A few quick numbers that have stuck in my head (or been retrieved from my scrawled notes) from the past week at VMware’s VMworld Europe in Cannes.

Third — VMworld Europe is the third largest event by size on the French Riviera, according to the firm’s European manager, second only to the Cannes Film Fest and Monaco Grand Prix.

10 per cent — the number of Windows servers around the world running XenApp, according to Citrix.

70 per cent — the amount of VMware’s business which is from English-language countries, according to new COO Tod Nielsen, who told me the firm wants to get that closer to 50/50.

over 100 — the very vague number of firms currently beta testing vSphere, according to Nielsen. He also described it as “a lot.”

4,700 — the number of attendees, according to VMware’s European manager, up by 200 from last year. Not bad in a recession, and all that.

As of yet unknown — the number of days it will take me to recover from three solid days of having virtualisation crammed into my brain.

VMware today showed off a prototype of a device using their shiny new mobile virtualisation tech, which allows (in theory) any mobile operating system to sit on any handset.

While this is a ways off — manufacturers, developers and operators need to sort themselves out first — the potential is awesome.

At the moment, VMware is demoing Windows CE and Android on a touchscreen Nokia tablet. Imagine Google’s Android on an Apple iPhone. Or Apple’s OS running on a BlackBerry.

Okay, it likely won’t play out like this, but if you could put any operating systems(s) on any handset, what would you choose?

Last year, VMware announced a very flash sounding Virtual Data Centre Operating System, which they at the time called VDC-OS.

While that does contain the requisite ‘v’, it’s not very cool sounding. So now that they have the actual operating system lined up, set for release this year and in testing with firms, they needed a name. Rather than call it vSystem, or vOS or even vNotMicrosoft, it’s been dubbed vSphere, to some confusion (on my part at least).

When chief exec Paul Maritz announced vSphere this morning in a keynote session, he told us eager attendees that it was the first time the name had been uttered in public (which isn’t true, as it hit blogoland in December). He then told us some cool, ambitious and intriguing roadmap plans that would see the new software substrate vSphere connect hardware layers to software layers in such a way that we’d all have our own clouds and none of it would be proprietary.

Cool!

But. Um. What is vSphere, uh, exactlu? According to Maritz and a further interview with CTO Stephen Herrod, it’s the VDC-OS. They’ve just named it. As one attendee enthused to his friend next to where I was attempting to shovel food into my face well past lunchtime today, it just the next step in VMware’s infrastructure with some shiny marketing attached.

Yes, they’ve given us more detail about how it’s going to work. Herrod patiently, kindly explained to me that this was just an upgrade, with a new name. Indeed, last year’s announcement was of the category VDC-OS, while this announcement is sort of their model of it, analogous to automobiles=VDC-OS, Ferrari=vSphere.

So this hot new announcement is just more detail — hot, new details — of what they announced last year.

Don’t take this as cynicism. Incremental road maps from VMware are still more captivating than Microsoft’s ‘hey, we’re catching up in the virtualisation space’ statements, and if the market leader manages to deliver on today’s promises, data centres and cloud computing could be about to get very interesting — and that is saying one hell of a lot, indeed. I just hope we get to see the product before we’re marketed to death, that’s all.

Click here for all the news from VMware Europe 2009.

Let’s just get this out of the way at the start: the best way to protect your privacy would be to avoid Facebook altogether.

That said, if you’re reading a blog post about the site, it’s likely you’re a user.

Over the past week or so, Facebook has again been the subject of outrage over privacy, after a change to its terms of service. Despite their (’our’, I should say) predilection toward sharing every goofy photo, drunken event and inane thought from their/our lives, Facebookers sure get up in arms about privacy.

With that in mind, I thought I’d share this rather detailed list of ways to make best use of the site’s privacy settings.

It won’t keep Facebook from owning or controlling your content, but it might keep your ex/boss/mom from seeing you doing something stupid — assuming you were stupid enough to add them as a friend in the first place.

Facebook recently changed its terms of service. If you’re a user of the site, your continued use of the site means you’ve accepted the new terms, automatically. Sure, fine, whatever, right? Who ever looks at the TOS anyway?

Take a closer look at the terms, however, and you may wish you had read them. There’s some very scary language saying Facebook owns anything you upload and has any right to do what it wants with your content. Still, other web sites have similar language, and all that content is usually used for advertising and marketing, rather than anything truly sinister.

But earlier this month, the Consumerist website flagged that the Facebook TOS had been edited to remove a pair of lines:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

So under the new terms — which we’ve all tacitly agreed to — even if you delete those embarrassing pics, Facebook still has them and a license to use them. And if you want to argue with them, you’re obliged — according to the TOS — to enter arbitration.

Following from the Consumerist story, there’s been a bit of an uproar. Facebook has been forced to respond, as they’ve previously done with their Beacon mistake.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the Facebook blog:

“One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”

He said it’s not Facebook’s ‘philosophy’ to own our information, and that the site may make missteps in how they go about handling the legal angle.

I don’t think Facebook is planning anything evil; even if they were, I doubt such TOS would hold up in court or stand up against the fury of its many users.

But the fact is the site didn’t ask for users’ acceptance of the new terms, flag them up anywhere on the site, or clarify what they meant in the blog (until someone forced them) — when it easily could have.

Facebook could have used all that empty ad space to alert us to the changes, or held polls about the issues, or asked for people to opt in — the site is technically capable of all these things. For a communications site, it’s not very good at communicating.

On the upside, it’s encouraging to see that Facebook’s users not only read the TOS but are very good at making use of the site’s many functions to get their thoughts across — creating groups, sharing the Consumerist link, and commenting on the issues.

Maybe Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook’s higher ups could learn a lesson in how to share information from the people using the site…

Teens apparently spend 31 hours online each week — as someone who works for a website, that seems like a rather healthy and small number to be online, but I’m hardly the norm.

While I don’t doubt kids-these-days spend that such long hours on the web — that’s just five hours a day, hardly anything — I do have to wonder at the other findings of the survey by CyberSentinel, and wonder that the answer isn’t rather obvious.

Apparently, one hour and 40 minutes out of that grand weekly total is spent looking at porn. Puberty’s a pain, so I don’t doubt that result. But the 1,000 kids surveyed for the study apparently also average an hour and 35 minutes on dieting sites, and another hour and a bit on researching cosmetic surgery.

Look, I get that it’s tough to be a teenager, but that’s nearly four and a half hours obssessed with sex and the idea of looking good enough for sex. In case any of these troubled teens surf over to this site, as they well might in their 31 hours a week, I’d like to take the opportunity to give them some advice on these topics, as the solution seems easy to me.

Teens of the world, worried about being fat and out of shape — stop Googling for solutions, get off your chair, and go outside. That’s it. That’s my advice. Moving around enough means you don’t need surgery. And getting outside means you might meet people… so you can drop the porn habit.

For those scared that Cern’s Large Hadron Collider will lead to the end of the world, the news that the LHC’s restart has been delayed a few more months will sound like a stay of execution.

Just weeks after its start-up last year, a fault ended the collider’s work. While it was supposed to be started up again in July, the first beams will now be sent around the 27-kilometer track by the end of September, with collisions kicking off in October.

According to Cern, the delay was caused by a new “enhanced protection system” for busbar and magnet splices — whatever they are — as well as new valves to prevent the fault from recurring.

There’s also apparently been trouble with arranging the transport and storage of enough helium — these are not problems we here at IT PRO regularly face…

Click here to read about the IT behind the LHC experiment.

The dream that is working from home has been realised, thanks to the miracle of broadband. Now, we can balance our work and life, and still manage to do our jobs when the office isn’t available.

Great. Who’s stupid idea was that?

Thanks to the glory that is the internet, I’m able to work from home today. As London is rendered useless by masses of lovely snow, I’m working, because — lucky me! — I’m one of the legion of mobile workers.

It’s bad enough that when I’m home sick I feel compelled to curl up with my laptop in addition to my lemsip, but now I don’t even get snow days. One of my flatmates is also parked in front of a computer, as she can clearly do her job online. The other is an engineer, and really actually needs to be in the office in order to work. She’s off walking in the snow right now, the snowman she made earlier mocking me from out front our house.

Mobile computing might offer great benefits to somebody; today I really don’t feel like it’s me. But it’s lunch break now, and I intend to use mine to smash that damn snowman and build an even bigger one…