Tag: upgrade

Microsoft partners hold breath over Windows server 2003

Posted on July 15, 2015 by - News

windowscomputexThe date of doom of Windows Server 2003 is nearly here and Microsoft’s partners are worried that millions of customers have left themselves wide open to security breaches.

Some suppliers have more than a third of their customer base on Windows Server 2003 and will wake up and discover they are wide open to hackers..

This is of course an opportunity worth millions to solution providers but so far companies are only nibbling.

Any Server 2003 opportunity goes way beyond an upgrade and many companies will have to take on big projects. Some machines will have to be totally replaced.

Microsoft will no longer issue patches to keep outdated software protected, the risk of a security breach rises. There were 37 critical updates released in 2013 for Server 2003, an average of just more than three per month.

Most suppliers say that they don’t have customers who will not migrate, but some are still dragging their feet. Older applications run on 32-bit architecture and development for many of these applications has been discontinued.

This means that some companies are finding that they cannot run on Server 2008 or Server 2012, which feature 64-bit platforms.

This means a software upgrade which is taking time. All this is happening at a time when companies are broke and their boards will not let IT departments start new projects.

Gangham Style nearly broke YouTube

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

0921-gangnam-style_full_600Gangnam Style, the South Korean pop star’s enduring video phenomenon from 2012, nearly broke YouTube by getting more than 2,147,483,647 views and creating a sort of Y2K fault.

The site’s original view counter was not designed to take that many hits and its developers could not believe that a video would be watched by numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (2,147,483,647 views).

Google, which owns YouTube, in a blog post this week. ” ‘Gangnam Style’ has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade!”

When programmers built YouTube nine years ago, they probably never imagined that a video on the young platform — back when several million views was considered a smash hit — might be watched more than 2.1 billion times.

As of late Wednesday morning, “Gangnam Style” had breached the barrier, showing more than 2,152,512,000 views.

Fortunately YouTube did not collapse with smoke pouring out of a server.  YouTube’s software engineers saw the problem coming and recently updated to a 64-bit view counter across the site, Google spokesman Matt McLernon said. The view counter can now go up to 9 quintillion views (9,223,372,036,854,775,808, to be exact), which should hold PSY for a while.

“Nothing actually broke,” McLernon said. “There was never anything that actually went wrong. It’s just people having fun with the language.”

PSY’s trademark horse-riding dance video, is almost 2½ years old and was uploaded in July 2012, “Gangnam Style” was the first clip to hit a billion views and is the most-watched video of all time. It was even the 5th most-played video on YouTube this past summer.

“People still play this video an absurd number of times,” he said.

To commemorate the occasion, YouTube has added a new wrinkle: If you hover your cursor over the “Gangnam Style” view counter, the numbers spin backwards and forwards.

Google serves up tat

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

telescopeSearch engine Google has come up with a novel way of getting people to update their browsers to something a little more recent.

Users of browsers which can remember the use of shoulder pads and Duran Duran are suddenly getting served up search results which are just as old.

An Opera 12.17 user complained on a Google help desk that, Google’s homepage reverted to the old version him. If he searched for something, the results are shown with the current Google look, but the homepage itself is the old look with the black bar across the top. It seemed to affect only the Google homepage and image search. However he still got the latest news.

Opera is currently using version 24, version 12 was bought out in June 7, 2011.

A Google spokesman said that there was not a fault with Google, in fact it was proof that the “encouragement” to upgrade was working perfectly. He suggested politely that if the user wanted a modern Google they should run a modern browser to support it.

“We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers — they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall,” the spokesman wrote on the thread.

Strangely, the help desk thread continued with people using old browsers insisting that there must be a fault with Google’s programming. After all, there was nothing wrong with working with the same version of Safari which was blessed by Steve Jobs while he was young and healthy is there?