What started off as a way to meet women in college with his friend (who of course, had a natural Jean-Claude Van Damme impression), quickly turned into a handful of viral videos on YouTube and FunnyOrDie, and ultimately a legitimate career.

After doing some recent online work with Disney as “Tom Cruise”, which was packaged with content for the Twilight series, Ferrante says his career took off with corporate gigs and commercial work at home and abroad (apparently the Tom Cruise impersonation business is huge in Australia). His next move: an upcoming HBO documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, a project he co-produced that will apparently not include any Cruise cameos. Our brief backstage interview with Ferrante is below.

What does this have to do with TechCrunch’s Fifth birthday? Absolutely nothing, but it is a gold mine for TechCrunch readers who’ve always wanted to see a slightly amused, slightly confused Arrington bombarded by a barrage of Tom Cruise-isms.

Original article…

If you have them host your DNS, you can not make simple changes such as modifying the TTL of your domain.

I just had a conversation with a tech, “Alex”.  He was adamant that TTL settings are set across the board to 1 day (86400), and that it is their policy that this can not be changed.  They run Linux Bind DNS systems, which means this is about as simple of a DNS change as can be made.

It seems they just resell godaddy domains, so if nothing else just get your domains through godaddy and use thier DNS management interface.

• The notebook does not detect wireless networks and the wireless adapter is not detected in the Device Manager. [sporadically]

It was not until recently, when I read about this, this and this, that I started to search on HP’s website and found a Limited Warranty Service Enhancement for my laptop.  I thought this was a good thing, but I didn’t want to go through the ordeal of replacing my laptop for something that was a minor inconvenience. 

But as of last week, I am also experiencing another symptom:

• The notebook does not start.

I decided to finally call HP and request service.  They happily agreed that this was a defective unit and are sending a package to ship the laptop back in.

Now, onto my issue.  I will be without a laptop for about two weeks. I own a business and provide 24×7 server monitoring / management and require a laptop at all times.

I suggest that HP should send me a loaner laptop (or the laptop they will already be replacing mine with) because of a defect in thier product line.   Why should I have to pay double (by purchasing another laptop) for a manufacturing issue?

I spoke with Stephen M. of HP’s customer complaint division, and he said that it is simply not possible, they will not provide me a loaner laptop.  I believe that HP should be required to send me a replacement laptop and let me swap the hard-disk / battery / RAM and send them the bad shell. The will likely send me a new machine anyhow.

Because of this experience, my next laptop will not be coming from HP.

I am ranting a bit here, but I think of how short-sighted HP is for not considering how much direct influence many people have over millions of dollars per year in hardware equipment purchases, and how a simple laptop replacement could effect these decisions.

I believe that all companies need to stand behind their product and name, and need to understand how much they inconvenience and cost their customers in terms of time and dollars.

Check out the demo here.

Yahoo has been a leader in e-mail for more than 10 years. Yahoo Mail exceeds 1 billion visits each month. And Zimbra has grown quickly since Yahoo acquired the company. But what will become of Zimbra if Microsoft buys control?

“Zimbra is one of the few companies that challenged the Microsoft-controlled groupware space. Yahoo did so because they have a snazzy AJAX-based user interface,” said Mark Levitt, a collaborative research analyst at IDC. “Zimbra integrates various capabilities that don’t come with standardized solutions and makes the software available in a Java-based system that could either be installed internally or hosted by a third party.”

If Microsoft acquires Yahoo and decides to keep Zimbra, there is yet another question. Would Microsoft convert it to Windows .NET? Or sell it to another company that could turn around and compete on the e-mail front? Or put it on a back burner?

I suspect it would be left as an open source product, with support available from Microsoft very similar to its current setup. How sweet, MSFT supporting open source software, and making money from it. Sounds like a nice aside from acquiring a company. This also gives Microsoft a nice foot in the door in the open source community.

Another site: http://www.freezimbranow.org/ has a few thoughts as well.

What do you think?

The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. To see the Chart API in action, open up a browser window and copy the link below into a browser.  You will end up seeing the cart on the left.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

Use of the Google Chart API is subject to a query limit of 50,000 queries per user per day. If you go over this 24-hour limit, the Chart API may stop working for you temporarily. If you continue to exceed this limit, your access to the Chart API may be blocked.  This may be a limitation for some, but for many, this will work just fine.

Now, if it would only have all the capabilities of Google Finance.   For complete detail, visit the Google site.

Indeed, analysts and surveys of big IT buyers point to different conclusions about corporate appetite for the technology.

“Desktop computing, as it is practiced in enterprises today, is broken. Windows desktops are not secure. They are plagued by email-borne viruses and other malware. For this and other reasons, they are too costly to manage,” says Rachel Chalmers of the research firm 451 Group.

Chalmers cites a survey of 376 IT buyers by ChangeWave Research showing that 60 percent already have budgets earmarked for virtual desktop technologies.

Desktop virtualization moves the actual desktop to the datacenter and provisions a copy to the user as needed. The promise for IT is that users can no longer mess up the desktop image that IT has decided is stable and authorized. Desktop virtualization also promises to let IT separate the various OS and application layers, thus making it easier to protect the core OS from other components and to rebuild any compromise pieces on the fly.

Is desktop virtualization’s promise overstated?

Wait a minute. I certainly won’t argue that the Windows desktop isn’t broken, but is it really accurate to imply that desktop (remember, we’re not talking about servers here) virtualization can fix all those ills? I’m not so sure. And neither are buyers.

Just last month, Intel released a survey that paints a somewhat less bullish picture than ChangeWave’s. According to that survey, 39 percent of the enterprises have a current deployment of desktop virtualization, but the number of companies doing “broad deployments” of server virtualization and related technologies such as application streaming, was in single digits.

And then there’s a recent survey by our sister publication CIO, which found that 25 percent of enterprises were using desktop virtualization and another 13 percent planned to do so within a year. But 21 percent said it would be one to three years before they deployed, and 37 percent said they were not interested.

Unclear purpose, emerging alternatives weaken the case

“Desktop virtualization’s greatest obstacle is the clarity of the business case,” Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf told CIO. “Until the technology matures, you’re not going to see the 12- to 18-month ROI that’s common with server virtualization today. That’s why I’ve seen enterprises willing to dip their toe in the water but not quite ready to jump in feet first.”

Adding to the uncertainty are the multiple flavors of desktop virtualization, which Chalmers categorizes this way: client-hosted, device-hosted, server-hosted, and cloud-hosted. “We also recognize four closely related technologies: OS streaming, application streaming, OS-hosted virtualization, and terminal services,” she says.

Chalmers adds that other mainstream computing companies, including CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, whose core business includes managing traditionally configured and provisioned Windows desktops, are responding to the “threat” of desktop virtualization by building, as opposed to buying, their own solutions.

It’s worth remembering that virtualization of all types isn’t really a new idea. “Despite the appearance of rising to stardom almost overnight, virtualization is in fact a technology that dates back to the earliest days of computing and is really an ongoing phenomenon with an evolving role in corporate IT infrastructure,” says Forrester analyst Galen Schreck.

Old or new, there’s plenty of smoke here. But how much fire, and by that I mean profit for vendors and value for buyers, is a lot less clear.

Read the original story at: http://weblog.infoworld.com/tech-bottom-line/archives/2008/03/virtualization.html

– I am partial to using LVM based devices for creating my virtual machines. Think lvm snapshots for backups.

A setup I am working on now consists of 4 systems with a dedicated LVM device, and an lvm based mount point for file based VMs.

# vgs
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree
xen1vg 1 6 0 wz–n- 1.96T 1.47T

# lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy%
vm1rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
vm2rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
vm3rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
vm4rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
xen_master_img-lv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
xenimages1lv xen1vg -wi-ao 100.00G

- If you decide to use a file based VM, but use a directory other than /var/lib/xen/images to store your image files, then selinux will get in the way. Use the following:
# semanage fcontext -a -t xen_image_t “/<new_directory>(/.*)?”
# restorecon -R /<new_directory>/

- If something is not working check /var/log/audit/audit.log and ‘dmesg’, disable selinux: ’setenforce 0′.

- If your system is installing or using a file based cdrom device, and you need to insert or change to another disk:
# xm block-list <vmname>
Vdev BE handle state evt-ch ring-ref BE-path
768 0 0 1 -1 -1 /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/14/768
5632 0 0 1 -1 -1 /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/14/5632

# xm block-detach <vmname> 5632 -f
# xm block-attach <vmname> file:/xen-images/nextdisk.iso hdc:cdrom r