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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the technical-foul dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:17AM (#167737)

    I would expect there to be a crowd that would like to be able to see the score and the clock at all times.
    I'm guessing those folks paid to get the full professional experience.

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:36AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:36AM (#167745) Journal

    I'm guessing those folks paid to get the full professional experience.

    Like, waiting for half an hour for the game to actually start, and then in the aftermath see one team lose by some technicality? I'm not saying to exclude computer usage from sport events, just considering flip-boards the lesser of two evils in case of a computer failure.

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @08:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @08:54PM (#167982)

      The flip-cards solve 1 element of the problem but there is another problem to be dealt with.

      Going back many years to when The Wide World of Sports was a thing (and when I actually paid any attention to sports), I learned that there is a game played by Scots with big sticks (now, there's a mental image for you).

      The players and the crowd don't see a timeclock that displays the minutes left to play.
      The only guy who knows exactly when the game will end is the official timekeeper holding the stopwatch.

      Americans would never stand for such a thing.
      ...and basketball was originally an American invention.

      Going back many years again, there were special timeclocks for sporting events.
      Those were analog things with a sweep hand for seconds and one minutes. [google.com]
      To flesh out your backup idea, you're going to need one of those as well.

      ...and, as scruffybeard mentioned above, in the Internet age, it's also possible that they routinely stream data to their fans in cyberspace.

      -- gewg_