Did your ZUNE die?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/31/zunes-frozen-stuck-on-loa_n_154414.html

God hates Zune

Google Hot Trends

1. zune frozen
2. reset zune
3. zune locked up
4. zune troubleshooting

People own zunes!

I saw a Zune when out shopping last winter and thought it wasn't a bad idea, I was seriously tempted, but who is going to bite? Someone needed to take on the Church of Ipod.

I'm kind of hoping this self-destruction is some sort of super-villainy

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29023

Maybe it's a Halloween III deal and snakes will come out of the eyes of anyone who sees a "loading" screen.

Fuck the Zune. Anyone who bought one is a sap.

Microsoft gave me a zune at the RNC, complete with republican elephant printed on the back, I have never turned it on.

lol republican zune.

This is the shittiest new years ever for Time Warner cable subscribers that own Zunes.

This is the shittiest new years ever for Time Warner cable subscribers that own Zunes.

??

leap year or time-date calculate programming bug?

xp: i think time warner is cutting a bunch of cable channels

also they're probably going to cap downloads on their internet

Microsoft gave me a zune at the RNC, complete with republican elephant printed on the back, I have never turned it on.

Artefacts of our failing times #376

http://i39.tinypic.com/302zbj9.jpg

He should get that tattoo amended so it shows a never-completing progress bar...

Steve Jobs looking down on Zune story in schadenfreude shockah:

http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/4122/picture1no8.png

They've missed off an "i" from "Viagra Pens", at least if the spam I get is anything to go by...

I like this concept of how they become "immediate bricks".

pouring one out for all the dead zunes

this ones 4 you homie

http://onecity.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/profile_img1_zima.jpg

bad taste, too Zune

Can you believe?
That update bricked my Zune,
bricked my Zune...
Can you believe?
I'll get an iPod soon,
iPod so-o-o-ooon...

ok, I won my $10 bet.

It is a leap year bug.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/158289.asp

lol

http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/zune-news/38143-cause-zune-30-leapyear-problem-isolated.html

(emphasis is theirs)

After doing some poking around in the source code for the Zune's clock driver (available free from the Freescale website), I found the root cause of the now-infamous Zune 30 leapyear issue that struck everyone on New Year's Eve.

The Zune's real-time clock stores the time in terms of days and seconds since January 1st, 1980. When the Zune's clock is accessed, the driver turns the number of days into years/months/days and the number of seconds into hours/minutes/seconds. Likewise, when the clock is set, the driver does the opposite.

The Zune frontend first accesses the clock toward the end of the boot sequence. Doing this triggers the code that reads the clock and converts it to a date and time. Below is the part of this code that determines the year component of the date:

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */
while (days > 365)
{
    if (IsLeapYear(year))
    {
        if (days > 366)
        {
            days -= 366;
            year += 1;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        days -= 365;
        year += 1;
    }
}

Under normal circumstances, this works just fine. The function keeps subtracting either 365 or 366 until it gets down to less than a year's worth of days, which it then turns into the month and day of month. Thing is, in the case of the last day of a leap year, it keeps going until it hits 366. Thanks to the if (days > 366), it stops subtracting anything if the loop happens to be on a leap year. But 366 is too large to break out of the main loop, meaning that the Zune keeps looping forever and doesn't do anything else.

The unfortunate part is that there isn't anything that can be done to fix this besides somehow changing what the clock is set to (which is exactly what the battery disconnection trick ends up doing). On the other hand, it shows that Microsoft is correct: tomorrow, everyone's Zunes will operate normally again. However, if Microsoft doesn't fix this part of the firmware, the whole thing will happen all over again in 4 more years.. Hopefully by then a fix will be in place.

welcome to the social btw