Saturday Shutdown Of Parametric Software Looms

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January 09, 2004 (9:43 AM EST)

Saturday Shutdown Of Parametric Software Looms

The countdown for Parametric Technology Corp.'s software is in its last hours.

Most users, the company reports, have fixed the software--which, because of some Unix programming shortcuts, could fail at precisely 08:37:04 hours EST on Saturday, January 10.

The flaw could impact Parametric's Pro/Engineer and Windchill software. A Parametric spokesman, Joe Gavaghan, said the problem was discovered by one of the company's customers. "We isolated the problem in a week," Gavaghan said. "We developed a series of patches and we've had a huge campaign to notify customers. There are only about 150 lines of code involved."

Parametric believes that more than 90 percent of its customers have repaired the software.

Nevertheless, Brad Holtz, president and chief executive officer of Cyon Research Corp., a CAD-market researcher, said it's "not inconceivable" that the Saturday date might trigger other software halts. It appears that the problem can be traced to the way Parametric programmers viewed infinite time in Unix software created on 32-bit machines when they wrote programs years ago. Holtz said Parametric's programmers took a shortcut, but they forgot to fix it. Holtz said other software writers programming internal programs could have done the same thing.

The Parametric problem can be easily corrected with a software patch from the company. However, "it's possible that one percent of Parametric's users will walk in the door and their system will have locked up," explained Holtz.

Holtz compared the situation to the Y2K brouhaha: most users had fixed their computer installations in time and the whole issue became something of a non-event.

In a statement, Parametric said: "The root cause of the issue is an incorrect value having been placed in a constant that is used to identify a theoretical 'infinite time' in the future. Because the value of this constant was not set to the largest possible value, the theoretically infinite time will be reached . . . on Saturday January 10, 2004."

Many major companies, including Boeing and Toyota, use Parametric's CAD software; these major firms have all fixed the program, the company said. Pro/Engineer and Windchill enable computer-aided design specialists to access other Parametric applications.

Holtz said Parametric has handled the "embarrassing" situation well.