Microsoft ships IE11 for Windows 7

Computerworld - Microsoft today released Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) for Windows 7, and announced it would soon start pushing it to customers as an automatic update.

Three weeks ago, Microsoft signaled that the debut of the final of IE11 was imminent when it shipped a blocking toolkit for enterprise IT departments who wanted to ban the browser from their desktops.

"We will begin automatically updating Windows 7 customers to IE11 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE11 Developer and Release Previews," said Rob Mauceri and Sandeep Singhal, a pair of IE group program managers.

Microsoft launched IE11 on Windows 8.1 on Oct. 17.

The automatic upgrades on Windows 7 from IE10 -- which didn't reach the widely-used operating system until February -- will quickly drive up IE11's user share. From February through September, for instance, IE10's share of all copies of Internet Explorer soared from next to nothing to nearly 34% due to the forced upgrade from IE9, as well as some traction from Windows 8, before slipping for the first time last month as IE11 appeared in Windows 8.1.

That automatic upgrade may be welcomed by consumers, but analysts see it as a significant pain point in the enterprise, where change is often met with skepticism, even hostility.

"The faster pace is absolutely the biggest pain point," said Gartner analyst Michael Silver in an interview last month, talking about Microsoft's accelerated development and release tempo for Windows. "The problem with faster release cycles is that [enterprises] don't know if their apps will work with each new version. [And] IE is the biggest inhibitor to continuous upgrades"

Today, Mauceri and Singhal touted IE11's better JavaScript benchmark scores, claiming it's 29% faster than the current Chrome 30, 32% faster than Firefox 25 and 26% faster than Opera Software's Opera 17, citing the SunSpider test suite.

Ironically, Microsoft once dismissed JavaScript benchmark results as bogus. Three years ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the executive who still heads the IE team, said speed trials like SunSpider were "at best, not very useful, and at worst, misleading."

Not surprisingly, as IE's scores have improved, Microsoft's tune on the topic has changed.

IE11 for Windows 7 can be downloaded from Microsoft's website. The installer file is approximately 28MB in size.

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Speaking more than one language may delay dementia

Speaking more than one language "stimulates your brain all the time," researcher says.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Dementia developed an average of five years later in people who spoke more than one language
• The effect was seen even in illiterate people, meaning education was not the explanation
• It's unclear whether learning a second language late in life would help

The latest evidence that speaking more than one language is a very good thing for our brains comes from a study finding dementia develops years later in bilingual people than in people who speak just one language.

The study, conducted in India and published Wednesday in the journal Neurology, is not the first to reach this conclusion. But it is the largest and comes with an intriguing new detail: The finding held up even in illiterate people — meaning that the possible effect is not explained by formal education.

Instead, the researchers say, there's something special about switching from one language to another in the course of routine communication — something that helps explain why bilingual people in the study developed dementia five years later than other people did. When illiterate people were compared with other illiterate people, those who could speak more than one language developed dementia six years later.

"We know from other studies that mental activity has a certain protective effect," says co-author Thomas Bak, a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. "Bilingualism combines a lot of different mental activities. You have to switch sounds, concepts, grammatical structures, cultural concepts. It stimulates your brain all the time."

For the study, Bak and colleagues in India reviewed medical records of 648 people with dementia who were seen in a clinic in the city of Hyderabad.

The location was key, because residents of the city, like many people in India, often speak two or three languages — typically some combination of the official language, Telugu, the Urdu dialect Dakkhini and the English increasingly used in schools, workplaces and the media, the authors write. People may speak in one language or combination at home and in neighborhoods and another at work or school, all in the course of a normal day, says co-author Suvarna Alladi, a neurologist at Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad.

"Since bilingualism is more of a norm in India, bilingualism is not a characteristic of any particular socioeconomic, geographic or religious group," she says.

More than half of the people diagnosed with dementia at the clinic were bilingual or multilingual. But the researchers found those people had developed their first symptoms, such as memory loss and confusion, at an average age of 65.6 — five years later than the average of 61.1 for people who spoke just one language. The differences were seen in several types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia (associated with poor blood flow to the brain) and frontotemporal dementia (caused by degeneration of the brain's frontal or temporal lobes).

Two previous smaller studies, conducted in Ontario, Canada, found a later onset of Alzheimer's disease in bilingual people.

But in those studies, bilingual people were largely immigrants, raising questions about whether they differed in other ways from the general population, says Brian Gold, a neuroscientist at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. The new study is more convincing, he says, "because it is studying bilingual people raised in the same country and culture."

Gold's own lab studies have found that bilingual seniors excel at certain skills, such as quickly sorting colors and shapes, and that their frontal lobes work more efficiently as they perform such tasks.

All the research taken together is more good reason, he says, to expose children to language-learning as they grow — and for bilingual families to keep using more than one language in their homes. It's still unclear, he says, whether people can boost their brains by taking up a second language later in life.

"It may never be too late," Bak says, but he agrees more research is needed. It's also unclear, Bak says, whether bilingual people fare any better than others once symptoms of dementia develop.

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Facebook 'likes': The thumb is gone

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• The thumbs-up "Like" button on Facebook is no more
• Websites using the old button will be automatically updated
• Facebook says new design already giving more results

(CNN) -- Pop quiz: What buttons are seen more than 22 billion times every day, embedded on 7.5 million websites?

Answer: the Facebook Like and Share buttons, according to new numbers released by the social network. And now these most widespread of online icons are both getting their first ever redesign.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Being Sued Over Like Button

The biggest difference you'll notice straight away: the thumb is gone from the Like button. Instead, it will appear in the dialogue box above the button that shows you how many Likes your post or page has.

Facebook's new "Like" button does away with its iconic thumbs-up.

The new button features the Facebook "f" logo instead. It is white on blue, rather than blue on white, as is the new share button. The Share button will replace Facebook's Send button — deemed too confusing.

The reason for the redesign? The new version is optimized for high-resolution screens, according to Peter Yang, a product manager at Facebook, in the comments section of the Facebook blog postannouncing the change.

Users should start to see the change on those 7.5 million websites as it rolls out over the coming weeks.

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Apple to offer in-store iPhone repairs, says report

Apple Store employees will be able to replace the screen, camera, speakers, and other parts while you wait, says 9to5Mac.

Apple may soon offer in-store repairs for the newest iPhones.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CBS Interactive)

Break the touch screen on your iPhone and your local Apple Store may soon be able to replace just the screen rather than charge you for a whole new phone.

Apple is prepping its stores to repair and replace parts for the iPhone 5S and 5C, "sources with knowledge of the upcoming initiative" told 9to5Mac. This means that damaged iPhones won't necessarily need to be turned in for an entirely new unit.

The initiative will cover several components, according to the sources, including the screen, the rear camera, the volume buttons, the motor, the speaker system, and the 5C's conventional (non-Touch ID) home button. Special calibration equipment will be provided to the stores to allow employees to replace the touch screen.

Users covered by an AppleCare warranty can get the parts replaced or repaired for free. Other owners will have to shell out some cash. Replacing the touch screen will cost $149. A new battery will run $79. And a new home button for the iPhone 5C will cost $29.

But those expenses are minimal compared with the cost of buying a brand new phone to replace a damaged unit. Replacing a single component also means that users can keep the same phone, eliminating the need to back up and restore their data. And since the repairs are done on site, people can simply wait for their phone to be revived back to working condition.

CNET contacted Apple for comment and will update the story with any further information.

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Twitter rises by 92% on first day.

SAN FRANCISCO — There's no other way to put it gracefully . Twitter's first day of trading so far has been a monster.

Monster, as in mind-boggling — not scary, like Facebook's IPO flop 18 months ago.

The 6-year-old micro-blogging service, fresh off a road show that drove up its stock price two times, stormed out of the IPO gates like a wild-eyed wolverine Thursday. The stock opened at $45.10 a share, after it was priced at $26 late Wednesday.Within minutes, it briefly touched $50.

With an initial market valuation of about $35 billion, Twitter is worth more — on paper — than LinkedIn and Netflix.

"What's not to like? There is incredible potential and investors are more open to social media companies now," says Tim Loughran, a University of Notre Dame finance professor who is an expert on tech IPOs. "There is a change in mindset on Internet IPOs."

If the big day proved anything, it is investors' unquenchable appetite for a hot IPO.

Twitter is the centerpiece of one of the most ravenous IPO markets in years. New offerings are at their highest level since 2007, propelled by a record-setting Dow Jones industrial average that is up 20% since Jan. 1. The easy-money policies of the Federal Reserve have fueled the resurgence.

So, how long does this rampaging beast continue to rumble markets, and frighten its social-media rivals?

For a few days, at least, based on the early feeding frenzy. Some are even whispering the B word, as in bubble.

Twitter provided that froth today.

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