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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @05:35AM
Windows downloading updates does not stop anything from working. From the description it appears that updates were set to be applied automatically. System rebooted on its own and started applying updates. Crashing and then downloading updates necessitating nothing else could be done with the machine is not a plausible failure mode. It is just another case of people not knowing the basic workings of the things they own.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MostCynical on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:00AM
When windows is installing the updates from boot, it prevents anything else from happening until the updates are finished.
Often, one update will trigger a re-boot, which then triggers another update.. With one corporate laptop, I spent over three hours stuck in this cycle after the auto-updater had stopped working for a few months.
As it was a corporate machine, there were no user permissions for doing anything in the settings area at all.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:06PM
When updates are downloading a person still can use the machine. Your machine is set up to instantly apply without prompt. Ergo, every machine can not be used when updates are downloading.
There seems to be something amiss.
(Score: 1) by skater on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:48PM
Good point, but at the same time, if I get a laptop of unknown history (such as it was issued by work or whatever), I always boot it up and let it run for a while before trying to use it in a critical situation like a presentation or a meeting, for exactly the reason that updates can happen at any time. It doesn't insulate me, but it does cut down a lot of headache.
Of course in the basketball situation, who knows whether they even had the chance to do that. "Hey, Franz, can you run the board for the game in an hour?" "Sure, where's the laptop?" Or, "Sorry, but you can't check out the laptop for tonight's game until 5 p.m." We've all been in administrative snafus.
Also, I've seen plenty of sporting events where clocks and scoreboards weren't working and they went along just fine, so I think this basketball game probably could have gone with a low-tech solution to get the game underway.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 09 2015, @03:59AM
However Microsoft update is like a logic bomb so you can't wait it out. It may just start whenever some crazy dude at MS felt like it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:15AM
You start looking around the internet for things like svchost.exe railing the CPU and there are a lot of people who get that experience.
It took me some digging to discover what was prompting svchost to do me in. Even a "seasoned" friend did not want to get involved with this.
I was one of them having problems related to svchost, as apparently Microsoft started using larger buffers, and my system has only 1.5GB available RAM. What did me in is I had a substantial portion of that spoken for with FireFox, EAGLE, and LTSpice running. When the Windows Update ( I had no idea who was doing it to me at the time ) started , it would just rail me out.
Its easy to say someone is ignorant of their system. I definitely was. Someone often has no business trusting critical stuff to someone else.
I still remember an old scoreboard that ran on RS-232 from a laptop running DOS. Never had any problem with it. The program that ran it was freely distributed, and anyone wanting to use the scoreboard just brought their own laptop and plugged in. If that had happened in my younger years, that computer would have been switched over to another one in about three minutes.
We are sure losing resiliency in our endless chase for complexity.
Telling someone he is ignorant sounds to me like something a manager would say. Finding out exactly why the system is misbehaving sounds like something a not-so-highly paid guy who can't farm his problems onto others will do.
Many companies regard their name-callers over their do-ers... and it shows.
God, does it show.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @09:50AM
We are sure losing resiliency in our endless chase for complexity.
Indeed. Combine that with the fact than if we lose power nothing, absolutely nothing will work. Pretty scary.
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:34PM
Pretty scary.
True.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday April 08 2015, @07:28PM
It *was* scary during the Montreal area ice storm in the late 90's. Only locations with emergency generators were functioning. Our house became uninhabitable, because although the furnace burned oil, and there was lots of it in the tank, the burner was, for some reason, powered by electricity, and without electricity it was unable to burn the oil. We spent a week or more in emergency shelters and a relative's house in an area which got power connected before we did. The water purification plants were also affected, with only one functioning for the entire city. If that had failed too, clean water would have been unavailable, and, of course, boil-water advisories would be moot.
I heard that the emergency organisations briefly considered evacuating the city, but rejected it as utterly infeasible.
Surface travel off-island was prohibited because the bridges had so much ice encrusted that they were unsafe for normal traffic loads. I was told they finally got them operational by having helicopters swing weights at them to break the ice off the superstructures.
I do remember a moment when I looked out a window at the shelter to see trees and shrubs coated with huge encrustations if ice. A beautiful, deadly crystal landscape.
-- hendrik
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday April 09 2015, @02:02AM
Your experience is exactly what I am trying to avoid.
I am in Southern California. Earthquake territory.
I know we are going to pay our dues one day just as New Orleans paid the price to be in the middle of Hurricane Alley.
And I saw how much the government "helped" them. ( the "helped" is in quotes... I guess you know why I did that. ).
I lived in a poorer area for a while. My neighbor had a diesel-powered welder. It would put out 220V as well. We had already figured out and had made some cables so we could shinny up our power pole, open the pole-pig transformer with the switch Edison already had on it, and backfeed the neighborhood with his welder's output ( or at least four houses of it ). We figured we could at least keep minimal lighting and refrigeration running with it.
The more well-to-do area I am living in now is *totally* unprepared.
I am quite frustrated since losing employment that I cannot afford to put up solar panels and water wells. I wanted the well mostly for 60 degree fahrenheit water to use for geothermal heating/air conditioning use, but wanted to leave access to the water for emergency use in the event of earthquake. And solar panels to power the whole shebang. One of my intentions was to put lots of USB and 12 volt power access in the fence posts around my home so in the event of an earthquake, my neighbors would have a place to charge cellphones and car batteries. The power would come from the solar array. I would give water too, as the city water mains are likely to lose pressure due to rupture or power failure to the pumping stations. Of course, the water is just river water and would need treatment for drinking, but would work great for sanitary/bathing/firefighting purposes. However the main obstacle I would have, even if I had the finances to do it, would be getting permission to do it.
A friend of mine, a radio amateur, even had an impromptu TV station set up in his garage, and could transmit on the old style Analog TV bands. Best of my knowledge, he only did it once, just to make sure he could get out. He picked an unused TV channel, powered up for a few seconds, transmitted, and asked me if I got it on my TV. I did. It was then put back in mothballs, awaiting the day commercial TV got knocked out with the earthquake. He had plans of asking the city's police and fire to drop by to use his setup for communication with the city if all else was failing. It never got used.
There are a lot of very well intentioned people out there, who will give selflessly of themselves for the good of their neighbors, just as we see it all the time on the internet.
Unfortunately, though, our society places permission-givers above do-ers.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 09 2015, @04:13AM
Money enables you to buy your way out. Catastrophes disables you from anything unless it's at your disposal, right here, right now. Thus rich people may loose touch with the ground. Which is kind of interesting because in that situation it's so cheap to fix a backup for most things.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 09 2015, @04:10AM
I think this a good example of "oops" ..!
Of course you could splice some cable. But then you would need some materials which can't be had because there's no working or open shop. And a temporary solution might start a fire etc.
So one needs to think: If all utilities, even garbage collection.. is cut off without recourse. And nothing can be bought. Will you manage on your own? add to that some people might be tempted to grab something..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:04PM
More accurately we are losing resiliency for ease of use. Note this was a problem with auto update. Note your problem was with, guess what? Hidden services. All in the name of making things easier for people while making errors more prone as people know less and less about more and more. A paradox for sure.