Spider-Man stars out for premiere

Hundreds of Spider-Man fans have greeted the stars of the latest film at its European premiere in London.

Tobey Maguire, 31, who plays Spider-Man, was at the screening in London’s Leicester Square on Monday.

He was joined by many of his fellow stars as he walked down the red-and-black carpet, complete with spider logos.

Some fans - who had queued for hours - wore Spider-Man suits in honour of their favourite superhero.

They were kept entertained by footage from the film, which was broadcast on five giant screens overlooking the square.

And their persistence paid off when Maguire and co-star Kirsten Dunst paused to greet scores of fans, despite a gruelling promotion schedule that will take them around the world.

‘Big event’
The stars were in Japan last Monday for the world premiere, and will fly to Italy on Tuesday for the third of nine premieres.

Maguire, 31, said: “I’m a little tired, but I feel pretty present.

“I’m having a lot of fun, this is a big event, and I’m really proud of this move, so I’m really excited about it.”

In the film, Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man is enjoying life with the beautiful Mary Jane Watson when he discovers a mysterious black suit that enhances his power, but stirs hidden feelings of bitterness and revenge.

Maguire explained it is the darker side of Parker’s personality that comes out in the third instalment.

“Peter Parker has been getting a lot of attention from the public, getting praised, and he is basking in the glory of being Spider-Man,” he explained.

“It turns into a certain level of arrogance and self-importance, which starts him on his journey to a darker side of himself.”

US actress Dunst, who wore a black Rodarte dress, said she was thrilled to be at the screening.

“They [the fans] are so excited here, so it gives me a lot of energy.”

She added that Spider-Man 3 was “the best collaboration of them all.

“There’s a lot of action and drama.”

And she laughed: “I have no complaints about kissing Tobey in the film. He’s a good kisser.”

Passionate
Other stars at the premiere included Rosemary Harris, who plays Aunt Mae, James Franco who plays Harry, and Topher Grace who stars as the villainous Venom.

Grace said he was pleased to be spending time in London.

“This kind of reception is great,” he said, “and it helps when you are so passionate about the work.”

The film cost about £124m to make - rumoured to be the most expensive film ever made.

The original two films, also directed by Sam Raimi, took a joint total of £800m at the box office.

So it was no surprise that speculation over whether the webbed wonder will return for a fourth outing had already begun.

Maguire said he would not rule out appearing as the superhero again.

He said: “I would consider it if the script was right and the right cast was in place.”

Raimi, who was rumoured to want to make the Hobbit instead of another Spider-Man film, said he would like to keep the superhero alive with another movie.

But he would not be drawn on whether it was in the pipeline.

“It’s very exciting to see that so many people are interested in the movie.

“I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next, so I think I’m looking forward to spending a little bit of time with my family.”

The film is released in Japan, China and selected European countries on 1 May and opens in the UK and US on 4 May.

Apple Sued Over Tabbed Interface

An Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” treads on an interface patent that affects the operating system’s nearly universal use of tabs.

Little-known intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation this week became the latest to claim that Apple had abused a patent they hold.

Filed April 18th in a US district court in Marshall, Texas — a town frequently recognized as the preferred home for lawsuits by companies that hoard property claims — the four-page formal complaint purports that Apple has engaged in “willful and deliberate” infringement of a computer control patent by selling its current Tiger operating system.

IP Innovation is demanding a jury trial and asks for reparations for perceived damages which “exceed $20 million,” according to the suit. It also seeks an injunction that would prevent the California-based defendant from infringing on the patent, essentially blocking Apple from continuing to sell its current edition of Mac OS X and any future editions that might draw on the supposed infringements.

Dell Brings Back XP Preload Option

Tradition has it that when Microsoft releases a new operating system, hardware OEMs shift to the new platform almost immediately and phase out the old OS as soon as possible. But Dell’s customers have told it, not so fast, pardner.

For the second time since establishing IdeaStorm to solicit customer feedback, Dell is changing policy when it comes to operating system preloads. It’s already planning to add a pre-loaded Linux option, and now Dell is bringing back the choice of Windows XP.

Like most OEMs, Dell began to offer Vista as soon as it was available in January and dropped Windows XP as an option, at least for consumers. Corporate customers still had the option of purchasing XP for their systems, since corporations are often very slow and cautious in moving to a new operating system.

So, with more than 10,000 votes on IdeaStorm asking for XP as an option instead of just Vista, Dell complied. “In this particular case, it was something we could do that was relatively easy. The infrastructure was already there to offer XP on our systems, so why not?” said Kent Cook, a spokesman for Dell.

Cook said there were enough subsets of customers who wanted or needed XP to merit the decision. For instance, gamers are particularly sensitive to the issue because Windows Vista is lacking in driver support, meaning less than optimal performance out of Vista systems, and many games are not yet optimized for Vista.

Still, Cook said the “overwhelming majority” of Dell customers like the features and functionality in Vista. “There are some definite improvements in security and functionality. That’s not to say there haven’t been issues in some cases, there always are when a new OS rolls out. But it’s nothing out of line from other major OS launches.”

HP said it offers only Vista on its consumer PCs, while XP is still available for SMB and corporate customers and there are no plans to change that. Gateway is offering Vista to both consumer and corporate customers, but still offers Windows XP as an option across almost all of its consumer products.

Matt Rosoff of Directions on Microsoft expects some OEMs to sell XP for at least another year. The urgency to move to Vista isn’t as strong as it was when Windows XP came out in 2001, he said.

“There you had a transition from the DOS to NT codebase, and there was enough stability and enough of an argument for XP that consumers buying a new PC weren’t demanding Windows 9x,” he said.

He also said another reason people may hesitate in buying Vista is that even on a new PC, it has fairly steep requirements. Normally, Microsoft is about one year ahead of where critical mass is with PC hardware, but this time, Vista is a lot further ahead of current hardware configurations.

“The PCs coming out two years from now will run Vista pretty well,” said Rosoff. “Today it’s pretty steep. You need two, perhaps four gigabytes of RAM and a dual core processor to really get performance out of it.”

MySpace is Sick & Dying

One can only guess what exactly caused them to terminate their account with MySpace, but there are a large number of very obvious ones that could be tossed out. Viruses, privacy issues, lawsuits, horrendous deign(s), unreliability, competition and OpenID just to name a few.

Within the last month two of my friends have contracted viruses from MySpace, both of which I was unable to remove, and ended up formatting their machines. One of those friends claimed that would be the end of MySpace for him.

My MySpace page becomes less used everyday, and I have had a number of thoughts about deleting my own as well.

MySpace by the Numbers
Public traffic reports for MySpace show a nearly one year old trend, reporting MySpace‘s traffic at a constant level with no real fluctuation one way or the other since 2006 when MySpace became insanely popular.

This should speak volumes about where MySpace is at. No increases in traffic can mean a couple of things. It could mean that you are losing members at an even rate that you are gaining them keeping the traffic at a constant rate. It could mean that the same people are returning to MySpace over and over and you are not making significant gains in users keeping the traffic steady.

In either event MySpace’s traffic is teeter-tottering and could lurch in either direction. However given the circumstances that I have spoken about I would put my guess behind a decent sized decline over the next year.

Change is Good
One of the biggest factors leading to the demise of the ultimate teeny bopper’s playground is the inability or unwillingness to change. MySpace has given open reign on code being embedded on pages, something that next to no other social networking sites are doing. The failure of MySpace to protect it’s users from malicious chunks of code is driving users away. No one wants to shell out fifty to one-hundred bucks to have a virus removed.

The horrendous ability of users to be able to override the look of their pages is awful. How many pages have you gone to where you have a blaring red or yellow image then have to attempt to read text over the top of it? Simplicity is beauty and allowing users to create their own monstrosities is a mistake.

Rather then reinventing MySpace as a product that works well, and protects it’s users they have instead elected to patch and attempt to control the wide spread chaos, explaining that it would not be possible to re-release a MySpace application, and again ignoring the issues that MySpace creates further pushing it’s own users and supporters away.

Open Social Networks
In the near future when OpenID takes a firmer hold, open social networks will become reality. The need to use MySpace’s attempt as a Web page will become unnecessary as your friend will travel with you anywhere via your OpenID. Mashups of Social Networking sites will become more common place then the networks themselves further burying MySpace.

With open social networks your friends which are tied to your OpenID will be able to travel freely with you to any site you choose, and interaction between the social networking sites via these mashup sites will provide the ability to correspond with your friends from the safety of a professionally written social networking application.

MySpace is too Popular
I know a lot of people reading this are going to think to themselves “MySpace is too big, has too many users, and cannot be brought down”. I agree, it is a large task but I will leave you with two companies to think about. Maybe MySpace can join the club.

The Most Hated Comment on Digg

We all remember that sad day when Steve Irwin “the crocodile hunter” died after being struck in the chest by a sting-ray, and naturally an article was posted about it on Digg. But when I came across this Digg article recently, two things stood out to me:

1. The sheer number of comments (788 at the time of writing this) which completely froze up my web browser for about 5 minutes whilst the page loaded.
2. The most buried comment I have come across on Digg - with minus 1060 diggs (again at the time of writing this)!

Yes congratulations to yevkasem, whose sick comment “nice, it’s about time.” on 9/03/06 has got to be the most hated comment on Digg.