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The great Zune mass suicide


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I saw this on some other websites, too. I guess that's what you get for buying a microsoft music player in the first place, eh? I'm sure MS will come up with some way to blame the owners.

MS finally issued a statement, but it basically says nothing.

We are aware that customers with Zune 30GB devices are experiencing issues with their Zune device... We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a plan to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net.

Wall Street Journal article

CBC article

Los Angeles Times article

Imagine being someone who's currently trying to sell one of these on eBay! Suddenly you're not going to get any bids, or if you had bids, the bidders are looking for ways to retract the bids!

I don't know much about how the Zune syncs its music, but hopefully everyone will be able to get their tunes back.

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I have one of the models in question, and yesterday it was inoperable. Today it is just fine. The code that interfaces with the clock hardware wasn't set up to handle 366 days in a leap year, and went into an infinite loop.

Microsoft issued an official statement as to what the problem is, and they will fix the problem before it happens again in 2012.

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I was reading more about this event, and it turns out that there are no standard programming libraries for doing date calculations. So each programmer of each gadget, each operating system, each piece of software has to build his own. With thousands of versions in distribution around the world, I can see how something like this could happen.

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I was reading more about this event, and it turns out that there are no standard programming libraries for doing date calculations. So each programmer of each gadget, each operating system, each piece of software has to build his own. With thousands of versions in distribution around the world, I can see how something like this could happen.

Where did you read that? There are multiple libraries for date calculations.

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Where did you read that? There are multiple libraries for date calculations.

http://thedailywtf.com/

Like many modern development environments, there was no built-in mechanism for date/time calculations. Different modules of the operating system and its applications relied on different functions for different date/time calculations. Not
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I was reading more about this event, and it turns out that there are no standard programming libraries for doing date calculations. So each programmer of each gadget, each operating system, each piece of software has to build his own. With thousands of versions in distribution around the world, I can see how something like this could happen.

There are standard libraries for date calculations. However, when firms are building device drivers or firmware they will typically eschew libraries in favor of coding everything "by hand" because there's a high degree of interaction with the hardware which won't be in a library (because a driver is sort of like a "library" for that hardware) and it is often important for these types of projects to be small things which are typically not library strong points.

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  • 4 months later...

I have two zunes and one iPod. The subscription feature of the Zune really is nice. I download anything I want and as much as I want for a monthly fee. I can't remember how much it is. Maybe $15. Once I was able to download anything I want for no extra cost I stopped buying CDs so yes, I don't have any CDs to rip. If I wanted to I can still rip all the old ones I have to the Zune though.

Has anyone tried the Rhapsody subscription service for iPod. Is it any good? If it is I may get rid of my Zunes.

Edit: I did a little research. Apparently the Rhapsody subscription doesn't work with iPod. That really stinks. I like the iPod hardware but the Zune subscription makes it a much better device.

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Rumor.

ZuneX (phone? gaming system?)

zunex.jpg

• 4-inch display at 640x363 resolution

• Custom Intel LV Atom DualCore 733MHz processor

• Custom Nvidia BLowFish chipset

• 128MB RAM

• 40 hour music, 14 hours of video, 9 hours of gaming and 6 hours of gaming with the wireless on

• 4 analog buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, an analog stick attachment

• 32GB flash storage

• Support for Bluetooth headphones

• SIM Card tray (it's a phone! Maybe!)

• Xbox Live Arcade Games

• ZuneX Originals

• OnLive Ready game streaming (now we're just getting a little ridiculous)

• WMV, H.264, MPEG-4 and DivX support

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