Remember the horror that unfolded on New Year’s Eve as thousands of Zune users woke to find their 30GB media player frozen? And just as magically, the Zunes revived themselves a day later.
Microsoft eventually blamed the glitch on the inability of the device clock to handle the extra day in a leap year that was 2008.
Freedom To Tinker, a blog hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy has posted a detailed explanation of what might have gone wrong with Zune’s code.
The code had gotten stuck: it couldn’t stop, because days was greater than 365, but it couldn’t make progress, because days was not greater than 366. This section of code would keep running forever — leaving the Zune seemingly dead in the water.
Check out their teardown and explanation of the Zune code to see how things went so wrong with the player.
Photo: Microsoft Zune (Robert Nelson/Flickr)
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