Zune runs 24/365 but not 24/366

The original model Zune that died on Wednesday apparently now can be restarted.

If the Zune wasn’t cool before, this latest snafu has caused it to fall even further. Microsoft’s hometown paper reports:

“The New Year's Eve party I was going to tonight is relying on my Zune for music,” wrote KCBosox19 on the Zune forum, a complaint echoed by dozens of others, some of whom lamented having to explain to friends the glitch in the product that has never quite achieved the level of cool associated with Apple's runaway leader, the iPod.

The Seattle paper also notes that this will make for an embarrassing keynote speech by CEO Steve Ballmer at CES on Wednesday.

I don’t get how any IT product today could fail to get something as simple as handling leap years. In my first programming job in 1974, I had to program a date algorithm. We made sure it would work through 2099, even though the particular OS and 16-bit minicomputer were discontinued in 1979.