Why fix it when you can kill it?
Back in 2008, a bunch of Zunes croaked on December 31st apparently because it was day 366. Surprise surprise -- 2008 was a leap year. As far I have been able to tell, the official line was "drain the battery and reboot tomorrow, and it will be fine".
I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks ever since Microsoft announced they were shutting down the Zune product line. Today, I went looking to see if there was some kind of firmware patch which had been released to actually address that bug.
I haven't been able to find any evidence of a patch. I mean, when is that problem going to come up again?
$ date Wed Jun 20 14:02:12 PDT 2012
Oh... right.
So there's my conspiracy theory: it's easier to kill this thing than it is to deal with the drama again at the end of this year. Can any Zune owners comment on whether this was ever fixed?
While I'm talking about time handling, are you ready for the leap second at the end of this month? Notice that (as always) it happens at midnight UTC, not midnight local time.