zootm

The program I remember fondly along those lines is Nullsoft Beep:

http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/

It essentially makes your computer sound like something from Forbidden Planet, hence instantly bringing you into the future of the past.

If anything, what we need is more musical cues indicating system health. From the forboding opening strains of Orff's "O Fortuna" when the system first starts to overheat, through to Debussy's "Clare de Lune" while the CPU goes through a tearful montage of the many documents and applications that it's helped during its short life, before whispering its last goodbyes to an ocean-like plane of blue screen, the system could increase the user's empathy with a musical journey through its struggles.

With innovations like this, I might even shed a tear when the host lays itself down to die, rather than hammering the keyboard in futile rage.

You can get around this by turning on the "autoscroll" feature, since that's activated by a middle-click. I've often wondered just who exactly Mozilla thought the "paste in window goes to URL" feature was for; feels like the sort of thing that gets left in because its fanbase includes one of the developers.

This is a great feature. It's an example of a small, easy-to-implement change that makes their website just work better. I really like when things like this get done.

I'm not sure the article asserted that Scala was "not better" than Java. It was asserting that Scala is not "a better Java"; that is that the design philosophies between the two languages are such that it's not right to treat Scala as an evolutionary "next step" from Java, as some have. I think there's some truth to that point of view.

I got the "default" Gravatar image (the placeholder logo). You might want to filter that out. Interesting idea, though! Didn't work too great with my details but I'm wondering whether I could have really expected it to.

It's a pretty specific shootout, of course; the reasons brought up for JGit's relative slowness are not issues present in most applications, they're specific to certain realms of system. Unsigned number support is a major headache about Java when doing low-level work, in particular.

I think it's also important to note that the slowness is relative to an incredibly fast C implementation - taking twice the time sounds painful, but in reality the pauses caused by Git are barely perceptible as-is, and double of that is not likely to be very annoying.