(My sincerest apologies; this post was unpublished due to a database error. The issue has since been fixed.

This is a shout-out to all Zune 30 owners who remained patient.

This is to you, the faithful owner of a Zune 30, who didn’t buckle under stress and kept a keen eye on Microsoft, waiting for a solution.

This is to you, the discount shopper who picked up a Zune 30 and didn’t want to lose faith in your hardware.

Low and behold, Microsoft dug deep to find out the problem and, within minutes of finding out exactly what it was, pushed out an answer and a solution that didn’t void your warranty (thanks, Gizmodo). There’s a reason for why I’m bringing all of this up. July of 2008 saw cataclysmic server failure when a vast majority of all newly-purchased iPhone 3G units tried activating at nearly the same time, leaving both new iPhone 3Gs and some iPhone Gen 1 units dead in the water until the activation servers came back online. Poor planning led to the creation of a load-intolerant system on AT&T’s side (though the blame hardly belongs to them, given that Apple mandated this system in the first place). However, people weren’t infuriated by Apple’s ineptitude here. They were complacent and merely went with whatever explanation was fed to them. Meanwhile, a sizable majority of people who stuck with their own platforms of choice decided not to point and jeer.

Fast forward to December 31, 2008, and every Zune 30 device freezes due to a bug in a driver from Freescale Semiconductor in this while loop (between lines 259 and 274):

    while (days > 365)
    {
        if (IsLeapYear(year))
        {
            if (days > 366)
            {
                days -= 366;
                year += 1;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            days -= 365;
            year += 1;
        }
    }

(protip: day 366 triggers an infinite loop. To see the context of the code, check out the pastie link above, or just click here. You can see a breakdown of how this could’ve been handled here) 

What happened? Every Apple-loyal iPhone, iPod, and Mac owner threw a fit even though none of them actually owned a Zune 30 (You can’t run a Zune 30… or any Zune, for that matter, on a Mac). Thanks in part to the additional sensationalism promoted by gadget bloggers and, subsequently, news outlets the world over, a problem with a Zune model sold only in North America suddenly became a "Worldwide Zune Outage."

This is the difference between the Social and the Kingdom of Apple. Those with Zunes held out patiently and were rewarded with verbose output by Microsoft, whereas Apple simply vaguely alluded to some other company being the source of their problems (or were otherwise mute for a long period of time) whenever something on Apple’s side went wrong.

Thank you, Zune 30 owners, for living up to the hype of the Social. I’m now quite proud to be an owner of a Zune myself.