At least not necessarily …
Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty would notice the following highlighted copyright headers in the widely circulated "embarrassment" that everyone (even those who can't write a lick of C/C++ or ASM) criticized.
Unfortunately, too many people blame Microsoft without actually thinking. Freescale may have actually been caught red-handed and with its pants down. Notably, the bug did not affect the Zune models above 30GB. So Freescale knew about the bug, corrected it in a new driver for a new chipset, and then Microsoft may have not been notified.
News agencies were quick to say snarky things like …
"I’ve never heard of a consumer electronic device fail en masse like this,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Seattle-based research firm that focuses on the software giant."
Matt Rossoff, you really didn't research anything at your "research firm." VMWare did something massively worse and even similar in 2008!
VMWare's bug was orders of magnitude for significant, and a Zune Bug gets almost as much coverage? Insane.
These things actually happen routinely — in our software, too. It's smart to test for all the edge cases in code (or — even better, mathematically verify it), but missing a bug in code that wasn't actually written by your firm that only occurs on leap years sounds pretty reasonable to me.
The simple problem could have been patched in a routine firmware update any time before the last day of the leapyear — in this case December 31st, 2009.
Are we the only ones who noticed it was a bug in a hardware driver written by Freescale?
The much better question is did Freescale notify Microsoft or cover it up?
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Granted that Freescale introduced the bug, but by having access to the sourcecode, Microsoft's QA team should've caught it before releasing it upon the world. If you excuse Microsoft for every bug that they introduced because the code came from someone else, then Microsoft would never be at fault for anything.
I only half-agree. I find it remarkable that Freescale *introduced* the bug and then possibly never notified Microsoft. I don't think MS is immune here, but I don't think it's right to flame them without citing that the bug is Freescale's, and that nobody would have noticed unless they cycled the clock for 4 years. That's also a hard thing to test for … if you think about it. I sympathize with their QA team on that one. Bugs that depend on time are similarly ridiculous to debug as race-conditions. So I don't excuse MS, but wasn't VMWare's screwup WAY worse?
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