Miscellaneous Geeky Ramblings

Call of Duty: Black Ops Continues to Set Records

Activision's latest blockbuster video game, "Call of Duty: Black Ops," continues to set records. This week, the company announced that the title made over $650 million in its first five days on the market, beating out the previous record-holder, which happens to be its predecessor, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which earned $550 million in the same time period a year ago (kinda wishing I had stock in "Activision" right now...you?). Over 10 million copies were sold in the first week.

And Black Ops is also setting Xbox LIVE records: According to Microsoft, players spent over 5.9 million multiplayer hours with Black Ops on the online service on opening day, and over 2.6 million unique gamers played Black Ops online in the first 24 hours.

How big of a deal is this? Big enough to be the biggest entertainment launch in history, regardless of format (Cinema, DVD, Music, etc...). In fact, it's not even close.

All that without my $60 contribution...yet. They can sleep easy though. They'll get it soon enough.

Apple Fixes Next iOS Before It's Even Released

Close your eyes for a moment and just imagine how this would play out if the companies and products were different.

Let's say Microsoft spends several months promoting Windows 7 last year, promising various features and making claims about how it's like getting a new PC and so on. And then the date for Windows 7's release comes and goes...with nothing released. Then Microsoft finally does release Windows 7, except that now it's called Windows 7.1 because the company found some "severe" problems right before it was supposed to release the OS.

Got that image in your head? Can you see the Mac faithful taunting and chortling about how lousy a company Microsoft is, about how broken its software development processes must be? Got it? Good.

Now realize that what I'm talking about is, in fact, iOS 4.2, the next release of the system software for Apple's iPad and iPhone, and that when it comes out, late, it will actually ship as iOS 4.2.1 because Apple did, in fact, discover "severe" problems (with VoIP functionality) right before it was going to pull the trigger on this release.

And if anything, iOS is actually even bigger than Windows 7, at least for iPad users, because it adds basic iPhone functionality like multitasking, folders, and so on. So you can be sure of one thing: Those Apple fanboys aren't laughing over this one. No, they're not laughing at all.

Wonder if they'll have one of those pretentious "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials about this one?