Posted by Keenan "SuperMario290" in Gadgets | 0 comments

Zune Service in the Living Room: Microsoft Job Ad Hints at it

Well, a recent Zune job posting says that the peeps in Redmond are looking for someone to come up with “innovative user interfaces for delivering a rich, deep interactive media consumption experience in a living room environment.” Could this be the Zune software team into the ConnectedTV division starting to kick in? This job posting also mentions on-demand audio and video content, which seems like a natural direction for that of the ZunePass. We don’t know when any of this is going to take into affect, or take full-swing, but hopefully it will help out the staggering Zune platform.

Link

Posted by Keenan "SuperMario290" in Gadgets | 0 comments

Zune + iPod = Fail

Another day, another bad iPod impersonation….or…Zune impersonation? Well, this gadget is made by QQ. The K805 does it best to combine the iPod and Zune to the fullest, but overall, it just doesn’t work. As always, you’ve got the click-wheel, and the rectangular design, as with every media player coming out of China or Japan. Although, this media player boasts a 2.4-inch 320 x 240 resolution display, support for a plethora of files, USB 2.0 connectivity and a microSD card slot. No price has been revealed yet, but hey, we can pretend that you actually wanted to know.

Link

Posted by Keenan "SuperMario290" in Gadgets | 3 comments

Zune Suicide? Programmer reveals the problem

Okay, so the massive Z2K has come and gone, we have to figure out why such a widespread problem had such a simple fix – wait till it dies, then turn it back on. Wait….what?! Out of nowhere, the Zune’s started working again, so yeah, problem solved. Here is the explanation from itsnotabigtruck of Zune Boards:

The Zune’s real-time clock stores the time in terms of days and seconds since January 1st, 1980. When the Zune’s clock is accessed, the driver turns the number of days into years/months/days and the number of seconds into hours/minutes/seconds. Likewise, when the clock is set, the driver does the opposite.

The Zune frontend first accesses the clock toward the end of the boot sequence. Doing this triggers the code that reads the clock and converts it to a date and time. Below is the part of this code that determines the year component of the date:

…

Under normal circumstances, this works just fine. The function keeps subtracting either 365 or 366 until it gets down to less than a year’s worth of days, which it then turns into the month and day of month. Thing is, in the case of the last day of a leap year, it keeps going until it hits 366. Thanks to the if (days > 366), it stops subtracting anything if the loop happens to be on a leap year. But 366 is too large to break out of the main loop, meaning that the Zune keeps looping forever and doesn’t do anything else.

So, the massive Zune suicide was just a problem of the leap year, and can also be found in a few other portables such as Toshiba’s S series.HA!!! We can just hope that Microsoft has a fix for this before 2012, the next leap year.

Link

Posted by Keenan "SuperMario290" in Gadgets | 2 comments

WATCH OUT! Massive Zune Suicide!

You better not shout, you better not cry, you better not pout I’m telling you why….cuz your Zune is going to die…tonight! Anyhows, away from the Christmas esque song, an unspecified number of Zune 30’s died at the exact same time accross this US this week. It’s a massive Zune suicide. We all knew it was going to happen.

Gizmodo reports that “the players began freezing at about midnight last night, becoming totally unresponsive and practically useless” and that the “crisis has been dubbed by Zune users ‘Y2K9′, due to the apparently synchronized faceplantings across the country.”

An anonymous tipster from Gizmodo explained that the Zune’s appeared to “either reset, or were already off” and that “when turning on, the thing loads up and… freezes with a full loading bar… it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them.”

Wow, good thing I don’t own a Zune…..or have ever touched one for that matter. Hope Microsoft gets this problem fixed….and that it’s not in the Xbox 360’s as well. Yeah, that would be bad.

Link

Posted by Keenan "SuperMario290" in Gadgets, Gaming in General | 0 comments

Yahoo Lists PS3, I Phone and Microsoft Zune among “Top 10 Most Overhyped Tech Products”

There’s no doubt that in the world that we live in, there are tons and tons of overhyped products. This goes hand in hand with games, and game consoles as well.

In order to keep all of these products and gadgets lodged in your head, Yahoo Tech has put together a top 10 list, and most of which, I completely agree with.

Apple’s MacBook Air just barely edged out competing notebooks in its quest for thin, and as CNet found out, actually loses its title as “world’s thinnest” to a notebook from 1997. Even still, the Apple propaganda machine managed to make this reinvention of the wheel out to be the Earth-shattering king of ultraportables, with signature Apple marketing smugness to match. It’s a small notebook, folks. We’ll be amazed when it fits into the same envelope your credit card bills come in. (Watch our MacBook Air Review)

Full list of shame here