One news story:

Happy New Year: Microsoft Fixes Zune Bug

After its New Years Eve power outage, it seems that Microsoft has fixed the bug that caused the owners of its 30GB Zune portable music player to unexpectedly lose functionality.

Another story:

Zune Leap Year Bug Fixed, Microsoft Says

Microsoft says it has resolved a glitch that caused the 30-GB model of its Zune MP3 player to freeze up over the past week.

In case you don’t see the problem, it has to do with the fact that Microsoft didn’t “fix” anything; the bug is still present. It was a bit of programming that sends the Zune into an endless loop when the last day of a leap year comes around; all Microsoft did was to tell people to wait until the extra day passed (and then some), then told them how to restart the players (which involves a strange process of draining the battery, recharging fully, then booting). That’s it. No “fix,” no resolution. The bug applied to a time period, they simply told people to wait it out. If nothing were changed after today, the bug would happen again on December 31, 2012.

I also like the wording about how the bug caused Zunes to “unexpectedly lose functionality.” In a way, they “lost functionality,” all right. However, if you tried to start your car and nothing happened, I don’t think that you’d say that it “lost functionality.” If you turned on your TV and it just sat there, blank, I don’t think you’d use those words. “Lose functionality” usually means that the device works but a few of its features have been lost. The Zunes did not so much “lose functionality” as much as they “completely froze up” (note that the second article got it more accurately). As for “unexpectedly,” I suppose that depends on how accurately you judge Zunes.

Other headlines include “Microsoft sorts out Zune bug” and “Microsoft offers solution for Zune,” and there are more like those. It’s as if much of these stories were written by Microsoft itself, and knowing how news agencies often work, that probably what happened. All too often “reporters” just copy or paraphrase text from their sources, doing very little original writing.