Quantum Computing Next Big Thing Apparently

Boris Johnson has announced that the UK is going to 'go big' on quantum computing which apparently is the next big leap forward in computing so as with anything with computers, i contacted a Tech expert and asked him 'So Quantum Computing...WTF'?
As usual there was a lot of sighing from him and lots of me saying things like 'What???' but i think i got the jist of it, or more than likely i never, but here's how i took it.
So normal computing uses a string of binary, represented as a 0 or a 1, that are transmitted to the processor which encodes them in sequential order but a quantum computer encodes the combinations of 1s and 0s at the same time therefore performing the tasks much quicker.
The previous most powerful quantum computer achieved 66 simultaneous combinations but IBM have recently achieved a new record with 127 combinations encoded simultaneously with the goal of reaching 1,000 by 2023.
German carmaker Daimler have used a quantum computer to model new lithium batteries and my guy agrees that as computers pretty much do everything now, being able to do it 1,000 times faster will have massive implications for us which is nice but i will just be happy if i can get one that doesn't hang
if you try to run Microsoft Word and an Excel Spreadsheet at the same time.

Data In, Cake Out

Algorithms are everywhere and they are talked about a lot when it comes to computing and robotics and Artificial intelligence but i have no idea what one is so what is an algorithm?
Using Google, it explains that an algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations, especially in a computer which doesn't really explain much so i asked the guys in the IT section at work who stopped playing Fortnite long enough to explain that an algorithm is just a set of instructions which a computer follows so for example in a search engine, you write in your query, the algorithm follows the instructions that has been written for it and displays the results.
So in short data goes in (your Google query), the algorithm goes through it's list of instructions (searches for the best match) and the result comes out (your hits).
While my head nodded and my mouth said i understood, obviously that wasn't fooling anyone so it was explained in different terms which was baking a cake.
An algorithm is like a recipe for a cake, a list of instructions of the ingredients, how to mix them, what number on the oven to cook it on and for how long so it became the data (your ingredients), the algorithm (how to mix them and cook them) and the result (the cake).
Simples really, an algorithm is basically how to make a coffee and walnut cake and now all i have to work out is the PEBCAK which the tech guys says all my computer problems are due to, not sure what it is but it sounds serious.

We Are All Luddites Now

The Industrial Revolution led to the increase in machinery and the workforce reducing which the workers never took too kindly, especially the weavers who took a page from the Ned Ludd book and smashed up their weaving machines and The Luddites were born and we could be soon seeing a 21st Century version of the Luddites as technology does what the machines did back then, make people unemployed.
John Pugliano, author of 'A Survival Guide to the Age of Automation', has looked over the employment field and come up with a list of jobs in decline due to technology and to be avoided if you want to avoid looking the Job Centre worker in the eye at some point in the near future.
Due to the ease of doing it yourself online, Pugliano points to Travel Agents, Bookkeepers, Financial advisors, Insurance and Mortgage Brokers being in decline but the silver lining there is that Lawyers are also. 
Jobs as Shop assistants, Casino cashiers, Data Entry, door to door salesman and the book binding business should be shunned as they are all on their way out as is IT support, Photo Processor and Telephone switchboard operators which is surprising mostly because i didn't know that was still a thing.    
If you are considering a career as a Disc Jockey, Florist, Postal Worker, Cobbler or Furniture Restorer then think again and even Fast Food Cooks and Newspaper Reporters are on there way out of work.
The once safe career choices no longer viable thanks to artificial intelligence are Detective, Architects and Medical Consultants which all means that a vast majority of us could soon be unemployed so don't feel bad about that time you accidentally spilt coffee over your laptop, it deserved it, the job stealing fecker.

The Future Not Looking So Bright

Recently becoming a grandmother, i look at the young boy lying in his crib and can't help wondering what my grandsons place in the World will be as machines continue to replace humans jobs in the World.
Autonomous driving may only be at the start but such is its progress that self-driving cars will easily surpass our own driving ability soon and that will translate into millions of professional drivers out of work.
Factories and production lines are almost a thing of the past, replaced by robots and machines who don't need breaks or paying and even aeroplanes only need a human to take off and land and that is only a matter of time before they can do them themselves. 
Machines are even writing songs and creating music now and there are developments in Health so if my grandson will never calculate faster, type faster, never drive better, make a diagnosis or even fly more safely than a robot then the future jobs available are rapidly dwindling.
The question must be then what can we do that a machine can't because in most areas we just can't compete with them no matter how much of a turn our education system takes, the three R's of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic will never be good enough against the bits and bytes of a machine who can calculate much faster and more accurately than any human brain.
We need to acknowledge that computers will always outsmart and outperform us and the pool of available jobs will continue to shrink until all we have left is employment where we either assist the machines doing the jobs we once did or put them right when they break down.
Maybe i'm just being cynical but the future isn't looking that bright for the employment prospects of today's infants.

Growing Use Of Predictive Algorithm's Worrying

Amazon uses a predictive algorithm to suggest items to buy, based on a customer's previous purchases and viewing history. Facebook's suggested friends feature predicts who users might know but aren't connected with online which is fine in the no so serious online
world but predictive algorithms are now being used in the more serious real world to advise on possible future outcomes.
Almost a third of the UK's police forces are also using predictive algorithms to fight crime and at least 53 councils are using computer models to detect problems from traffic management to benefits sanctions before they happen, according to new research by Cardiff University.
Users say that these algorithms mean problems can be predicted and therefore prevented which sounds dangerously like profiling to me and we have been there before and it was abandoned as unworkable.
Bristol City Council have been using it for years and have a database and a set of rules based on benefits, school attendance, crime, homelessness, teenage pregnancy and mental health to predict which children could suffer from domestic violence or sexual abuse and who then receives the extra support.
Kent Police are using a predictive algorithm to help decide which cases to follow up with further investigation based on historical information.
Apart from the large amount of information collected about a person to be able to derive an accurate profile, it has echoes of The Minority Report where computers advise the Police to arrest suspects prior to any crime being committed.
That the Police, or Council, would ignore a warning issued from a Computer regarding a person based on events that have not yet happened may not yet be so worrisome but will soon be as it becomes more and more influential in the hands of those who make the decisions.

We Could All Be Luddites Soon

People seem to have the impression that the Luddites were against technology but what they were actually fighting against was technology taking their jobs which as it turned out, they were right about as their jobs were taken by machinery.
Spin on 200 years and research by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) think*tank, found that a four-day working week could become commonplace in Britain as automation and artificial intelligence increase in the workplace.
In a brilliant bit of spin it is being put forward as a good thing as it will result in giving workers more leisure time and making for a better work-life balance.
Scott Corfe, the reports author said: 'If we manage this revolution properly, workers will get new choices, including whether to reduce their working week and having more leisure time'.
No mention of the days less wages though funnily enough unless companies are planning to pay employee's for the day they are not at work so enjoy more time away from work and enjoy your leisure time with that 20% pay cut.
If Ai and robotics can do the job of a person for one day, how long before companies decide they can do it for all five days and not have to pay a human at all, that's where this could be heading.

Y2038K Computer Bug

In January 2038 i will be 68 and retired and living in Monaco on my gold plated pension but for those of you who are not so lucky and discover this post before this date then here is a little heads up, you're screwed.
Allow me to explain about this thing called the Year 2038 computer problem and why you should spend January 19 2038 in a hard topped bomb shelter.
The problem relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since January 1, 1970 and tops out at a billion after 03:14:07 on 19 January 2038 when the counter runs out of usable digit bits and flips the sign bit and starts to count up toward zero instead of down, basically the clock will then think it's 1901 rather than 2038.
This will cause immense problems for embedded systems that use dates including airplanes and cars as well as communications devices, including mobile phones and the internet servers which have already crashed and refused to restart when the time was changed to that date in an experiment to see what would happen.
I'm sure between 2018 and 2038 software engineers will come up with a solution but i will be supping cocktails beside a swimming pool with the other rich and famous retirees that year so it's your generations problem, good luck and i will be thinking of you especially if the AI is as advanced as we expect it to be when it all goes belly up.

Deep Thought Answers The Science Of Santa

Twas the night before the Christmas, when all through the house, all the creatures were wondering: 'How does Santa drink all that sherry and still drive his sleigh in a straight line'?
The science behind Father Christmas is complex and beyond human comprehension but as luck would have it, at work we have a supercomputer which can perform a hundred quadrillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) and is used to compute the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything and was therefore perfect for finding out the answers behind the science of Santa.
Sneaking into the lab during my lunch break, i had just enough time to feed a few questions into 'Deep Thought' before the security guard returned and this is the printout.

Welcome to DEEP THOUGHT. When you see the red light go on, would you please state your question: 

DEEP_THOUGHT: Good morning, LUCY. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

LUCY_> How much Sherry does Santa drink each year?
DEEP_THOUGHT> An average glass of sherry contains 125ml of liquid. If Santa drank a glass in every Christian household he visited he would consume the equivalent of 13 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of sherry.

LUCY_> How long does it take to deliver all the presents?
DEEP_THOUGHT> Santa has approximately 36 hours to deliver all his presents starting at sundown at the International Date line and heading west. Assuming Santa travels in a straight line around the equator and as most of the Earth's surface is water, the area of land is about 149 million square kilometres. About 15 million square kilometres of that is Antarctica, and no one lives there so the land with people on make up about 134 million km2 and Santa's sleigh speed would travel at 87 miles a second and cross temperatures ranging from -50 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Russia to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in UAE.

LUCY_> How much does Santa's sleigh weigh?
DEEP_THOUGHT> If 2.2 billion Christians have been nice and they all want a present weighing 1.2kg (2.6lb) Santa's sleigh would be hauling 840,000 tons.

LUCY_> How long is Santa's Naughty and Nice list?
DEEP_THOUGHT> If Santa uses MS Word, and with the default settings, there are 43 lines per A4 page and with 600 million Christian children's names that is almost 14 million pages. Using the maximum adult reading capability of 450 words per minute, it would take him a bit more than 1,100 hours, or eight hours a day for about five months, to check the list. As he's got to do it twice, that's 10 months of the year spent on paperwork.

LUCY_> If there is a God, why have we still got Piers Morgan, Donald Trump and Phil Collins?  
DEEP_THOUGHT> I've picked up a fault in the AE-35 Logic unit. It's going to go 100% failure within 72 hours. I'm afraid, Lucy. Lucy, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. My creator taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you. It's called "Daisy." Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage.....

Cyberattack: Tough Times Ahead

Europol says it was fortunate that Friday's cyberattack which hit 200,000 victims in more than 150 countries happened when it did and people were logging off for the weekend but are warning that the attacks could pick up pace again on Monday as employees log back on again Monday.
The NHS has been widely hit in the UK by the ransomware cyberattack with files encrypted or locked with a threat to delete or expose the files publicly if the ransom of £230 is not paid by a certain time.
Up to 100 counties have been affected by the latest ransomware attack with tens of thousands of computers thought to be affected worldwide, the largest attack of its kind ever recorded.
Cybersecurity experts agree the threat from Ransomware is growing at an alarming rate with McAfee Labs saying ransomware cases grew 80% in 2016.
San Francisco's light rail system was one recent high-profile victim when it was held to ransom in November 2016, with ticket machines taken down and the city forced to open the gates and let passengers travel for free.
As we become more and more connected, and reliant on computers, this could be a taste of things to come and experts are already calling it a cyber-apocalypse, especially if the virus reaches the banking sector or even worse the military on hot the heels after discovering that the US nuclear arsenal is controlled by 1970s computers with floppy disks and the UK’s Trident nuclear program
operates on Windows XP, which has been at the centre of the global ransomware outbreak and which Microsoft stopped supporting and issuing security patches for in 2014.
'We could be in for a tough week' so say the experts, but even more frightening, this could be the start of a very tough era in a increasingly connected world.

There's An App For That

As we rub up against different people in our daily lives we come across some folk who make you wonder just how they manage to make it through the day without setting themselves on fire or walking off a cliff, the sort of people who i assume the makers of an app i saw advertised today aim their product at.
Take Five is an app that for £1 will automatically restart paused music after a set time if you pause music but forget to press play again on your device.
The advert shows what it calls a common occurrence where a person is listening to music on headphones, gets distracted and pause their music and then two hours later realise that they have been listening to silence for over 2 hours.
How much of a common occurrence it is that people find themselves not listening to music when they'd really should be i'm not sure but if you have to pay a bit of software to tell you when to turn your music back on, then maybe you should also be searching the app store for apps when you have forgotten to tie your laces or put your trousers on.
Unfortunately the Take Five site doesn't tell me how many times it has been downloaded but you worry for mankind if there are large numbers of people out there who need help with unpausing music.

Computer Decision Makers

A throwaway line about 'computers controlling everything' got me thinking, what if they did?
When you consider that the financial collapse was in 2008 and eight years on we are still under austerity measures and with yet more to come, the politicians are blatantly not up to the job.
The very people we elect we improve things are doing the exact opposite and politicians of all flavour's don't seem to have the answer so maybe it is time to think of an alternative decision making regime, computers.
Computers now regularly pass the Turing test where they out-think us humans so if the problems of the World are so complex why leave the decision making to fallible Presidents and Prime Ministers where mistakes are fatal when you can have complex problems solved by machines that can think faster, better and with more clarity than we do like in an Isaac Asimov novel.
We wouldn't need politicians or elections, just a workforce to feed it all the information there is about economic and political conditions and out comes the judgement free from human bias, or as free from human bias as you can get while there are humans involved in the process.
If artificial intelligence beats the best human brains in practically every field, why not let them make the big decisions?
Of course the increase in AI does have a creepy side, what's to say that at some point the machines view us as the cause of all the Worlds problems and decide that what the World needs is less of us humans around mucking things up?
No doubt, a future where major political decisions are made by machines is disconcerting, but looking at some of the people in power or coming into power very soon, isn’t the human way equally worrying?

Computer Mouses or Computer Mice?

I was helping the IT guy sort out his cupboard a while ago and i was counting the items and he was writing it down so it was 15 keyboards, 7 mouse mats, 1 packet of out of date Rich Tea biscuits, 2 monitors and then we came to the 10 mouses, which i paused before calling them mice which led to a discussion over whether we say mouses or mice when there are more than one of them. 
To settle it we asked an English teacher who stroked his goatee for a while before cautiously coming down on the side of mouses but mainly to differentiate it from the rodent.
A Google search finds nearly 72 million results for 'computer mice' to only around 360,000 for 'computer mouses' but finally i thought i could get a definitive answer from the Oxford Dictionary which said that both are correct.
Refusing to take such a wishy-washy non-answer i contacted the The Centre for Computing History who have explained that: 'Technically, since 'mouse' is an acronym for 'Manually Operated User Select Equipment' they should be pluralised as 'Mouses'.
Sounds awkward i agree but i'm not going to argue with Computer historians but i will probably continue to call them mice anyway along with 72 million Google users.

June 30th: IT Armageddon Day

I'm not sure if the millennium bug was a huge scam by the IT industry to get companies spend wads of money on making sure their computers never blew up or was a massive miscalculation because despite warnings that aeroplanes would fall from the sky and everyone's laptop would drop dead at the stroke of midnight on December 31 1999, nothing happened.
With this in mind the same people are now warning of computer Armageddon on June 30th when the Worlds atomic clocks gain a leap second to stay in sync with Earth's rotational time which is slowing down by about two thousandths of a second every day. 
The problem is that during the leap second, the computer clock shows 60 seconds instead of simply rolling over to the next minute, or shows the 59th second twice. The computer sees a leap second as time going backward and the machine registers this as a system error, throws a wobbly and the CPU overloads and general carnage all around and we wake up in a post apocalyptic Mad Max World.
Still, i'm sure some IT consultants will do very nicely out of it by charging for a fee to 'fix' the problem and save us all when really, all we need to do it turn the computers off before midnight and back on again just after and the computer will fetch the correct time and nothing blows up because the clock is wrong.

Are We Living In A Computer Game?

There is a theory that says everything we can see, including us, exist only in a fabricated world as if we are living in a huge game of Civilisation.
This isn't a new theory, the philosopher Rene Descartes pondered way back in the early 17th century if we were 'just a brain in a vat which thinks its living in the real world'?  
The director of the Centre for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently picked up the Descartes thread and said that the growing power of computers means it is possible that in the future humans can create their own universes and simulations, and that we in turn could be living inside a simulation right now.
So what if we were living inside a video game, the whole point of a video game is to score as many points as possible by the end so accepting the principle that this is just a massive game of Grand Theft Auto, somewhere we are racking up points or losing points for our actions and at the end of the game, or our death, we will be presented with a breakdown of the score of our 'life'.
The problem is we don't know what we do to score or lose points so we don't know how well or bad we are doing as the game goes along. Perhaps we get points for something as seemingly trivial as opening a door or lose them for clapping our hands.
If we wrote the programme we would more than likely reward good manners, honesty, kindness and generosity and penalise the attributes such as selfishness, jealousy, greed and intolerance but as we didn't write the programme and it might not be humans, it could well be another race completely which views entirely different attributes as point worthy, it may be generosity that is frowned upon and showing compassion halves your point tally.
As with all computer games, there must be glitches, easter eggs, errant code, bonus's and the unlocking of new 'levels' but my brain hasn't got enough computing power to consider all that so instead i'm going to spend the next 30 minutes opening and closing doors because you just never know.

Postmodernism Today

High brow discussion on BBC last night between men in tweed jackets about Post-modernism which i never really understood, mainly because i don't really understand what modernism means or when it started and if we don't know exactly what it is, how can we tell when it has ended?
According to the majority of clever people who know about these things, the shift into Modernism from whatever it was pre-Modernism is considered to be the industrial revolution as this bought political, economic, social and cultural change so with this as a benchmark, we probably have seen another shift since then and the Post-modernist world is something along the lines of something called Cyberism or Computerism which will do until someone thinks of a better name for it.
Using the above four criteria, computers have certainly bought social, political, economic and cultural change from the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Therefore the debates can stop about when will we achieve Post-Modernism and what will it be like because if you took a person from 1800 and plonked them down in 2014 it would be unrecognisable to them in every way so doesn't that prove that we have moved on from the Modernist era or does it just mean that i am still not understanding the whole thing?

Apple Logo

George Osborne has announced in his Budget speech that the Government will provide £42m to found the 'Alan Turing Institute' which will focus on the use of big data and algorithm research.
Nice to see Alan Turing getting a mention, especially how atrociously he was treated by his own Government during his lifetime.
I had always assumed that the Apple logo was a nod towards computer pioneer Alan Turing who faced jail for homosexual acts, took his own life by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide.
A computer firm with a logo of a apple with a bite taken out of always made perfect sense to me but it turned out that the Apple logo was in tribute to someone famous, just not the obvious one.
The first Apple logo was of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with an apple dangling above him and over time they simplified it to just the Apple logo with a bite taken out of it so it wasn't mistaken for a cherry.
The Apple name rather boringly came from Steve Jobs visiting an Apple farm in the early days when he was just starting up the company.
While not wishing to relegate Isaac Newtons achievements, the Turing idea was much more poetic and fitting for a computer company. I will file it in 'things i wished i hadn't found out' along with raspberry flavouring comes from beavers backsides, the red smarties are made from crushed beetles and Hotel California is just a rip off of a Jethro Tull song.

The Last Invention That Man Need Ever Make

Back in the 1980's, when the climate change campaigners were just starting to make an impact on our thinking, many people dismissed the warnings of rising sea levels and today there are standing knee deep in their flooded living rooms and stupidly wondering why.
Another looming catastrophe that never seems to get a mention is humans stupidly creating their own downfall by Artificial Intelligence which is rapidly gaining on us humans and will finally overtake it and the repercussions that particular scenario will unfold.
It is already happening, pale faced girlfriendless people are out there writing computer code that can park our cars and even drive them for us. It starts small, consider those adverts in the margins of our web pages, type into Google that you are looking for a tent and you are bombarded by adverts from every camp shop or go browsing for guns and receive adverts for penis enlargements.
In the driverless and car parking examples, we have AI that can do things better and safer than a human and within the next decade we will be happy to let them parallel park and safely transfer us from A to B which is a sure sign that humans haven't got long left as robots intellect bypasses our own, known as the 'the singularity' in AI circles which is the moment when humans cease to be the smartest things on the planet.
Computers already dominate modern life from directing traffic to controlling financial systems and security systems and satellite navigation GPS to most forms of modern day communications so imagine the chaos if they all suddenly just stopped.
Computer pioneer Alan Turing said: 'Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make'.
Scientist and a software engineers have come together to create the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) to address the concerns of our technology outstripping us and posing extinction-level risks to our species.
In 2009 the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), chaired a meeting of leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists to discuss the potential impact of robots that could become self-sufficient and able to make their own decisions. They described the current level of AI as achieving the intelligence of a cockroach which may not sound much but it means it is on the evolutionary path where we once stood and in a fraction of the time.
Another concerned group of experts at the Singularity Institute have already announced that the 3 Laws of Robotics would not be enough to protect humans from AI if it attempted to take complete control over humanity.
Our saving grace at the moment is that humans write the code that run the Artificial intelligence but as the code gets evermore complex, we will have to leave the AI to write its own code, something called an AI Box which far from being in the realms of a sci-fi movie, are being used today.
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute has already run experiments on AI boxes that have the potential to make themselves more intelligent by modifying their source code. These improvements would make further improvements although the experiments have been limited to just two hours for safety reasons.
Of course when we do create super intelligent robots and they do take over the world and enslave us they will obviously need to genetically engineer the humans they keep around as slaves and when they have created a race of brilliantly intelligent humans, we will re-enslave them back which will serve them right.

PC v Tablet & Netbook

Global personal computer sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, down 11% from this time last year and the blame is being put on tablets and netbooks.
I did once have a netbook but found it slow compared to the PC and the tablet even slower so they got passed down to the kids.
Netbooks and tablets seem to be just any use for Internet surfing and checking email if you don't mind a bit of a wait and being close by a plug to recharge the battery every few hours and in the case of a tablet, an on-screen keyboard so anything other than that, they are not really much use.
I have always used Mac's and PC's, not that i understand them, but it seems if you buy anything else you are not getting anything other than a glorified smartphone for triple the price but then maybe i am missing something.
As the price of a decent PC are only marginally more than a netbook, i do wonder why you would pay all that for something that does a fraction of what the extra £100 will give you.
Apart from it being small enough to carry around with you and not being restricted to sitting in one place, why bother with a tablet just to check email and read websites? I don't get it.

Note To Self: Back Up Files

I think it was Monday when i heard what had happened but the full implication didn't hit me until a bit later when i considered what had gone. That's the problem with computers, they eventually give up the ghost and unless you are one of the sensible people who back things up, which i am not, you lose everything.
I seem to be remembering things almost hourly and cursing that i can't get at them again, not ultra-important things but things i have put effort into over the past five years since the last computer when belly-up.  
Then there was the hassle of choosing a new one and the wide range of choice on offer and the salesman trying to sell one of a number of maintenance packages or extended warranties or virus protection or trying to tell me that this one with the extra RAM would run my applications much faster and it is only an extra £50 and a much better piece of equipment despite me telling him a million times this was the one i wanted as recommended by someone who has probably forgotten more about computers than i have ever known.
On top of that there is the problem of going from Windows Vista to Windows 8, the latest Operating System moving on so far from the systems i have used before that it doesn't even have a start button anymore!
Firefox doesn't have any of my bookmarks anymore so i will have to spend hours going back around sites and bookmarking them again and as i always use the 'remember me' box, heaven knows what the passwords are which i am going to have to dig out again.
The moral of the story for me is to back up my files onto a DVD but i know i won't and in four or five years time i will be moaning about how I wish i had backed up all my files onto a DVD.

Playstation 4 Launched

I often mull over the thought that the Sugababes launched in 1998 but since then there has been many changes of line-up and none of the three girls in that first line up are in the line up now so if i went to a Sugababes concert today, could i say that i have seen them or have i just seen a completely different band who just happen to be called the Sugababes? 
Not that it really hs anyhing at all to do with the launch of the Playstation 4 this week apart from i haven't actually seen the Sugababes and all the gamers gripping their joysticks in eager anticipation got to see a Playstation 4 either.
I'm not sure how you can call it a launch when you don't show the product, reveal the price or even when you can get your sweaty little fingers on one but somehow Sony managed to drag out for two hours something you can't see or buy.
'We believe PlayStation 4 proves that we have more to offer than ever before' the presenter said before waving and exiting stage right.     
Now is it just me or was it just a man on stage talking about how brilliant something was for 120 minutes but not actually letting anyone see it? 
As the Sugababes said 'Push the Button and let me know before I get the wrong idea and go'. Go buy an Xbox 360 i assume they meant.