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Ars Technica reports
A second-tier German professional basketball team has been relegated to an even lower tier as a result of being penalized for starting a recent game late—because the Windows laptop that powered the scoreboard required 17 minutes to perform system updates.
The March 13 match between the Chemnitz Niners and the Paderborn Baskets was set to begin normally, when Paderborn (the host) connected its laptop to the scoreboard in the 90 minutes leading up to the game.
In an interview with the German newspaper, Die Zeit (Google Translate), Patrick Seidel, the general manager of Paderborn Baskets said that at 6:00pm, an hour and a half before the scheduled start time, the laptop was connected "as usual."
"But as both teams warmed up, the computer crashed," he said. "When we booted it again at 7:20pm, it started automatically downloading updates. But we did not initiate anything."
After all the updates were installed, Paderborn was ready to start the game at 7:55pm.
By the end of the match, Paderborn won 69-62. But then Chemnitz formally protested, saying that because Paderborn had delayed the start time of the match by 25 minutes (instead of the 15-minute maximum as allowed under the German basketball rules), they should be penalized. As a result, Paderborn lost another point in the standings (Google Translate), according to a Basketball Budesliga press release, which meant that it would certainly be relegated to the "ProB" league of German pro basketball.
(Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:01AM
Many folks never change the default settings that their systems come with.
The defaults for home users make sense for most home users. This was not a home user; and they had special requirements. They should have changed the defaults. Although we don't REALLY know the real truth. Just that they are claiming they did not initiate them.
Lots of people will click install updates; then when they are installed see the prompt that says updates are installed; windows update needs to reboot to finish installing updates, and then they hit "postpone and do it later" for days on end. And then when they finally reboot it are pissed about it taking forever to do updates.
Can any Soylentil think of a non-MICROS~1 example that compares?
Actually yes.
1) Name a cloud service. Pretty much any cloud service. Q.E.D I can cite lots of examples where a cloud outage or internet outage to cloud provider caused major problems.
2) Linux - yup; I've seen servers take literally ages to startup after a crash. Its gotten better in recent years. But 30 minutes or more downtime after a linux box went down wasn't unusual - even if all that was needed was to power it back up. Even scheduled outages, we often gave them 30 minutes+ to boot.
3) OSX? No. Not yet. I've never had OSX actually do this to me yet. Although certain updates have taken HOURS literally on older systems where it just says "optimizing" or something for seemingly forevor; it happened when I need it to finish up so i can do something. But so far its never been so timing critical that its cost me badly. But then Windows updates happening at inopportune times have never bitten me in the ass THAT badly either.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:15PM
2) Linux - yup; I've seen servers take literally ages to startup after a crash.
It's called a file system check. Your problem is purely related to administration problems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:19PM
It's called a file system check. Your problem is purely related to administration problems.
If one has their linux box set perform a 30-minute filesystem check after a crash; and the unit crashes 5 minutes before game time that seems to be equivalent to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @05:33PM
But you can cancel a fsck. Updates, not so much.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday April 13 2015, @05:20AM
But you can cancel a fsck.
Unless you can't...
However, in Arch Linux the fsck disk checker does not offer the option to abort a disk check once it has started. In Ubuntu for instance, you are told to press Esc to cancel. You can however abort fsck with Ctrl-C, but by default, fsck will then treat the disk as having failed the disk check, and only mount it read-only.
To get round this, create a file called e2fsck.conf in /etc/, and add the following line:[...]
Admiittedly, as is documented, there are ways around it if you had sufficient foresight. Then again, ditto for windows updates.