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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 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.