Weirdest shit ever. All the 30GB Zunes went tits-up at midnight last night. I have an 80GB Zune that’s working fine but my old 30GB Zune (which is now my sons) froze as soon as I turned it on with the same symptoms everyone else is describing. I guess people were listening to music and they just rebooted and locked.
I’m not sure how MS is going to be able to fix this. With the Zunes in their current state they aren’t recognized by the computer so they won’t be able to push any sort of system update or anything. This could cost MS a BUNCH of money.
If this was my primary MP3 player I would be furious. Thank god my 80 still works fine. This is a shame because the Zune is far superior to the ipod but this could be a PR nightmare the Zune may not recover from.
There is a bug fix, which is to wait until tomorrow, when the whole thing will right itself.
Apparently, the 30GB developers didn’t account for the leap year, so the devices just sorta threw up their hands and said “whatever”. There’s an explanation on the Zune support page.
Quite a lot failed at the turnover of Y2K, but most of it wasn’t serious because it was addressed beforehand. The mania is perceived as being misplaced, but it was a call to action for programmers to fix things before year’s end. Their remarkable success at such short notice is unfairly dismissed.
Yeah, but when you are (read: I was) writing computer programs with an expected lifespan of perhaps 3 years pre- say - 1997, we didn’t tend to worry about silly little 2 digit date issues. “Someone” would fix it by then if it hadn’t already been replaced.
Chimera, one of the millions of programmers responsible for Y2k in the first place
I’ve been trying to figure out how that explanation makes any sense. if the Zune was having trouble with leap year, wouldn’t it just show the wrong date? Now if the Zune was sync’ing with another computer, I could understand it. Unless there are two devices with separate clocks inside the Zune, but that doesn’t sound like a very parsimonious design.
Perhaps it knows that Jan 1st is a Thursday, but thought that Dec 31st was a Tuesday, so when it encountered the intermediate Wednesday, did the Star Trek thing and died at the encounter of mismatched logic.
The Zune’s clock only exists to facilitate the DRM scheme. Content purchased through the Zune Marketplace with a Zune Pass is only valid for as long as the user maintains the Zune Pass. So, upon purchase, the content is set to expire 30 days later to the minute, and it obviously needs a clock to do that.
By waiting until today, the problem essentially solved itself. The leap second issue is more or less a one-and-done thing; it’s not a regular problem. Users had to completely drain the battery first, which did something to the memory, and the sync process adjusted the device’s clock to reflect the correct time and date. As fixes go, it’s painless; the only damage done was that users couldn’t use their Zunes for the day. It also gives the developers time to work out a permanent solution that can be implemented in a future firmware update, but since it’s no longer critical, they can do it right.
Short notice? I know places that were preparing for Y2K in 1995. The problem was on the radar screen even earlier - the first time I read about it was about 1991. At just about every major company I’ve dealt with Y2K compliance was a process that was handled over years. It’s not like people suddenly realized in October of 1999 that things could break.
More seriously though, it was hardly ‘short notice’. I got my first job in the computer biz in 1995, and Y2K was a huge deal then. I don’t know how long it had been going on before I got in, but it’s not like it was suddenly “discovered” in 1999. We worked on that crap for years.
Though I have to agree - it was largely thankless. I remember articles in January of '00 in which people complained about the non-event & even speculated it was all a ruse to con people out of money. You can’t win for losing
Maybe we should have scheduled a few missiles to go up and detonate right at the nick of time, due to quick-thinking programmers uploading code by typing really hard at them.
