Microsoft launched on Tuesday a program to create versions of Windows and its other programs in little spoken languages such as Amharic, Catalan, Gujarati and Welsh to spread its software to all corners of the globe. The Local Language Program aims to double the 40 languages now available on Microsoft's personal computer software with help from local governments.

Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob "average" User. Read more .

Opera has released their browser for Mac based on the 7.x codebase. Changelog and a screenshot.

Pango, Glib & GTK 2.4.0 have been released. The announces with a changelog are here, here and here.

yellowTAB is pleased to inform its customers that ServicePack 3 for Zeta RC1 is now available for download for registered customers.

Sun Microsystems is reluctant to make Java source code available through an open-source model because it would encourage incompatible versions of the software, Sun's top software executive said. Our Take: Funny, last night I tried to install the Symbian SDK and it bailed out because it wanted me to have Java 1.3.1 while I had Java 1.4.1. Talk about "incompatibilities"...

"Today, Xandros has released their latest operating system, the Xandros Desktop OS – Business Edition. Though this release doesn't really differ much from their previous Deluxe 2.0 product, I felt that the features introduced by this version were significant enough to warrant a few words on this new product." Read the review at MadPenguin.

Microsoft Corp. executives on Tuesday spent a lot of time talking up the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is the company's vision and technology roadmap for reducing the cost of managing and securing enterprise systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft exec says that open source model endangers the software economy.

Amiga, Inc. announced today that it has sold the Amiga Operating System to KMOS, Inc, allowing Amiga, Inc to focus on the growing mobile market. On April 23, 2003 Amiga entered into an Agreement with Itec LLC, later acquired by KMOS, Inc. for the transfer and sale of all of Amiga's right, title, source code, and all versions, from the "Classic Amiga Operating System" through AmigaOS 4.0 and all subsequent versions to KMOS, Inc. The PR gives no explanation about the exact future of Amiga OS 4.

Apple released MacOSX 10.3.3 via the Software Update pref. panel. More info & changelog here.

The presentation subsystem in "Longhorn" (code-named "Avalon") provides powerful new APIs for input. This article gives an overview of these APIs: What services are provided to applications, the architecture of the input system, and how new input devices can be supported.

Here is the transcript of the Dan Farber interview with Darl McBride at the Sand Hill Group's Software 2004 conference in San Francisco, which Groklaw has been given permission to transcribe.

In an effort to determine what the true performance benefit of 64-bit computing is, TheJemReport designed this benchmarking project using FreeBSD. The article can be found here. The article compares the performance of three test cases (Intel P4 Prescott 3.2E and Athlon64 3200+ in 32-bit mode and 64-bit mode) using stopwatch tests, openssl, and two synthetic benchmarks from the Ports system.

If you've ever inherited and then had to maintain a Java-based legacy application, then this article is for you. The author shows you how to use aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to gain an unprecedented view into the inner workings of even the most opaque of legacy applications.