Zunes Attempt to Shun 2009

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
From our front-page news:
Some people spend the last day of the year differently than others. Some might prepare their resolutions, while others treat it like any other day. If you are a Zune user, you might very-well not be listening to your music today. Although the reason for the mass suicide isn't verified by Microsoft, some feel that it has to do with this year being a leap year, and in some small way, that makes sense.

Or does it? The reports at that some Zunes are simply dying off at around 2:00AM today, which if EST time, would be midnight PST. The good thing is that all of the Zunes should begin working tomorrow (we can hope), but I am pretty interested in the real reason this is happening. If a Zune can die off simply because of a date issue, that doesn't give me much reason to believe in the stability of the product.

If it is indeed a date issue, Microsoft will likely issue a firmware update for the device, but that might not matter to many people. By the time the next leap year rolls around, we'll likely be toting around 3TB Zunes (don't quote me, my assumptions have been known to be absurd).

microsoft_zune_third_gen_090908.jpg

According to reports this isn’t a few 30GB Zune's that have failed, the vast majority of the devices have the same exact failure symptoms and have been reports by hundreds of owners according to Gizmodo. At this point little is known as to what is causing the mass failures of the devices. Once Microsoft is up and running for the workday, perhaps we will get more information on the issue.


Source: DailyTech
 

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
I am going to go out and say that the Zune, at least the second revision, has been nothing but perfect for me since I got it last May. I love the hardware and I love the software. It's been an all around great relationship.

That said, I laugh at/cry for our forum member BlackAndy, who upon my call this morning to have him check his 30GB Zune, found out it was bricked.

It sounds as if the problem will correct itself and because of this, I doubt Microsoft is putting to many engineering hours behind a fix. Even still, how in the hell does something like this happen?
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Yeah, it was a half-joke that I was unsure of the stability of these things. I've been pondering picking one up for a while, and might still if I can't find my old Sansa.
 

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
I have the 8GB flash based Zune.... you can pick one of those up now for around 130 dollars. I love it.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
It's believed to be caused by the 366 day leap year... since today is the 366th day. The issue is supposed to fix itself tomorrow when it'll be day "1" of 2009... ;)

I find it all very amusing to be honest... it just goes to show things like rounding that 0.6 will eventually come back to haunt you, or rolling back the clock such as flying across the international date line which caused a squadron of F-22s to all suffer a cascading computer failures.

Technology is very number sensitive, it doesn't like results it wasn't told to expect such as out-of-bounds, invalid, or impossible negative numbers. I think the day when a computer can recognize and overcome these inherent programming flaws by itself we'll soon be seeing real A.I. :)
 
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Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Okay. Yeah I think that qualifies as really bad code. Hopefully they will fix that before the next leap year comes along...
 
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