Biggest Businesses Run by College Dropouts

Ever wonder where the chief executives of some of the world's most successful companies went to college? Well, don't tell your kids, but some CEOs never graduated college—and some never even bothered to apply.

From computers to cruise lines, these 10 CEOs made it to the top without a college degree and defied the idea that to be successful you have to have a diploma.

Ralph Lauren

Photo: Emmanuel Dunand | AFP | Getty Images

Position: CEO, Polo Ralph Lauren
Market Cap: $11.9 billion

Ralph Lauren, the chief executive of Polo Ralph Lauren , established his company in 1967 as a line of men's ties and developed the company into a global fashion empire. Lauren's successful clothing line came from his unique, classic style that went against conventional fashion of the time.

According to the Ralph Lauren website, Lauren said, "I never went to fashion school—I was a young guy who had some style. I never imagined Polo would become what it is. I just followed my instincts."

With only a high school diploma in hand, Lauren followed his instincts. His decision to ditch college and focus on running his business lead to a series of breakthroughs in the fashion world, including the first shop-within-a-shop designer boutique for men in Bloomingdale's department store in 1969. Lauren continued to build his empire, expanding it to include women and children's fashion, fragrances, and home furnishings.

Today, Polo Ralph Lauren is one of the most successful fashion companies in the world.

Richard Branson

Photo: Karim Jaafar | AFP | Getty Images

Position: CEO, Virgin Group
Company Worth: $18 billion
Virgin Media Market Cap: $8.1 billion

Forget graduating from college, this chief executive didn't even finish high school. Richard Branson, the current CEO of Virgin Group , dropped out of high school at age 16 to start Student Magazine . Four years later, Branson founded Virgin Group as a mail-order retailer. He opened his first record shop in London and two years later built Virgin's first recording studio. In 1977, Branson signed his first big name group, the Sex Pistols, and continued to sign popular artists such as the Rolling Stones and Culture Club.

In 1984, Branson developed Virgin Atlantic and the brand began to grow. Today, Virgin Group provides mobile, broadband, TV, radio, finance, health, tourism, leisure, and travel services.

Michael Dell

Photo: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Position: Founder/CEO, Dell
Market Cap: $30 billion

Most 19 year olds would spend a thousand dollars on a spring break weekend, or a put it toward buying a new car, but Michael Dell spent his $1,000 founding Dell .

The founder and CEO of Dell expanded his company with the idea that "technology is about enabling human potential." In 1992, he became the youngest chief executive to earn a ranking on Fortune magazine's "Fortune 500" list. His staff also grew from a one-man operation to 100,000 employees in just eight years.

Today, the company provides information-technology services for global corporations, governments, health care providers, small and medium businesses, education institutions, and home computing users.

Dell is not the only company this CEO has had a hand in creating. Dell founded MSD Capital in 1998 and a year later launched the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, a philanthropic organization for global issues.

Bill Gates

Photo: Sean Gallup | Getty Images

Position: Co-Founder/Chairman, Microsoft
Market Cap: $226.2 billion

College dropouts such as Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz are not the only successful business founders who attended, and then left, Harvard University.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft , enrolled at Harvard as a freshman in 1973. Gates, who lived down the hall from Microsoft's current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, created BASIC, a programming language for the first microcomputer, during his first year of college.

Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to concentrate all his efforts on a company he called Micro-soft with his childhood friend Paul Allen.

As if founding Microsoft wasn't enough, Gates went on to found Corbis , one of the world largest resources of visual information. He also earned a seat on the board of directors for Berkshire Hathaway , an investment company engaged in diverse business activity.

Steve Jobs

Photo: David Paul Morris | Getty Images

Position: Founder/CEO, Apple
Market Cap: $362.4 billion

As a young boy, this college dropout showed an early interest in computers.

When he was 12, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple , called Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard , after finding his number in the phonebook. When Hewlett answered, Jobs said, "Hi I'm Steve Jobs. I'm twelve years old and I'm a student in high school. I want to make a frequency counter. I was wondering if you had any spare parts I can have?"

Hewlett gave Jobs the spare parts and hired him that summer to work on the assembly line at his company. During this time, Jobs formed a friendship with Stephen Wozniak, a soon-to-be dropout from the University of California at Berkley.

Jobs enrolled at Reed College after high school, but he later dropped out. He connected once again with Wozniak and the pair quit their jobs to start production on a computer in Jobs' garage.

There are different versions of how the pair came up with the name for Apple. The best-known story comes from Jobs summer spent working on an apple orchard and his love for the fruit. The bite in the side of the apple is said to be a play on the computer term "byte."

In a biography, Jobs said he was worth more than $1 million when he was 23, $10 million when he was 24, and $100 million when he was 25.

Apple went from a garage-based operation to a multibillion-dollar, worldwide corporation, and it all started with two college dropouts tinkering in a garage.

Today, Gates serves as Microsoft's chairman and as an advisor on key development projects.

Microsoft Co-founder Sues Apple, Google and Facebook

Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen is suing Apple, Google, Facebook and eight other companies through his current firm, Interval Licensing LLC.

The lawsuit alleges that 11 different companies, including YouTubeYouTube, Netflix and AOL, have violated four different patents associated with web search and e-commerce.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, Interval Licensing LLC is a firm that holds IP developed at the now-defunct Interval Research. Interval Research was an incubator that Allen financed during the InternetInternet bubble of the late 1990s.

In a statement, Interval describes the patents at the center of the alleged infringements:

• United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
• United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

What is frustrating about this lawsuit, from an outsider’s perspective, is that the nature of these patents — while based in software and technology — also have clear ties to business methods. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Bilski case didn’t make the blurry lines between these two areas any more clear.

We’ll update this post with more information after we obtain the actual court filing from PACER.

[img credit: WikipediaWikipedia]

The legal action against Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and eBay, as well as six other firms, asserts that web technologies first developed by Interval Licensing have been infringed.

The patents are key to how e-commerce and search websites worked, it says.

Google, Facebook and eBay immediately said they would fight the accusations.

"This lawsuit against some of America's most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace," a Google spokesman said in a statement.

"Innovation - not litigation - is the way to bring to market the kinds of products and services that benefit millions of people around the world."

A Facebook spokesman called the action "completely without merit".

'Key technology'

In the suit filed in the US District Court in Washington on Friday, Interval said it was seeking damages and a halt to the alleged violations of its patents.

“Start Quote

We will do whatever is necessary. This is an important step”

End Quote David Postman Interval Licensing

The four patents concerned essentially involve using web browsers to find information; letting users know when items of interest appear; and enabling adverts, stock quotes, news update or video images to pop up on a computer screen while the user is engaged in another activity.

The company also alleges that it helped fund outside projects including research by Larry Page and Sergey Brin that resulted in Google.

The other companies named in the lawsuit are AOL, YouTube, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax and Staples.

Interval does not name a precise figure for damages, but a spokesman told the BBC that it would be "determined as this progresses".

"We will do whatever is necessary. This is an important step. It is the first time that Paul Allen has filed a suit like this," David Postman said.

"Some of the technology developed by people working for Paul Allen a decade ago is now key to this search and e-commerce space. It is part of our daily life on the web and has shown itself to be of value to the industry today."

Patent activity

There has been a recent flurry of patent lawsuits involving Silicon Valley companies.

Apple, Nokia and HTC are involved in a long-running dispute over patent infringements involving smartphones.

Oracle has fired off its own legal action against Google, alleging that the search giant's Android mobile phone operating system infringed patents Oracle now holds for the open-source Java programming language, acquired through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

There has also been an increase in people buying up companies to leverage the patent portfolio. But Mr Postman said that is not the case with Mr Allen's action.

"We are not asserting patents that other companies have filed, nor are we buying patent originally assigned to someone else. These are patents developed by and for Interval," he explained.

Mr Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, and later started Interval in 1992. At its height, the company employed over 110 scientists, physicists and engineers.

The Wall Street Journal said among those who worked there were Robert Shaw, a co-creator of chaos theory; Max Mathews, who wrote the first widely used computer programme for music; and David Reed, one of the founders of the TCP/IP internet protocol.

Mr Allen, who made billions of dollars from his Microsoft shares, recently pledged most of his $31.5bn fortune to charity.

Last year, he revealed he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Hacker explains why he reported 'Wikileaks source'

So news that former high-profile hacker Adrian Lamo had turned over an Army intelligence analyst to authorities was met with derision by some.

"A lot of people have labelled me a snitch," Mr Lamo told BBC News. "I guess I deserve that on this one but not as a generality."

"This was a very hard decision for me."

Mr Lamo is a former hacker, who exposed security flaws at the New York Times, Yahoo and Microsoft. After a brief stint hiding from the FBI, Mr Lamo was imprisoned and fined. He now works as a journalist and security analyst.

'By the book'

Mr Lamo says that he was responsible for reporting Specialist (SPC) Brad Manning to the military authorities after the analyst boasted to him that he had handed over thousands of classified documents and classified military video to whistle-blower site Wikileaks.

One video posted to the site shows a US Apache helicopter killing up to 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. Two children were also seriously injured in the attack. Some of the men were armed.

Mr Manning, 22, reportedly acquired the video during the course of his work at a US Military field base FOB Hammer, on the outskirts of Baghdad.

“Start Quote

I didn't want any more FBI agents knocking at the door”

End Quote Adrian Lamo

• US intelligence analyst arrested

Mr Lamo said that he did not suspect anything unusual when Mr Manning contacted him over instant messenger and e-mail.

"I'm contacted on a daily basis by all kinds of people who confess to all kinds of federal crimes," he said.

"I have never once turned them in, even when the FBI offered me a deal."

However, after Mr Manning confessed to distributing the documents, Mr Lamo said that his stance changed and he "felt the need to contact investigators".

"At the moment he gave me the information, it was basically a suicide pact."

"I was worried for my family - that if I were obstructing justice that they could be caught up in any investigation," he said.

"I wanted to do this one by the book, by the numbers. I didn't want any more FBI agents knocking at the door."

Code words

Mr Lamo also said that he had decided to report Mr Manning for reasons of national security.

Instead of going straight to the authorities, Mr Lamo disclosed the information to "a friend" who had worked as an agent in the Army counter intelligence unit.

"He put me in touch with some of his former colleagues who he felt could handle the issue in a low key way," he said.

• Who are WikiLeaks?

Four agents - from different federal and military agencies - turned up at his house to read the conversation logs - from his e-mail and instant messenger conversations with Mr Manning - "one by one", he added.

"I gave them conversation logs that implicated Special Agent Manning.

"They were particularly interested in a code word for a major operation."

Mr Lamo also described how Mr Manning had supposedly obtained the documents.

"He described the process of operational security in detail," said Mr Lamo.

"What he described was a culture of insecurity with poor attention to information.

"The field base didn't have significant security."

'Impossible decision'

He said that Mr Manning would download the documents from a room that needed a unique security code to access it. However, security on the base had slipped, he said.

"He said you'd knock on the door and they'd let you in."

Mr Lamo said that Mr Manning would take a CD labelled Lady Gaga into the room which he would load into a computer.

“Start Quote

I want to be proud of it but I can't bring myself to be”

End Quote Adrian Lamo

"Basically he sat down and started burning data to the CD whilst pretending to be bopping along."

Mr Manning would then upload the documents to Wikileaks servers, which are held in various countries around the world and anonymise the source.

Wikileaks has not confirmed Mr Manning as the source of the video and has said it never collects personal information on sources. It said that it has not been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables that Mr Manning reportedly leaked to the site.

Wikileaks also questions Mr Lamo's credibility.

However, the US military has confirmed that Mr Manning has been detained on suspicion of leaking classified documents and video. He is being held "in pre-trial confinement" in Kuwait.

"I want to be proud of it but I can't bring myself to be. I keep thinking about what it was like being 22, alone and not knowing about my future," said Mr Lamo.

"Knowing that I did that to somebody - it hurts. I feel like I should be talking to a priest."

He said he had been placed in a situation where "an impossible decision had to be made".

"I hope that Manning gets the same chance as I did - the same chance to take his punishment as I did and start a new life as I did."

"I like to think I prevented him from getting into more serious trouble."

Firefox 4 Beta 2 Is Here for Mac OS X

As we have explained before, Mozilla is now making more frequent updates to our beta program. So here it is, Firefox Beta 2 has just been released, 3 weeks after Beta 1.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 already brought a large amount of new features (see the Beta 1 feature list). So what’s new for web developers in this beta?

Performance & CSS3 Transitions

The two major features for web developers with this release are Performance improvements and CSS3 Transitions on CSS3 Transforms.

This video is hosted by Youtube and uses the HTML5 video tag if you have enabled it (see here). Youtube video here.

Performance: In this new Beta, Firefox comes with a new page building mechanism: Retained Layers. This mechanism provides noticeable faster speed for web pages with dynamic content, and scrolling is much smoother. Also, we’re still experimenting with hardware acceleration: using the GPU to render and build some parts of the web page.

CSS3 Transitions on transforms: The major change for web developers is probably CSS3 Transitions on CSS3 Transformations.

CSS3 Transitions provide a way to animate changes to CSS properties, instead of having the changes take effect instantly. See the documentation for details.

This feature was available in Firefox 4 Beta 1, but in this new Beta, you can use Transitions on Transformation.

A CSS3 Transformation allows you to define a Transformation (scale, translate, skew) on any HTML element. And you can animate this transformation with the transitions.

See this box? Move your mouse over it, and its position transform: rotate(5deg); will transform transform: rotate(350deg) scale(1.4) rotate(-30deg); through a smooth animation.

#victim {
background-color: yellow;
color: black;

transition-duration: 1s;
transform: rotate(10deg);

/* Prefixes */

-moz-transition-duration: 1s;
-moz-transform: rotate(5deg);

-webkit-transition-duration: 1s;
-webkit-transform: rotate(10deg);

-o-transition-duration: 1s;
-o-transform: rotate(10deg);
}
#victim:hover {
background-color: red;
color: white;

transform:  rotate(350deg) scale(1.4) rotate(-30deg);

/* Prefixes */

-moz-transform:  rotate(350deg) scale(1.4) rotate(-30deg);
-webkit-transform:  rotate(350deg) scale(1.4) rotate(-30deg);
-o-transform:  rotate(350deg) scale(1.4) rotate(-30deg);
}

CSS 3 Transitions are supported by Webkit-based browsers (Safari and Chrome), Opera and now Firefox as well. Degradation (if not supported) is graceful (no animation, but the style is still applied). Therefore, you can start using it right away.

Demos

I’ve written a couple of demos to show both CSS3 Transitions on Transforms and hardware acceleration (See the video above for screencasts).

This demo shows 5 videos. The videos are Black&White in the thumbnails (using a SVG Filter) and colorful when real size (click on them). The “whirly” effect is done with CSS Transitions. Move you mouse over the video, you’ll see a question mark (?) button. Click on it to have the details about the video and to see another SVG Filter applied (feGaussianBlur).

This page shows 2 videos. The top left video is a round video (thanks to SVG clip-path) with SVG controls. The main video is clickable (magnifies the video). The text on top of the video is clickable as well, to send it to the background using CSS Transitions.

This page is a simple list of images, video and canvas elements. Clicking on an element will apply a CSS Transform to the page itself with a transition. White elements are clickable (play video or bring a WebGL object). I encourage you to use a hardware accelerated and a WebGL capable browser. For Firefox on Windows, you should enable Direct2D.




Warning: All contents found in this Article are properties of the Mozilla Foundation, Owners of the Mozilla Firefox browser

Microsoft's chance to show it still leads

SEATTLE (CNNMoney.com) -- It's a pretty good time to be Microsoft -- but the company still has a lot to prove.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and the full roster of Microsoft's top executives are meeting with financial analysts on Thursday to map out Microsoft's strategy for maintaining its leadership in the corporate market and catching up to Apple and Google in the consumer space.

Analysts will be especially tuned in for what Microsoft says about its plans for tablets, Windows Phone 7, Bing and Kinect -- businesses that all lag behind their rivals.

The company is coming off of one of its strongest quarters ever in terms of revenue and profit, as Windows 7 and Office sales have soared on renewed demand for PCs. Microsoft has sold nearly 200 million Windows 7 licenses, demonstrating an ability to bounce back from the Windows Vista debacle. Many corporate clients, which make up about three-quarters of Microsoft's customer base, are beginning to refresh their computers and software, and most are expected to migrate to Windows 7 and Office 2010 by the end of next year.

The software giant has also embraced cloud computing in a way that impresses industry analysts. Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) responded to Google Apps' threat to Office by launching a very functional, free online edition of Office 2010 in June. Microsoft's unique "Azure" cloud platform helps businesses save money by moving existing applications built on Microsoft's platform -- as many corporate applications are -- onto remote servers that are supported and serviced by Microsoft, allowing for remote access to data.

For consumers, on the other hand, Microsoft is struggling to keep pace with its competitors.

With search engine Bing, Microsoft has integrated some innovative and compelling ideas to make search more visual, intuitive and predictive of users' intent -- Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) has even copied many of Bing's most unique features. Bing has grown its share of the search market by about 50% in a little over a year, and the revenue-sharing deal with Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) may help it gain scale.

But Bing still trails Google by a vast margin, and it continues to hemorrhage cash.

And then there's Windows Phone 7, one of Microsoft's biggest question marks.

With its last software release, Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft did fairly well in terms of global smartphone market share, but the company was is badly in the United States to more feature-rich phones like the iPhone, Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry and Android-based devices.

Windows Phone 7 is a complete redesign of Microsoft's mobile offering, focusing on a simple and unique user interface. But it's not slated to debut until this fall -- an eon in the fast-moving phone field, where the iPhone and Android continue to gobble up market share.

Tablets are also a glaring question that Microsoft will need to address on Thursday.

With the early success of Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPad, many analysts are predicting that the tablet space will be one of the fastest-growing tech segments this decade, alongside smartphones. But Ballmer has only vaguely articulated a very generalized strategy for tablet computers, namely that Windows 7 will be on tablets "soon." But the CEO famously canned a turmoil-fraught Microsoft tablet project that had been in the works almost a decade before the iPad came to market. Analysts want more concrete answers about how Microsoft plans to compete in tablets.

Xbox is perhaps Microsoft's greatest source of strength with consumers, outside of Windows.

With the much-hyped, controllerless Kinect accessory set to go on sale this fall, Microsoft hopes to grow its user base even more by adding on the casual gamers who have embraced Nintendo's Wii. Microsoft loves to sell Xbox's ability to download media and stream it across a PC, Zune or Windows Phone. The consumer cloud is a high-growth space that many tech companies are quick to embrace, but given its lack of success so far with Zune media players and Windows Phone, Microsoft has to be concerned about what happens if/when Apple allows its users to stream their iTunes libraries across multiple devices over the Internet.

Microsoft's consumer divisions, which include mobile, have failed to consistently make money for the company. The company let entertainment division chief Robbie Bach head out the door in May.

Here's a telling sign of how challenging Microsoft is finding that market: Though it has many questions to answer on the consumer front, Don Mattrick, who replaced Bach, is not scheduled to speak on Thursday.

Source: CNN Money

All news on this site are Trademarks and Properties of Google and Companies which names are mentioned herein

Sodiq Aiyedun

FBI says mastermind of botnet nabbed

(Sod-a-Blog) - International authorities have arrested a computer hacker believed responsible for creating the malicious computer code that infected as many as 12 million computers, invading major banks and corporations around the world, FBI officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

A 23-year-old Slovenian known as Iserdo was picked up in Maribor, Slovenia, after a lengthy investigation by Slovenian Criminal Police there along with FBI and Spanish authorities.

His arrest comes about five months after Spanish police broke up the massive cyber scam, arresting three of the alleged ringleaders who operated the so-called Mariposa botnet, stealing credit cards and online banking credentials. The botnet _ a network of infected computers _ appeared in December 2008 and infected more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and at least 40 major banks.

Botnets are networks of infected PCs that have been hijacked from their owners, often without their knowledge, and put into the control of criminals.

Jeffrey Troy, the FBI's deputy assistant director for the cyber division, said Tuesday that Iserdo's arrest is a major break in the investigation. He said it will take the alleged cyber mastermind off the street and prevent him from updating the malicious software code or somehow regaining control of computers that are still infected.

Officials declined to release Iserdo's real name and the exact charges filed against him, but said the arrest took place about 10 days ago and the man has been released on bond.

"To use an analogy here," said Troy, "as opposed to arresting the guy who broke into your home, we've arrested the guy that gave him the crowbar, the map and the best houses in the neighborhood. And that is a huge break in the investigation of cyber crimes."

Troy said more arrests are expected and are likely to extend beyond Spain and Slovenia and include additional operators who allegedly bought the malware from Iserdo. Authorities would not say how much Iserdo supposedly charged, but said hackers could buy the software package for a certain amount, or pay more to have it customized or get additional features. Internet reports suggest the fees ranged from as much as $500 for basic packages to more than $1,300 for more advanced versions.

Cyber masterminds behind the biggest botnets aren't often taken down largely because it is easy for experienced hackers to hide their identities by disguising the source of their Internet traffic. Usually the computer resources they use are stolen. And the investigations are complex and technical, often spanning dozens of countries with conflicting or even non-existing cyber crime laws.

For instance, there have been no arrests yet in the spread of the Conficker worm, which infected 3 million to 12 million PCs running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and caused widespread fear that it could be used as a kind of Internet super weapon.

The Conficker botnet is still active, but is closely watched by security researchers. The infected computers have so far been used to make money in ordinary ways, pumping out spam and spreading fake antivirus software.

The Mariposa botnet, which has been dismantled, was easily one of the world's biggest botnets. It spread to more than 190 countries, according to researchers. It also appears to be far more sophisticated than the botnet that was used to hack into Google Inc. and other companies in the attack that led Google to threaten to pull out of China.

The researchers that helped take down Mariposa _ which is from the Spanish word for "butterfly" _ first started looking at it in the spring of 2009.

Hackers spread the botnet by using instant-messaging malicious links to contacts on infected computers. They also used removable thumb drives and peer-to-peer networks to spread the botnet.

The investigation has included federal and international law enforcement as well as a team of more than 100 people, including FBI agents, members of a specialized botnet investigative team and the so-called Mariposa working group, which includes researchers and private industry experts.

The gambling man who co-founded Apple and left for $800

Pahrump, Nevada (CNN) -- Ron Wayne is usually just another gambler at the Nugget Hotel & Casino in Nevada. He comes here a couple of days a week to try his luck on the video poker machine. But on this trip, he drew some curious onlookers, as he was escorted by a CNN camera crew. A gift-shop worker asked him if he's famous.

"Well, I'm one of the founders of Apple Computer," Wayne responded.

Wayne, 76, is used to the puzzled looks. He said people assume that he must be living in a mansion.

"I'm living off my Social Security and I do a modest trade in collectors' stamps and coins," he said.

The irony of being inside a casino is not lost on Wayne. After all, if his short-lived career at Apple had gone differently, he would be holding a different kind of winnings: 10 percent of Apple's stock.

Today, that stock would be worth $22 billion.

Wayne left Apple for only $800.

"What can I say? You make a decision based on your understanding of the circumstances, and you live with it," he said.

Wayne's tenure at Apple began on April 1, 1976. His name is signed on the legal document that established Apple -- next to those of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the Silicon Valley giants most people associate with the popular tech company, which makes the iPhone and iPad.

Jobs and Wayne had become friends a few years earlier while both were working for the Atari Corporation.

"We did get fairly chummy, had lunch together, dinner together and had conversations," he said.

As Wayne tells it, Jobs asked for his help in drafting documents and mediating a dispute between Jobs and Wozniak. He also drafted the company's first logo and operating manual. For this work, Wayne was awarded a 10 percent stake in Apple.

"What Jobs had in mind was that he and Woz [as Wozniak is sometimes called] should each have 45 percent and I would have 10 percent as mediator in any dispute that would come up," he said.

That account is backed up by other reports.

In Steve Wozniak's autobiography, "iWoZ," he described Wayne as "one of those people who seemed to have a quick answer for everything."

"He seemed to know all the things we didn't," Wozniak wrote. "Ron ended up play a huge role in those very early days at Apple."

But Wayne had early misgivings. He had been unsuccessful in starting a slot-machine manufacturing business. He racked up thousands of dollars in debt.

With Apple, he was concerned history would repeat itself.

"I could see myself getting into this situation again, and I was really getting too old for that kind of thing," Wayne said, noting that his partners at Apple were 20 years younger than he was.

"The way these guys were going, they were going to bulldoze through anything to make this company succeed. But it was going to be very rough ride, and if I wasn't careful, I was going to be the richest man in the cemetery."

Eleven days after Apple was formed, Wayne removed himself from the company charter. He eventually was given $800 for his stake in Apple, and he let go of that valuable Apple stock, which has exploded in value since.

Wayne said he doesn't let himself wonder how things could have been different if he had chosen to stay with Apple.

"Obviously he [Wayne] didn't have the foresight to know what Apple would become. Like any company in the very early stages, there's a risk associated and you've got to be willing to take it, or you're not," said Ben Bajarin, a technology industry analyst for Creative Strategies.

Wayne, whose net worth is mostly tied up in his extensive coin and stamp collection, said he's as "enamored with money as anybody else."

"But when you're at a focal point of history, you don't realize you're at a focal point of history," he said.

A retired engineer, who has worked at various companies since his departure, Wayne said he never has owned an Apple product.

"I never had a real use for computers," he said. He recently purchased a Dell, saying he's too familiar with Microsoft Windows to want to switch.

Yahoo Talks Search Strategy and the Microsoft Deal

Yahoo is revealing its new plans for search here at an event it has dubbed “Yahoo! SearchSpeak,” occurring now at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale.

While the world’s second-largest search engine is slated to be sucked up by the Microsoft mothership later this year, the team hasn’t stopped developing new features for its product.

On stage, SVP of Search Products Shashi Seth began to discuss Yahoo’s history of search and “misconceptions” of the Yahoo-Bing (Bing) deal, and still went on about the subject even after the power went out throughout the Yahoo building.

Specifically, Mr. Seth spoke about keeping users engaged with Yahoo search until the Bing deal came through (if it is approved, he specifically added).

Here’s some of what of the Yahoo team spoke about:

Microsoft patches "Google hack" flaw in Internet Explorer

Microsoft patches "Google hack" flaw in Internet Explorer
By Emil Protalinski | Last updated January 20, 2010 3:45 PM
Microsoft patches "Google hack" flaw in Internet Explorer

Microsoft has issued an Advanced Notification for the out-of-band security bulletin it is releasing tomorrow for Internet Explorer at approximately 10 am PST. The patch will fix vulnerabilities in IE6, IE7, and IE8 on supported editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2—vulnerabilities notably exploited in the recent series of Chinese-based attacks against Google and 30 other tech companies.

Microsoft has previously insisted that the publicly posted exploit code only affects IE6 and as such recommended its users to upgrade. While the software giant says the attacks it sees in the wild are still only successful against IE6, Redmond has rated the flaw "Critical" for all versions of the browser.

"This is a standard cumulative update, accelerated from our regularly scheduled February release, for Internet Explorer with an aggregate severity rating of Critical," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "It addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and a small subset of corporations, as well as several other vulnerabilities. Once applied, customers are protected against the known attacks that have been widely publicized."

The fact that the update is being released out-of-band (meaning that Microsoft is not going to wait until its next Patch Tuesday on February 9) shows how serious the company is taking this particular vulnerability. The company admitted that its own investigations into the highly organized hacking attack in late December against various companies (including Google) had concluded that a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in IE was used by the perpetrators. That vulnerability is triggered by an attacker using JavaScript to copy, release, and then later reference a specific Document Object Model element; attack code may be executed if it is successfully placed in a random location of freed memory.

We will update this post when Microsoft releases the patch for all supported versions of Windows. The company will also be hosting a webcast to address customer questions on the out-of-band bulletin tomorrow at 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada).