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Gangnam Style Surpasses YouTube's 32-bit View Counter

First time accepted submitter neoritter writes "The Korean pop star PSY's viral music video "Gangnam Style" has reached the limit of YouTube's view counter. According to YouTube's Google+ account, "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. 'Gangnam Style' has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!"

7 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Gangnam Style by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Truly the finest music video of all time.

  2. Signed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why the hell was it signed?

  3. Marketing gimmick by iONiUM · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This is just a marketing gimmick. I find it weird that they wouldn't have used an unsigned int to begin with (or at least, would have upgraded when it appeared a video was approaching the limit).

    Now they get a free news article all over the world about it! More ads for everyone!

  4. Re:numbering by amicusNYCL · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whoever has the second most viewed video on YouTube probably cares.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  5. Re:32 bit signed integer, obviously by unrtst · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If they'd used a 32 bit unsigned integer they might have bought another 6 months or something.

    You could say the same of the unix time_t problem, which is a signed 32bit int. If it were unsigned, it'd go to 2106 instead of 2038. Either way, that's not not really the solution. The solution, as youtube has done, is to move to 64bit int.

    Personally, I'm amazed at the hit count!
    There are 2^31 seconds between 1970-01-01 and 2038-01-19.
    If this video was watched once every second since 1970, it'd still have 24 years before it rolled over that counter.
    By comparison, it hasn't been available very long. How many views a second is that thing getting? On average, more than 28 hits a second!!!

    28 hits/sec may not seem outrageous for a very popular file on a very popular site, but that's averaged since July 2012 until today. That, IMO, is nuts.

  6. Re:Rick-Roll by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What kind of sick person would see a link described as a "fancy pivot chat" and still click on it?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  7. Re:Half of the credit... by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... for the successful rick-rolling goes to the "informative" mods...

    Even though "beats the 64bit integer" was very obvious BS, I still clicked...

    That was part of my evil scheme.
    No Slashdotter can resist the sense of superiority that comes from correcting a trivial math error. ;-)