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AFP - AsianWeek, a 30-year-old newspaper for Asian-Americans based in San Francisco, has announced plans to drop its print edition and go online only.

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Microsoft posted a quick fix on New Year's Day for the glitch that made some of its Zune digital music players freeze up the day before, thanks apparently to a leap-year problem encountered by the Zune's internal clock. Since 2008 had an extra day, including February 29th, the calendar/clock on some Zunes got confused about when the new year was about to start.

Michael Gartenberg, VP of mobile strategy for Jupitermedia told NewsFactor.com he hasn't "seen anything quite like this since the Y2K phenomenon," referring to the problems that many feared would freeze computers when the clock advanced at midnight from 1999 to the year 2000. While millions were spent to upgrade computers and software in order to avert a Y2K virtual meltdown, the recent Zune freeze-up was, of course, much less significant.

"It doesn't appear for most users that this was super-serious," Gartenberg said. "If you waited until New Year's Day to plug in your device and charge it back up, most users were fine."

On the other hand, Gartenberg pointed out, it's still embarrassing for Microsoft that the Zune would freeze up at all. The glitch, he said, shows a lack of quality control, and "it definitely is not the type of thing that enhances Microsoft's reputation as a pioneer in consumer electronics."

The Four-Step Fix

On its Zune Web site, Microsoft outlined four steps for owners of the frozen 30-gigabyte Zune players:

First, disconnect the Zune from its USB and AC power sources. Because the player is frozen, its battery will drain, which is a good thing.

Then, wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black. If the battery was fully charged, this might take a couple of hours.

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AP - The nonprofit foundation that runs Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia of user-contributed articles, said Friday it has met its $6 million fundraising goal for fiscal 2008.No tag for this post.