Beginning on December 31st, 30GB Microsoft Zunes around the world began freezing up and complaints flooded in from worried users who were concerned their media device was broken.
The software giant looked into the problem and concluded that the problem stemmed from 2008 being a leap year. The Zune’s internal clock had failed to switch over to the new year, and the software bug caused the devices to lock up.
The problem was ‘fixed’ however yesterday when Microsoft advised all Zune users to let the battery of their device drain out and then turn it on after 7 am on Thursday.
“Wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black,” the company said, “Then power up the devices, but only after 7 a.m. Eastern time on New Year’s Day Thursday. No other action is required.”
Users may have to re-sync their devices completely today however, to restore any DRM files that come with
copyright-protected songs.
Result for: giant
According to Warner Music Group, negotiations between them and video sharing giant YouTube have broken down, and the group has removed all their music videos from the site.
Currently each of the Big 4 labels are renegotiating their licensing deals with YouTube.
“We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site,” Warner noted. “Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”
Earlier this week, Universal Music noted that YouTube had become a strong revenue stream for the studio, and that it “has generated ‘tens of millions’ of dollars for the recording company this year, up 80 percent from last year.” Universal hopes to add more content to YouTube soon, likely full length feature films.
“If we can’t reach acceptable business terms, we must part ways with successful partners,” Google (owner of YouTube) added. “For example, you may notice videos that contain music owned by Warner Music Group being blocked from the site.”
Result for: giant
Search engine giant Google released its Chrome web browser in early September. As expected the browser was released as a beta version but what was definitely not expected just happened. After three months of beta test development Google has released an official stable version 1.0.154.36 of Chrome.
Approximately 100 days, 10 million downloads and 14 updates. That is the Chrome beta in a nutshell. The latest update improves the stability, speed of start up and JavaScript processing as well as overall performance.
The new stable version also improves the bookmark features - you are now able to easily import and export bookmarks to and from your Google Chrome.
Chrome will be updated frequently in the future as well. Upcoming updates will add form prefilling, browser extension and RSS support as well as Linux and Mac OS X versions of the browser.
