oops, my bad. wrong button.

Its Zune Day....

Yeah mine crapped out. Looks like they'll be able to fix it though, since once the battery dies you can reboot it, meaning you can get it on the PC and update it.

Oh well, we'll see how long it takes them, as MS support has only been up and going for about an hour.

Thank god I have an 80GB....

Certainly an odd problem indeed. I'm looking forward to seeing the explanation

On the up side, I might see some free handouts for the trouble

Edit: there's rumors going around that it's a result of leap year issues.

Welp... So, how much battery is this thing eating sitting on the bootup screen?

take the cover off the back, unplug the battery, plug it back in. hard reset!

A lot. The screen is on, the hard drive is spinning.

many wooters are going to be pissed

Zune's site now acknowledges the problem:

http://www.zune.net/en-US/support/default.htm

damn wtf

I was pissed all morning because my zune was ****ed

that's what I get for leaving it plugged in (or did it just happen anyway??)

It would have happened anyway. It has to do with the latest firmware update and the time. It has a built-in clock so it will die regardless.

whoa this is weird

Supposedly its due to there being a Leap Second in time change at 2am

Z2K!

ah ****

my zune wont start up

Mine works perfectly.

my situation matches perfectly, around 3 or 4 this morning when i went to bed i pulled out my zune, and after the bar reached the end at the boot screen it just froze. the <- and upward arrow salute didn't do anything to fix it, and i thought it just was another minor zune glitch and threw it onto the floor

do you have the latest firmware updates?

Everyone knows that 365+1 = -1

Or he might not have a 30GB version, which appear to be the only ones affected.

My Zune tried to divide by zero

I think it's befitting that the greatest tech story of the year came on the last day of the year.

greatest tech story of the year

http://forums.zune.net/412486/ShowPost.aspx

MS finally commented on it.

The issue was related to the date, specifically the time driver in the 30GB devices. They expect the issue to resolve itself come tomorrow, and they will issue a firmware update to ensure it does not happen in 2012.

Zune, Music 365 days a year. (too bad it's a leap year)

On that topic: This year we officially have a leap second! I bet even the IPods struggle with that one.

Leap seconds are only decided about 6 months in advance... I don't know how any hardware keeps up with it.

I thought this one was decided on less than a month ago... Or at least that's when I first heard of it.

Well, less than 6 months in advance then.

You mean 6 months and one second.

[QUOTE=Someone Else]Okay, someone on the internet actually found the driver code online and posted the offending lines. Which actually give responsibility to a third party company and not Microsoft since Microsoft didn't actually write the driver. Rather, they wrote software on top of the driver.

It was basically caused by a poorly written loop AND check condition. I've rewritten the driver myself to fix the bug for fun and it took like 5 minutes. Hell, one person suggested a fix that eliminated the loop altogether. Though it's partially mathematical voodoo, it makes sense and works. And there were actually two bugs in the code that should have been caught by QA and not let into the wild. The first was an incorrect condition (it presumed that a year is always 365 days) that determined whether or not to enter the loop code. The second was an incorrect if condition that was supposed to subtract the number of days.

A unit test of the method should have picked up the fact that the while loop could enter into an infinite loop. Mainly because the unit test would have entered into the infinite loop.[/QUOTE]

Oh, and I had to completely purge mine and reinstall/resync everything for it to work again.

lol outsourcing

This shows a dual copyright on the code in question, so it was likely either Freescale or microsoft.

The article also has a copy of the offending code:



So when days == 366 AND IsLeapYear(year) evaluates to true, we just loop endlessly. The reason the whole thing is wrapped in a while loop is because days is initially set to the number of days since a marked epoch (1980 apparently), and every iteration through we are looking to cut out a years worth of days and return the remainder.

A simple fix would then be to add and else/break to the leap year branch: