Thursday, January 1, 2009

Leap Year, What's a Leap Year?

If there's anyone left who thinks that Microsoft software is well written, consider this latest embarrassment affecting their Zune 30GB portable media player and it's inability to handle leap years: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,474690,00.html. Zune 30GB players all become unusable on the 366th day of 2008 (a leap year), then need to be reset and synced on January 1st in order to work. Microsoft says this 'undocumented enhancement' is by design, and they recommend upgrading all Zune 30GB players to the new version of the Zune, dubbed 'ZuneVista.' While slower, more 'clicky,' and with a completely different user interface grafted onto the top of the same old Zune, 'ZuneVista' is guaranteed by Microsoft not to suffer from any similar leap year issue through Dec 30th 2012.

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