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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:32PM
Not even that! When it comes to mission critical (such as the case of a basketball game that make-or-break your professional team's standing), one should use a real-time OS,
Not in the slightest. I get the feeling you don't even understand what a real-time OS is - its a way to embed an application into the operating system so that it gets reliable millisecond level scheduling.
The problem with real-time OSes is that they are not even close to general-purpose. They are appropriate for the embedded controller in the score-board, but not for an application that tracks scoring and has as one of its functions sending the score to the scoreboard computer.
Linux wasn't necessary here either. All they had to do was turn off auto-updates or failing that, just leave it off the network. It was simple operator error, nothing more.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday April 08 2015, @02:58PM
I doubt the operator asked it to crash and reboot before the updates started. Some windows updates happen during bootup and shutdown which prevents the computer from being usable. You don't always know when that is going to happen either. You could have installed updates the night before and shut the computer down. The next morning you'll spend 20 min waiting for your desktop because it's stuck in an update and won't present the login screen until it's done. I also see people who want to leave for the day and their laptops say "please don't turn off power" or whatever when trying to shutdown. They could be waiting anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes.
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(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday April 14 2015, @06:42PM
This particular day it was windows updates. Next month, the hard drive could fail outright and it won't matter what OS you have installed. They should have had a spare laptop.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday April 14 2015, @07:23PM
The scoreboard could also fail. At some point you have to draw a line in the risk analysis sheet.
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(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday April 14 2015, @10:58PM
The scoreboard could also fail. At some point you have to draw a line in the risk analysis sheet.
Very true.
But a 'spare laptop' need not even been a dedicated unit. It could have just been one of the coaches personal units with the scoreboard control software preinstalled and ready to go.
(Or maybe not... who knows what the licensing and DRM for the scoreboard software looks like. :)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 08 2015, @07:30PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford