For the Windows Ping List... Windows Update costs team the game... PING!
Posted on 04/01/2015 9:28:32 PM PDT by dayglored
What’s the worst thing that could happen when your Windows update takes longer than expected? Ask the Paderborn Finke Baskets, a German pro basketball team who got relegated thanks to Windows’ sluggish performance.
The Spiralling Progress Indicator of Doom spelled the end of the team’s run in Division Two of the Basketball Bundesliga.
As the home team in a match against Chemnitz, the Finke Baskets were responsible for the large score display screen. The laptop controlling the screen crashed right before the start of the game and upon re-start insisted on installing automatic Windows updates.
The game was supposed to start at 7.30pm on 13 March, but after speaking to the ref, the team manager decided to wait for the screen before tip-off.
With the team desperate to hold on to their place in the league, it took 17 excruciating minutes for the Windows updates to be installed, two minutes longer than the Paderborn team could afford.
In an official statement the Basketball Bundesliga confirmed that Paderborn has been relegated from the ProA because, according to the rules, if a game is interrupted for more than 15 minutes, the responsible team is considered to have lost the game...
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
By the way, the team that was disqualified actually won the game, but of course that didn't count...
For the Windows Ping List... Windows Update costs team the game... PING!
What a stupid rule
Rut-row!
I'm ok with the 15 minute rule on the game. Not the OS.
/johnny
Mayhem at 3AM.
I really did not enjoy getting THAT phone call...
Just a couple of weeks ago I was waiting on a Taxi to take me to the Airport. With about 15 minutes to go I get online to make sure my flight is on time. When I go to shut downn my computer it starts doing that “update” thing. Complete with warnings about “DO NOT SHUT OFF YOUR COMPUTER!!”
But I want to put my Laptop in my safe, and I have to close it to do that. Fortunately, it finished about two minutes before the Taxi arrived. But I was so flustered that I forgot to change from my reading glasses to my outdoor glasses. So I spent the whole trip in a fog.
So....what happens if you do shut your computer off while it’s updating? I can’t believe it would be anything too terrible.
Driving sports display screens is not a job for Windows. It's a job for Linux. With automatic updates turned off, obviously. So, if it was working yesterday, it will work today, for sure.
Blaming MS for their own incompetence. Only way to run the scoreboard is from a PC and they only had one?
Absolutely nothing bad should happen in such a case. The update should either succeed or fail completely. It should not matter if the update is run half a time, a full time, and then reattempted. This is elementary software engineering.
It’ll recover but it can get ugly. If it happens again, put the laptop away while it’s still running- if the update takes longer than your battery life then something is seriously wrong.
> So....what happens if you do shut your computer off while it’s updating? I can’t believe it would be anything too terrible.
Actually if you shut down in the middle of updates you stand a pretty good chance of it not booting up the next time. Unlikely that you’ll lose everything, but it may be pretty exciting getting the computer to work again.
> Absolutely nothing bad should happen in such a case. The update should either succeed or fail completely. It should not matter if the update is run half a time, a full time, and then reattempted. This is elementary software engineering.
Well, simply not booting correctly on the next restart can be devastating to the non-savvy user. Sure, nothing “bad” happened, all the files were still there, but the user was sweating and crying. That’s bad in their book...
For stuff that HAS to work, like FR, I use linux. And I'll update it when I need to, not when it thinks I need updated.
/johnny
“...but the user was sweating and crying. That’s bad in their book...”
Darn right!! ;)
Well, yeah, they were dumb to use Windows in a serious application like that. But they’re hardly alone. Think about ATMs all over the country that are still running on Win XP...
That's a bug in the update.
Sure, nothing “bad” happened, all the files were still there, but the user was sweating and crying.
That's a bug in the lawyer screen before the update.
The solution in this case should have been to cancel the update and proceed with the game.
/johnny
Wait... whut? XP on ATMs?
/johnny
It was entirely avoidable even with Windows. Look at the reliability of the ABMs- seeing one offline around here is a rarity and it’s usually because they’re empty.
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