Bad Hair day
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, iPod on January 5, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Do you think they could be doing it on purpose? After all, their last cock-up spawned a whole industry of Y2K “consultants” who guaranteed to make work anything which wouldn’t work after midnight 1999.
The latest balls-up with Microsoft’s Zune players appears to be nothing but sheer incompetence, especially coming from the firm largely responsible for inflicting the millennium bug on the world. That time, it was the thousands of programmers who forgot the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries by using only the last two digits in date calculations. They had already been bitten by the same bug when working out who was born before and after 1900. In the early days of punch card computing, two digit dates may have saved the space occupied by the extra two figures but by the end of the 20th century there was no need.
As for the Zune stopping working after 0-o-clock on 31 December because there was an extra day in the year, what was that all about? Why on earth should an mp3 player worry what date it is anyway? You don’t expect your iPod to go on strike just because it’s having a bad Hair day.
We all knew that 2008 was a leap year, even if we didn’t realise it needed an extra second added to keep in sync with a solar year, roughly 365 days 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds. Those scridgely bits at the end are fudged every 4 years unless it is the turn of the century, which are not leap years if they they are not divisible by 400. Apart from the year 4000 which will not be a leap year, to use up the tiny bits of time left over by leap years.
The glitch hit Zune players released in November 2006 so it looks as though Microsoft expected the players to last only a year and a bit before needing a service pack.
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