The Daily Parker

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How to get nine quintillion views on YouTube

Psy's surreal Gangnam Style video got so many views on YouTube that Google had to change their database schema to count them:

YouTube said the video - its most watched ever - has been viewed more than 2,147,483,647 times.

It has now changed the maximum view limit to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or more than nine quintillion.

YouTube's counter previously used a 32-bit integer, which is a unit used to represent data in computer architecture. This means the maximum possible views it could count was 2,147,483,647.

In my programming language, C#, the 32-bit integer is standard, and is called simply "int". The 64-bit integer is called "long". So, basically, Google decided that all their videos needed—wait for it—to get a long.

Ah. Ha, ha. Ha.

Anyway, here's the video in question, which at this writing has 2,160,472,115 views:

Hat tip: Dan DiGangi.

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