Gladiator

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I saw the movie Gladiator this weekend. A very enjoyable show, but surely not one for the kiddies. As I sat there watching the violence unfold, I realized that this kind of stuff is exactly what Trey Parker & Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, were commenting on in their movie. Anyhow, it's a very entertaining summer flick, and although a few plot points were rather predictable, overall it was a lot of fun. On the IMDB, I gave it a score of 8 out of 10. I skimmed a couple other reviews on the net, a couple people commented that the fact that the actors had different accents bothered them. I found this pretty laughable considering that:

  • The Roman Empire was pretty large, spanning from Egypt to Britain, I'm sure there was a great variance in accents.

  • Our protagonist is from Spain, is referred to as "The Spaniard", is it surprising he has a bit of an accent compared to the Romans who are from Rome.
  • They're speaking English! The Romans spoke Latin! If you're going to nit-pick about languages, demand that the movie be done in Latin, with English subtitles!

    • Microsoft yanks Windows 2000 CD's from new computers

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    This is a PC World story I can personally confirm, as our two newest Dell computers came without "real" Windows 2000 CD's. Instead, you get a blue CD that reads "Dell Software Product Recovery CD". On the CD is Windows 2000, but a quick test by myself revealed that it won't install on a Gateway E-4200, it gives an error message saying that the CD will only work on Dell machines. Very inconvenient, but still not as bad as Compaq's hard drive images which come on CD, forcing you to install all of their crappy software when all you want is your OS.

    "ILoveYou" virus ravages Internet, film at 11:00

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    In case you've been in a cave all day, the "ILoveYou" virus has swept the Internet in the last 24 hours, taking down mail servers across the world. So far we haven't been hit too hard here at UNI, as most of the faculty/staff/students use Netscape or PINE to read their e-mail. I've had two faculty members report having been sent the virus, one of the actually did attempt to run the script, fortunately they were using Netscape Messenger on a Mac, so they didn't accomplish much...