Week in Rock: Auld Lang Edition

All Zunes Die For a Day

In one of the most bizarre stories of 2008, getting in under the wire, every single 30 gig Zune crashed on New Year's Eve. Reports started coming in around Midnight that some sort of Skynet-esque reset was underway, shutting off every player and rebooting them to a frozen load screen. Microsoft was a bit slow on the response, leading to tons of speculation on tech blogs and forums as to what was up. Turns out, the code in the systems had forgotten to accommodate for a leap year, and the Zunes trying to account for a 366th day went all batty and wigged out. If this sounds like the sort of thing a giant computer company like Microsoft should have accommodated for, you're absolutely correct. This is like computer programming 101 type stuff. Fortunately, the error only affected the system for one day, and everything automatically went back to normal on New Year's Day when the calendar clicked over. Microsoft insists that a similar problem won't occur the next leap year in 2012...maybe assuming everyone will have switched to an iPod by then.