Steven Tew

IBM has announced a program to give computer science majors the technical skills to develop or adapt computer programs for people with special needs.

Why? Well consider this…

“Between 750 million and 1 billion people have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or cognitive disability, according to the World Health Organization. One-quarter of the U.S. population turn 55 by 2008, and about two-thirds will have a disability after turning 65, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The census and the American Association of People With Disabilities estimate that people with disabilities have a collective income of $1 trillion and control up to $10 trillion in financial assets.”

Read more at InformationWeek.com.

Microsoft wants to help aid in the development of Firefox. It sounds scary doesn’t it, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s all about Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab and getting the award winning, free web browser running smoothly on Windows Vista. You can read more about this over at M-Dollar.

This is wonderful. Ricky Gervais does Microsofts training video.

Microsoft takes Internet Explorer 7 out of beta and makes the release candidate of IE 7 available for download this morning.

“The RC1 build includes improvements in performance, stability, security, and application compatibility. You may not notice many visible changes from the Beta 3 release; all we did was listen to your feedback, fix bugs that you reported, and make final adjustments to our CSS support.”

The RC installation requires not one but TWO restarts (it uninstalls any existing IE7 version first), plus it does a virtual pat-down and “validates” your copy of Windows AND it runs the Malicious Software Removal tool to make sure all’s kosher on your PC. After all that, you’re exhausted, but the new version does have a much speedier startup. IE7 RC is a free download, Windows only.

“…we may post another release candidate. We’re still on track to ship the final IE7 release in the 4^th calendar quarter.”

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/24/715752.aspx

Microsoft are currently locking down IE7 for shipping and have released a summary of its new CSS features, fixes and changes.

And Dave Shea over at Mezzoblue.com ran a post yesterday asking people to highlight any IE7 CSS issues they’ve stumbled across during testing.

Incidentally one response to Dave’s request mentioned that their site now gets more hits with IE7 beta (1.3%) than all versions of Opera added together (1.2%) - which makes me wonder how many people are already hitting Monster with IE7 beta.

Personally, I’m finding IE7 much easier to code for than IE6. After I’ve finish creating a page in Firefox, I find it needs very few changes to get it looking correct in IE7. IE6 though, has always demanded some extra work. ;-)