No matter how hard it may seem for most people, if you have a crazy dream, but you channel all your energy towards reaching it, your chances of reaching it will increase exponentially. No matter how much some people would disagree, I am sure Bill Gates is a living proof of the statement above. He's also a proof of the fact that having all the possible studies one, two or more universities can provide won't ever compensate for inspiration, passion, and sustained work. Now, let's get to the historic event that happened today - Bill Gates stepped down from most of his Microsoft-related duties, but remained the chairman of the company's board of directors.

Obviously, we can't just say "Bill Gates retired" without taking a look back and try to point out the highs and lows of his career as Microsoft's CEO, starting with those early "garage days" until today. This is a pretty long period - 33 years, and a good lesson for most people dreaming to have a net worth of a few million over night. Big things take time, remember that! Now, let's roll back to 1973...

...when Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside School, and scored 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs. In the fall of the same year, he enrolled at Harvard College, where he met Microsoft's future CEO - Steve Ballmer. Anyway, Microsoft wasn't even founded yet back then, but Gates met a lot of interesting people at Harvard, including Christos Papadimitriou, a computer scientist who worked with him on a paper about algorithms.

In 1975, Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems on a BASIC interpreter, and once Intel released the Intel 8080 CPU, he saw this as an opportunity to put his BASIC skills to work, starting a computer software company with Paul Allen.

As a side note, you should know this wasn't Gates' first business venture, because he formed Traf-O-Data with Allen a few years before, when he was 17, earning $20,000 in the first year, but that business went slowly down went his clients found out... his age!

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On the 26th of November 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO, after starting up as "Micro-soft" in Albuquerque. In that period, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter, after finding out that a pre-market copy of the BASIC interpreter he worked on leaked into the community. Gates pointed out in the letter that software developers should be able to demand payment, and in late 1976, Microsoft became independent of MITS.

On the 1st of January, 1979, the company moved to Bellevue, Washington. In those early days, Gates continued to write code, while taking care of the company as a whole, and it is worth being mentioned that, during the first 5 years in Microsoft's history, he personally reviewed every single line of code that made it to clients, often rewriting various parts by himself.

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for the upcoming IBM PC, in a move that laid the foundation of the IT world as we know it. Pretty soon, MS-DOS was born, and Gates insisted to keep the copyright of what was a heavily modified 86-DOS, a operating system similar to CP/M, the most popular one before MS-DOS turned Microsoft into a major player of the IT industry.

The first retail version of Microsoft Windows arrived on the 20th of November, 1985, and Bill Gates' dream started to have a clear shape. Windows 95, Windows NT, the ill-fated Windows Millenium...all these are history already, and I think best thing to do now is to get back to Bill Gates...

Gates has three children, being married with Melinda since 1994, and a net worth of $58 billion, and still rising.

I think one of the greatest of Bill Gates' accomplishments is the fact that Windows doesn't work perfectly. I know it sounds strange, but think about all those jobs created by this simple fact! It doesn't work? Call a tech support center!

Today, Bill Gates delivered a short speech to Microsoft employees, saying "There won't be a day in my life when I won't be thinking about Microsoft, the great things that we're doing and wanting to help," with tears in his eyes.

That's it - no matter how you put it, an era is ending, and another one has already started. Should Gates return as a CEO, one day? Will Steve Ballmer be the CEO Microsoft needs in these troubled days? There are soo many questions, and lots of answers, but I know one thing - only time will tell, but until then, feel free to drop your comments below, I am sure you have plenty of things to say about this!

These days, security becomes a problem to more and more people. I am not talking about terrorism as we all know it, but you can consider this a form of terrorism too, because computer viruses are surely a tool of terror. Why do I say this? Well, the less you know about computer security, the more likely you'll get frightened when your antivirus will detect "something," or when your operating system will display error messages. Since knowledge is power, today I'll provide you some valuable computer security advice, because that's what you need, before anything else.

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While most of you are probably using Windows, most of these tips apply to other operating systems, and some of them are also useful in real life situations, like interacting with people your don't know if you can trust or not. All right, these being said, let's see today's 10 security tips, shall we?

1. Don't rely on suppositions, and don't EVER say "that can't happen to me." Try to find at least 10 minutes per week to find out more about latest threats and to get some computer security advice.

2. Use a good antivirus, and don't rely on your friend's advice regarding this matter. Go visit Checkmark, AV-Test.org and AV-Comparatives to see for yourselves that the program you're going to spend some money for is really worth it...or not!

3. If your antivirus is not an all-in-one package, try using a firewall. My personal suggestion is Comodo Firewall Pro, one of the best out there, and also a free product! Obviously, you don't have to take my word for granted, so feel free to check some of the many firewall test results available on the Internet.

4. Be careful with incoming email, especially when your antivirus is not capable of scanning incoming messages, or you have disabled this feature. Even friends can send viruses without knowing it, so always double check strange attachments.

5. Don't use passwords easy to guess. Your phone number or your birth date can be easily found through trial-and-error, while a password like "7yhfX_8dh7z_1sZ3" is not something one would guess. Try to make your passwords as complicated as needed so you won't remember them, and store them in a safe location, like a USB drive.

6. Getting back to emails, don't answer spam. If someone you don't know sends you a message without sufficient identification data, better avoid answering too, although it may not look like spam.

7. Avoid sharing your personal documents on the network, as well as installing useless toolbars, programs you don't need, and those coming from sources you can't fully trust.

8. Keep your operating system and applications up to date, but don't use automatic updates. Why? Some updates proved to do more damage than the threats they were supposed to fix, so my advice is to wait a few days after an update is issued, and check user feedback before taking that step.

9. Avoid Warez sites, because these are obvious sources of Trojans/spyware/viruses. I don't have to say that using files you get from such sites is illegal in most cases, but sometimes only by accessing a Warez site you can end up with a virus.

10. Backup, backup, backup! USB drives are extremely cheap these days, and so are DVD discs. Spare at least 30 minutes per week to save your latest documents on a disc or a USB drive, and keep the backups in a safe place. Your data is far more valuable than the hardware used to store it, so don't suppose your hard drive won't crash. The warranty can replace the dead drive, but won't bring back your data!

This is it. I know some of the computer security advice above may seem obvious, but this is like learning to write, especially for beginners. The key is to repeat it all until you'll find the security measures above to be as natural as breathing. If you have some computer security advice I missed and you'd like to share with the rest of us, please drop your comment below, your effort will be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Okie dokie, so Firefox 3 has landed, everyone started downloading like crazy, and now the Guinness Book officials are still a few steps behind this, but I am sure the record will be validated pretty soon. Before getting into the subject, I must say that I'm happy with it, but I won't lie to you - Firefox 3 crashed on me a few times, but considering the time I spent using it in the last days, it didn't crash often enough to make me stop using it. Anyway, let's get to the numbers now, shall we?


Firefox 3 overview from Mozilla Firefox on Vimeo.

<-120x240 Vertical Banner - left->In the first 24 hours, Firefox 3 managed to reach 8.3 million downloads. Now, the official Firefox 3 download counter shows 19,910,340 downloads, and keeps moving on. The average download rate until now is over 900 downloads/minute. Not bad, not bad at all! Speaking about countries, the US is leading the way, with over 330 downloads per minute, followed by Germany, with over 70 downloads per minute.

According to Mozilla, "By the end of the 24 hour period, the unofficial count clocked in at more than 8 million Firefox 3 downloads! The Guinness judges still have to validate the record attempt, and the Spread Firefox team is standing by to announce the results when they’re available. Since then, another 10 million copies of Firefox 3 have been downloaded, bringing the total to over 18m in the first week," so now it's only a matter of time until Firefox 3 enters the Guinness Book.

As one last thing, I am sure you noticed the redesign that Mozilla.com suffered. I don't know about you, but I love it. Here's what John Slater, Mozilla's Creative Director, has to say about it:"One of our biggest goals for the Mozilla.com redesign was to kick our presentation of Firefox 3 up a few notches, so to speak. With that in mind we really expanded the Firefox section of the site, adding a detailed features page, tips & tricks, information about security and add-ons, and more. We also figured that, since some concepts are more easily shown than explained, it would be a good time to add our first-ever video to the site."

To download Firefox 3, if you were afraid to do that so far, I advise you to go to the Firefox 3 download page on Mozilla.com. Good luck!