It's the ZUNE-POCKALPYSE!!!

Rackhir · 31st December 2008, 05:36 PM

Apparently significant numbers of 30gb zunes have started mysteriously locking up on their own today.

Users report 30GB Zunes seizing up | Microsoft - CNET News

LightPhoenix · 31st December 2008, 06:13 PM

From what I've read, it's an issue with the calculation of the new year. My guess would be some sort of overflow (ie something like 365-day, where today is 366). Hopefully they should go back to working tomorrow.

I've also heard it's only the newest firmware, and older firmware is okay.

Rackhir · 31st December 2008, 06:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LightPhoenix

From what I've read, it's an issue with the calculation of the new year. My guess would be some sort of overflow (ie something like 365-day, where today is 366). Hopefully they should go back to working tomorrow.

I've also heard it's only the newest firmware, and older firmware is okay.

BUT IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!! Dozens! Perhaps even a few people are being denied the use of their Zunes!!!!

Oh! The Huge Manatee!!!

(PS. your sig link doesn't work)

Merkuri · 31st December 2008, 07:52 PM

Sometimes when companies are putting out beta software they build in something called a time bomb. It's a hard-coded date when the software will stop working so that beta testers can't just continue using the beta software after the original software gets released. Occasionally (the company I work for is guilty of this) somebody forgets to take out a time bomb when the software is officially released.

This smells very much like a time bomb. Perhaps they forgot to take out one of the time bombs in their firmware after the latest firmware came out of beta. Of course, if this was the case I would have expected them to realize what it was right away and release a fix. Unless it's a really good time bomb that completely rendered the hardware useless, in which case Microsoft is just buying time, trying to find a way to fix the issue without having to recall how many million Zunes.

I just find it hard to believe that there's anything wrong with the date of Dec 31, 2008. Was this year a leap year? That's the only thing I can think of would be if this day was a leap year, meaning today is day 366 of the year. If the Zune is somehow hard-coded to have only 365 days in a year then that might cause problems.

Vocenoctum · 31st December 2008, 10:27 PM

This was a leapyear, yeah.

LightPhoenix · 1st January 2009, 05:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Merkuri

I just find it hard to believe that there's anything wrong with the date of Dec 31, 2008. Was this year a leap year? That's the only thing I can think of would be if this day was a leap year, meaning today is day 366 of the year. If the Zune is somehow hard-coded to have only 365 days in a year then that might cause problems.

It may be because this year contained a leap second, so if Zunes calculated the date by the number of seconds that have passed, that could cause a problem.

PS, thanks Rakchir!

Protagonist · 4th January 2009, 06:18 PM

And the answer is...

MAKE: Blog: Cause of ZUNE leapyear problem - Freescale date routine

Code:

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

Merkuri · 4th January 2009, 09:05 PM

Ah, I see. If it's a leap-year and the day equals 366 then nothing happens and it just goes through the loop again (infinitely). I think they just need to change the greater-than sign to "greater-than or equal to".

That's stupid. Why haven't they been able to find and fix that bug? I would think they'd be able to release a fix for that really quickly. I guess maybe they didn't think it was important enough since it'll only affect the devices one day out of every 4 years.