“Judgment day has arrived for owners of 30GB (and only 30GB) Zunes. The music player inexplicably entered a worldwide coma last night, and players are completely non responsive.” [Kroc: I wonder if this is anything like the bug that caused Windows 98 to crash after 49 days when the tick-count exceeded 32-bits :P]
The feeling of a bunch of Apple Fanboys getting that much smugger.
Yes but this time it is warranted. This is truly pathetic. Developers have been messing around with shutdown dates or best before dates.
This is obviously a mistake but there should never be such time limits coded in the first place, triggered or not!
It is? Have we all forgotten Apple’s practice of intentionally bricking iPhones / iPod Touches as a means of license enforcement? Or that iTunes update which had a tendency to rm -rf entire OS X systems?
Not just Apple proponents. Anyone skeptical Microsoft’s ability to run datacenters. Like servers, embedded devices are supposed to be reliable. Gotta love this:
“A Microsoft spokesperson tells Ars, “We are aware that customers with the Zune 30GB are experiencing issues with their Zune device.”
Issues? Their hardware is dead due to Microsoft’s carelessness and or negligence.
And why was this fiasco relegated to page 2? It is clearly page 1 news.
Nice projection. They’re running completely different hardware, completely different OS, completely different client software. Keep the hate flowing …
Does anyone else think this is sabatoge? Why should it only affect 30GB zunes and not others? What particular code could possibly relate the disk size with the date? I can’t think of any. Why should any code on a media player execute at a specific date if you have a particular disk size?
Does each size have different firmware? Different internal hardware(other than different SSD or HDD obviously)?
Edited 2008-12-31 21:08 UTC
What kind of foolish paranoia is that; what makes you think that every Zune model has the very same software? Having different hardware, it means different chips. One might be defective. Inside a Zune there’s not only software programmed by Microsoft, there’s much more. Just like inside an iPhone, iPod, iDontKnowWhat…
I’m not paranoid. I don’t own a zune or care. I just do not see any correlation between the date and storage size. What code could possibly need to run at 6 am on new years eve of 2008, just on zunes that have 30GB?
It’s probably not sabatoge, It just doesn’t make sense to me.
Don’t worry; Microsoft itself doesn’t make sense most of the time
Happy New Year.
It’s likely that a developer somewhere in Redmond forgot to account for a leap year in some esoteric portion of firmware code, and the system choked upon discovering a 366th day in a 365-day year.
Not a nefarious conspiracy, just poor QA, and a clusterfsck overall.
See that was my first assumption, but that still leaves the question open of why just the 30GB model?
The 30 GB Zune is the original Zune, and likely does have rather different hardware than subsequent Zunes.
I recall some amazement in DAP circles when Microsoft actually released firmware updates to bring their first-generation products all the bells and whistles of the second generation (unlike, for instance, Apple and pretty much all other manufacturers, other than Samsung and Cowon…)
I mistakenly thought that the 30gb was released along with another hdd based zune, which made me think they contained identical hardware. So that really explains it.
Yeah, I read somewhere that the 30GB Zune runs on different hardware and the drivers (or whatever) was developed by Toshiba, where as the latter ones were developed by Microsoft. Sure, it’s a big screw-up and MS is ultimately to blame, but I wouldn’t subscribe to any conspiracy theories.
Note: I bought a Zune for myself as a Christmas present, but returned it a day later. What a dreadful device that is.
And the search begins for someone else (other than Microsoft, whose name is on the hardware) to blame it all on.
When I was growing up we had a game item called “Hot Potato”. It was in the form of a (plastic) potato and you wound up its timer and start passing it around. The one caught holding it when the buzzer went off was the loser.
There was also a similar game item called “Time Bomb”, which was pretty much the same, except that it was black and spherical, with a fuse on top.
This fiasco is just starting to remind me of those games. I’ll bet we’ll see more of this.
Edited 2008-12-31 21:39 UTC
From the forums it sounds like to Zune 30 has some sort of expiration date or the internal clock has hit some sort of bug.
Why would Microsoft program the player in this way?
Coming up… Vista users face endless re-activation on a arbitrary date.
Edited 2008-12-31 21:33 UTC
from todays daily wtf (http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-The-Harbinger-of-the-Ep…)
I do not believe that Microsoft is telling the truth. My Zune crashed and so did my sisters but my dad’s did not. He got frustrated with it and has not used it in about 6 months. His has never been connected in this time. I think that someone uploaded a virus onto the Zune software that affected anyone who synced there Zune recently. They planned to have them fail as the new year changed but accidently put it at midnight last night instead of today.
This is strange. Your Zune crashed, but not your dad’s. So far, so good. But what made your sisters crash? What did they crash? A party? A car? What caused it? A virus rarely causes sisters to crash parties. I could see maybe cars.
There is an old saying: He who’s Zune dies… has a dead Zune.
Edited 2009-01-01 07:57 UTC
As they say, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Consensus elsewhere seems to be that it was a bad firmware update, so if you didn’t have the update, you didn’t have a problem.
Just security holes.
The two Zune owners must be outraged.
Have a look at this post from the zune.net forum, far enough into the thread that the extent of the disaster was known, but someone thought they had a fix:
http://tinyurl.com/a8mxqe
Well, someone found the brute force solution to the problem. Someone who probably wanted to upgrade for a while…
He doesn’t sound all *that* anxious to upgrade. A later post (from the same link) by the same disserviced Zune owner (who is planning on saving his money to “upgrade” from a 30GB Zune to a 16GB Zune):
I’d be looking at any brand *but* that one if this had happened to me.
Edited 2009-01-02 01:40 UTC
From looking around other forums discussing the issue, it sounds like some firmware upgrade in the last 6 months broke something to do with NTP syncing and leap years. So, if your Zune hasn’t been updated in a while, or if you didn’t hook it up to the computer on the day, you’d not have had a problem.
What is so special about the Zune that it would even worry about what the date is or if there is a leap year. I don’t see why an MP3/Video player with a couple of games on it would care what the date is, unless it has PDA functions or is keeping track of how old some purchased songs are for some reason.
Honestly though, it is a sad state of affairs if an error in the firmware regarding dates or leap years can bring a portable media player to its knees and leave the user a useless brick.
FWIW, the story out of Microsoft is that the brickification^W”issue” was temporary, and started clearing itself starting yesterday, the first day of the new year, when the user fully charges their unit, and that everything is now just fine.
But… there are still plenty of reports in the zune.net forums from people who still have bricks. And a few complaining that the aggravation is made worse by the fact that the (outsourced?) people MS has answering the phones at Zune tech support can barely speak English.
Some Zune owners are reporting that their units will not even charge today.
Edited 2009-01-02 19:42 UTC
The issue was a Freescale-written routine failing (going into an infinite loop) on the 366th day of a leap year.
Bad testing perhaps, but no conspiracy. Those that were unaffected either had their dates set incorrectly or are a different Zune model.
Affected Zunes should fix themselves when they are “rebooted” however one achieves that on a Zune. (I don’t own one).
The offending code is shown here: http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/zune-news/38143-cause-zune-30-leap…
Edited 2009-01-03 02:02 UTC