It's probably time to buy some extra RAM, but feel free pause first to swoon at the growing scope of the world if you need to. But maybe it's those conventions that need to evolve, now that the number of people who substantively engage with technology is no longer a 32-bit matter. But what happens as the world's population continues to grow, and as previously dark parts of China and India start to come online permanently? The number of people in the world already exceeds the limits of 32-bit integers, and in the foreseeable future, a majority of them are probably going to possess some combination of phones, laptops, tablets, and wearable computing devices.Īlready, the term "Big Data" has become a buzzword in the tech industry, denoting the study of data sets that are too large to be processed using conventional techniques. In comparison, with around 1.35 billion users, Facebook still has plenty of headroom to continue to represent their User ID numbers with a 32-bit data point. Thus, YouTube's recent change to the view count limit is interesting not as a computational problem, nor as an example of a meme spinning out of control, but rather because we've just seen a population of active technology users overflowing the previously accepted limits of mathematics in computing OS X only moved beyond 32-bit processors with version 10.7, which was released just one year before "Gangnam Style." It's not the height of the aggregate number that's compelling, so much as the breadth of the user base that necessitated it.Īll these people were interacting with a single technical platform-with a single item presented on that platform, even. That number may be only implied, but it's also huge. It's the play count, strictly speaking, but music video views don't overflow theoretical mathematical boundaries unless a lot-like, a lot-of people are watching them. What's mind-boggling about all this, though, is that the number that was pushing those limits loosely correlates with a quantity of people.
It didn't actually "break YouTube's code" in any meaningful sense, let alone "break the Internet."
#VIDEO OF OPEN GANGNAM STYLE 32 BIT#
That fix was as simple as changing the memory space allotted to that data point from 32 bit to 64 bit, which is actually a relatively small change. You can see various catapult officers dancing around while waving a finger around in the air, instructing. When "Gangnam Style" hit 2 billion views back in May, a record at the time, Google's engineers noted that it might also soon overflow the limits of a 32-bit integer. Video Alert: Watch Sailors Dancing to Gangnam Style on an Aircraft Carrier.
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