's nothing there. So you're saying we've lost our cool. Yes, we have lost our cool and the cool encyclopedia that went along with it. That actually did launch in but it wasn't enough to keep
the search engine around. We did gain WOLL from Alpha. We did game was that might actually be a little earlier. It's hard for me to remember too, because I was like I had to actually look stuff. Oh we got rock Melt, new browser that's intimately tied with your Facebook profile. Yes, that's really the only way to use it, and so that's made some people nervous about privacy issues as well.
So rock Melt is brand new, it's still in beta, it's still invitation only, but those invites multiply because when you get invited, then you suddenly have three invitations, and when you invite other people, they get invitations. Plus if they download. If people you invite download rock Melt, you get your invitations back so you can invite more people.
So really it's it's one of those you know, they tell two friends and they tell two friends, and so I can hear you thinking about except that it's more than that, right, because I tell two friends, they tell two friends. Well, meanwhile I'm telling to other friends and they're telling two friends. So it just it explodes very quickly. Um, stuff like that usually does, I think, based on the encounters I've had with betas and things like that, it
just it just takes off. Um. And yes, you're right, that was two thousand nine for a will from Alpha, so I thought it might be to remember. You know, it's funny people say that tech years are like dog years. Um, I can see that, all right, I've got another one. And this actually goes back to Apple and and phones again iPhone four oh yes, and antenna gate, antenna gate
and glassgate. Yes. So the iPhone four coming out having the front facing camera, FaceTime all that stuff, plus the iPod Touch with the new cameras so that you can use FaceTime on those as well. Um. Yeah, Apple really had a pretty big year for introducing new devices when you factor in the iPad, the iPhone four, in the new iPod Touch, plus the other new iPod form factors
as well. The only one that did not get an update was iPod Classic, which actually wasn't referred to it all in their event, but it still exists, it's still sale, So there was that. It was a big year for games. We had games like Fallout, New Vegas, Halo, Reach, Left for Dead Too, Epic, Mickey Medal of Honor, h lots and lots and lots of games. I spent many many hours playing games until my Xbox three sixty died. Yes, I should be getting that in the mail any day now.
Oh um. I I remember one thing it came out of our predictions for but as a good thing, um, which was Palm being acquired. So it looks like uh, Palms new web OS operating system will continue to live on now that the company has been acquired by Hewlett Packard. I've got some fun which is kind of interesting, some fun text stories that we can talk about briefly. Do you remember chat Roulette? Oh? I do. Yeah, that was
a news story that broke in. Of course, that was the video chatting service that would random repair people uh for chatting UM sessions. And of course that was where we learned that many people apparently have no problem with nudity in front of strangers. Yes, And we learned that some people like to imitate Ben Folds and sing to whomever is on the other end of the and sometimes and sometimes apparently it is Folds apparently, but one of those people Ben Folds. Yes. Yeah. Chat Roulette was funny
and UM, I'll never forget. The greatest screen capture I did all year long was when The Daily Show ran a segment about chat Roulette, and at the end of the segment they had a certain Natalie de Conti now Natalie Morris, who was commenting on chat Roulette and then hiding her face in her hands as one of the the nudists I referred to UH joined chat with her and so I got a great screen capture of Natalie hiding her past in her hands in a window above
John Stewart's shoulder. It was a beautiful thing. Yeah, it was a proud moment for her. She was on Daily Show. Congratulations Natalie, um double rainbow? What does it mean? Oh? Yeah, we're gonna go with memes. And there's certain memes that I I would mention, but I couldn't go into any detail because it's objectionable material. Like there's a certain song
that got really popular. Actually, there's two songs I could think of off the top of my head we got really popular in the Internet, and neither of them are one. So we can talk about you should you should probably refrain from mentioning them at all at all because to talk about insane clown posse and cel Okay, I won't. Uh, there's how about this. Here's a great story. Yeah, Old Spice and their YouTube ad where they in real time to Twitter messages sp a whole day shooting replies and
posting them rapid fire. This was that reminds me of them. Yes, Conan Cam another another example of using the Internet in a brilliant way. A very absurd silly way to get attention. Uh. So with the the Old Spice one, of course, they were using the the the I'm want a horse guy. Yeah, Isaiah,
Isaiah exactly. And he was responding to Twitter messages. People were sending tweets and he would direct these responses to specific people and they got posted to YouTube and they were all hilarious and bizarre and absurd, and people just flipped out on Twitter. They I can't believe that the Old Spice guys talking to me. And there were conversations that started up between the Twitter people and Isaiah and
it was just hilarious, great marketing. And of course the Conan thing was a twenty four hour camera set up in the stairwell of teen Cocoa. Yes, Conan O'Brien new show on on TBS. They were preparing for the launch and as as the first show is impending. Uh, they had show staffers come out and do stuff in the stairwell like they do dramatic readings. Uh. They would play games, the dancing top pairs, aerobics, bears doing aerobics were awesome, but the dancing taco was my favorite. And here's why.
The camera angle was in a stairwell, and you could also see down a hallway, and in the hallway there was an elevator. Right there's one point where the dancing Taco starts to It's a guy in a taco outfit doing just goofy dance moves to this, to this looped free music. About half an hour so he's dancing. At one point he starts dancing down the hallway and then he dances down to the elevator, pushes the button, continues to dance, the elevator doors open, He gets in the
elevator to the doors closed. About two minutes later you see him dancing up the stairs and then his when he gets to the topic, he says to the camera stairs a heart, let's limit the stairs, and it just goes right back to dancing. And I was like this that I know it's incredibly stupid. I know that there's no sophistication to this humor. I love it. Yeah, yep. And of course the dancing Taco bell, the dancing taco bell that followed another fun story. Yes, trolla la la
la la, la la la, one of my pet favorites. Yes, I'll kill a Soviet entertainer from the nineties, sixties and seventies. That's a that's a meme. That's pretty clean. Although apparently, which is funny, because he had no idea that he had come back into vogue. He used to sing this song all over you know that the TV. He was a very popular singer. Um and he has a very interesting facial expressions when And the funny thing is he's he seems like a really nice guy. They've done interviews
with him since then. He and he apparently was told by one of his grandchildren, Hey, you're an internet sensation now, and yeah, exactly, they've done interviews with him, and and uh, it turns out the song the reason he was doing these vocalizations instead of using actual lyrics, where the lyrics were basically about being free, it was it was like a cowboys song, being free on the open range. And that was uh an idea that the Soviet government wasn't
really a percent behind at the time. So he was strongly encouraged to change the lyrics. So he just he just made it where it was just him making sounds, really singing these sounds to the tune and sort of like scat singers used to do when they would forget the lyrics that sort of gave birth to the movement of scat, the vocal movement of Scat. The song is great, but the video, the video is awesome, possibly the greatest
thing to ever be on the Internet ever. And the fact that he is it became sort of a joke overnight and has a good a good sense of humor about it. Um, I think just makes them that more endearing to people. Yeah, so anyway, Yeah, I love that. I mean, wow, that was a long time ago, but I guess it was this year. Man, lull Here. Here's the thing about memes to write. Memes tend to have,
with a few exceptions, a meteoric rise. They're really popular for a couple of months, and then they disappear and then typically and then the next meme will take over. Some of them last longer, some of them become kind of a joke later on that you can reference, but no one's really, you know, watching the videos actively anymore. Yeah.
It's like, you know, right, You'll see you'll see a two or three week period where the views on YouTube just skyrocket, and then after that they trickle off pretty quickly, and they still might have steady viewership that it will be a fraction of what used to be. Oh nos, Yeah, let's see what else Internet Explore nine. Internet Explore nine, there's another browser that that debuted, um, and people talked
about how fast it was. That There's some other developments within and to Explore nine that seemed pretty interesting to me, like, Uh, they're going to incorporate the no tracking system, so you can if you have it active, then you aren't tracked while you navigate the Internet. Uh. You know, you've got private browsing on various systems as well, but the definition of private seems to be somewhat flexible depending upon the browser. So let's see that that came out. Uh, what else?
One other big big stories should we talk about or just Google? We like Google Chromos. Google Chromos which is just at the end of well, at the end of two thousand nine, we knew that the developer rolled for Chromos was out and they had said at that time that this was geared toward a launch in the end of right, so it's not a surprise, but but it is releasing and the the app store that goes with it. Now, the the the surprise I would say from Google was
the driverless cars. Yes, that was a big surprise. It was a big surprise because it turns out that they had been testing this for a long time ye hundred forty tho miles before they actually announced it. That's that's a lot of miles to be driving around with no actual active human driver. And there was there was someone behind the wheel at all times. There was never a moment where the car was by itself, like there was
no one in the car. They always had someone who could take over should there be a catastrophic failure of the system. But as far as we know, there there were no such incidents. There was a couple of stories about accidents that the Google Car was involved in, um at least one of them. I remember it being the Google Car was rear ended, so it may or may not have been the Google Car's fault. I mean, if the Google car stop suddenly, then it probably was its fault,
But I just don't know the details of that. I think I said that when we did our podcast on the Google Car, and I never went back to actually read the story to see how it turned out. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was the incident with the the black trans Am, which apparently was jealous of the other driverless car. Michael, I'm going to sing about the Constitution. I'm sorry, I'm mixing up the movies now, yes you are. And one of them is the TV show it's not even a movie. No,
there were. There was the made for TV movie I'll have you know. Oh, night Writer. Yeah, okay, so Night Writer six, it was brilliant. And then and then the Google Phone. Yeah, also the Nexus one, yeah, which which was released into the nine but really yeah, but at the time we were talking about it like it was going to start with the Google Store and they were going to sell they were going to get in the phone business, and they were really going to do this.
And then a few months later, earlier this year, they said, yeah, you know what, No, Yeah, that was kind of a well, I mean, it's still a developer phone, and it originally was a developer phone. It became a consumer phone at the very beginning of two thousand ten. I remember because I was at CS and there were people who had literally just had it delivered to them before they left for the show. Yeah, but CS is right at the bleeding edge of the first of the year. So yeah,
so it depends on how you look at it. But yeah, twenty ten was pretty much when the consumer Nexus one became a reality. It had already been a developer phone for a few weeks before that, and as and Google employees had had it for months. Yeah, yeah, and apparently and now when they discontinued, they also said that it might be available to Google developers and some other people after the fact that they were no longer going to
sell it to the public. Now, the Nexus S may mark the It seems to be marking the return of Google to the phone market. And that seems to be an interesting device too, But it's not going to I don't it's not supposed to actually hit the streets by the end of twenty ten. It will actually happen from what I've read if and I you may or may not know the answer to this question. But as I recall, do you remember what was the Nexus one? Was that an HTC device, and the Nexus S is a Samsung
I believe that to be true. That's right. When you actually start to start talk about something else, Okay, well, let me look at my list. Um, motion controlled gaming became yet another story. Of course, we already had the we mote m Yes, I'm we loading that story. But you know, we had the that and then Sony and Microsoft both came out with their motion controlled systems in two thousand ten. Of course, the Sony Move and the Microsoft Connect respectively, and uh, they are two different systems.
Both of them use cameras to track movement. In the case of the Sunny Move, the camera is tracking the motions of a l e ED that's on the end of the controller. That's the thing that's inside the little snowball thing at the end of the controller. Yeah, so the wand and stuffing like that. The LED can light
up different colors. It's supposed to light up a color that shows up out against whatever background it happens to be in front of, and then the camera attracts that motion and translates that into the actions in the game. The Connect of course, has cameras that are trained on the user him or herself, and your motions can control
the actions of a character in the game. Um. And we've seen some really really cool hacks with a Connect already, some neat stuff where like we saw the one where a guy was able to do real time lightsaber effects using the Connect where he just picked up essentially like a broom handle, but it looked like a lightsaber, and he could, you know, waving the broom handle around and then in real time, his digital version of himself is
waving around a lightsaber. We've also seen them some people use it for digital puppetry and other applications as well, so that it seems like that's going to be really a cool device in eleven, something for people to play with and find new ways to to uh create user interfaces and and interactive computing devices and all sorts of application. And yes, the answer to our question, uh, the NEXTUS one was built by HTC and this the Samsung will do the Nexus s excellent. So, UM, I'm what we're
kind of running low on time. Um, We've we've gone for a good while here. I've got one other thing I will talk about that I thought was kind of neat. Something that was launched in kick Starter. Now are familiar with Kickstarter a little bit. Kickstarter is a it's it's a fund raising um uh system. Really, it's what you can use Kickstarter to be able to raise funds for various um um charities or or causes. And the way it works is that you create an amount that you are.
You know, it's your target amount. This is how much money you want to raise, and you create the amount of time that you have to raise that money. So let's say you've got two months to raise two thousand dollars and then you start soliciting donations to this cause through Kickstarter. People can go and they can make a donation through Kickstarter to your cause. If you hit two thousand dollars, then everything goes through and you're able to
use that money for whatever the cause was. If you don't make it, if you only get to dollars, then all of those payments are canceled. No one has charged any money for using you know, for donating to the cost. So if you if you donated fifty dollars and they did not make their amount, it's not like that fifty dollars is gone, you get you get it back. It doesn't actually get charged to you. Cool. So it's a neat Yeah, it's neat internet based way to try and
do fundraising. Yes, and I came up with one last one o UM the Governmental Release of Data Data dot gov and the the equivalent in the the UK as well, those that both launched this year. People have been able to get their hands on a lot of information from all kinds of government agencies that can be used in reports and and mash ups. Um and you know it just previously it was very hard, not because it was classified so much, but because you didn't know where to go.
It was hard to find um. And you know, it could be used used by lots of different people for a lot of different things. Uh. You know, of course journalists like having that kind of thing on hand, so um, you know, the the making that information more readily available as a pretty neat deal. And if you couldn't find it there, you could go to wiki leaks. We didn't talk about that either. That's a that's a different sort
of governmental That was a big story. But launch launched in two thousand seven, but it it did make huge headlines around the world in UM I have I totally forgot to mention this, but it's one that I can't let go because it was one of those things that people anticipated and then we're still kind of anticipating it. The BlackBerry Playbook, Oh, that's true, we totally forgot about that.
That was another tablet device that got launched in just like Samsung Galaxy Tab also launched in But the BlackBerry Playbook was this, you know, that was the enterprise tablet, right because you think of the iPad. Not everyone thinks of that as an enterprise device. I think of that as a personal device, although there are apps on it that you can use in enterprise functions. But I think a lot of people think of that as a play thing,
not a work thing. And so the the BlackBerry Playbook, despite the name, is more of a work thing than a plaything. Now we still haven't really seen this yet, so it'll we'll have to wait to get our hands on it. But that announcement got a lot of attention in Yeah, and I think one that will get some attention in that was announced in is uh mac os ten point seven Lion, which will come up in the
Linux community. The Linux community had two releases as they always do this year and uh Maverick mere Cat UM. They're they're going through some interesting changes to that's the most current release where they're changing the look and feel of the the Ubuntu UM releases. So I think the Lenox community has a lot to look forward to in the next couple of years too. But they moved some some made some big steps this year as well. But you know, that's probably a different community than a lot
of our listening audience. Yeah, although it's becoming more of a news worthy item now that more people are aware that it exists. Of course, it's the underpaintings of the Chrome operating system, Sure, and many and Rock Melton. Many of our our devices, um non computer devices run on a form of Lennox one or another. So a lot of the servers pretty much all of them. Yeah, so not all of them, but a very large percentage of web servers run Lennox. Extremely important, but maybe not as
uh acclaimed as it as it could be. Well, we're gonna acclaim this thing over that doesn't make any sense, but I'm gonna say that it does. It's nice of you to stake your acclaim. Yes, thank you. So guys, if you want to tell us what some of your favorite stories from ten in the tech industry were, if we missed one of your favorites, or if you have something to say but one of the ones we talked about, let us know. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
That handle is tech Stuff h s W. Or you can email us and that address is tech Stuff at how Stuff Works. Dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com. So learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you