Sadly, the title of the book is becoming an oxymoron in the USA.
I don't know that it is.
Surely, the offshore issue is going to be larger and larger. For large "death march" projects, the chance it's going to be outsourced. I may be optimistic here, but I think there's going continue to be room for people here doing smaller, tighter, leaner projects; ones where the 6-12 hour time difference and language/dialect issues will prove to be a big obstacle in the communication that kind of work needs.
"Don't think of it as programming. think of it as warfare." --Dmitry Orlov, 99-5-13
I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. The way it makes you put different objects in different files/modules is so counter to Perl's scripting heritage that a good procedural/reusability-based outlook will get a lot more traction than this OO mess, at least 'til Perl 6.
I've only tried this for a few days at work, but I've found disconnecting my web browser (by removing the proxy server info at work, though at home I could do the same thing by typing gibberish into the setting) except for at lunchtime, and when I *really* need to Google for something, helps a lot. When I'm on a dull but difficult project, it's too easy to bounce to the web after every little microstep of accomplishment, and then stay there. Even though I can trivially re-enable it, disabling the browser proxy is enough of a "doorway" that a decision to jump over is going to be very deliberate, and therefore less likely.
Plus, as cheesy as it sounds, I printed out the word "TRUST" in a big font and hung it on the wall. I want to be a trustworthy employee in terms of effort applied.
I used to do tech support at one of the large OEMs, and everytime someone called in complaining, I always wanted to ask them WHY the asked for the highest resolution if they had no idea what that meant. Why would you buy something before seeing it or trying it? It wasn't like I was offered a choice! I used to run by 17" monitor at 800x600 'cause it was more comfortable. In fact, I asked for a LCD flatpanel and got the laptop instead. I was just sick of CRTs.
It is true that LCDs actually have a fixed resolution, but you can actually adjust them. When this happens, the monitor makes two or more pixels represent one. No, what people are saying is that most new monitors have antialiasing built-in now, so it's not some old pixel = 1 new pixel and some old pixels = 2 new pixels, it's every new pixels = 1.3 or something old pixels. Like "smart resizing" an image in photoshop or irfanview.
It's a bit on most monitors, but at work I have a laptop that has an insanely useless rez of 1600x1200 pixels--the screen just isn't big enough to justify that resolution, and images are tiny, tiny. Luckily, the native pixels are tiny enough that the blurring is barely noticealbe at 1024 or 1280.
thanks for the "overrated", jerky. "offtopic", maybe, but yeesh.
Anyway, getting into why the Mach 3 is so coveted...those blades are so overpriced. But Gilette stuff is really good. (those bunnies didn't die in vain). Still, the Mach 3 is a bit too much of a giant sharp shaving surface, I think the Sensor is much better.
Karma Whoring, mirroring from this sadly defunct comedy site...but I did go and order his book already Right now, I want to be like the naked jet pilot, but I'm not like the naked jet pilot. He has three blades on his razor and I have only two.
You know who I'm talking about? The naked jet pilot on the Gillette commercial? He's got a uniform and a plane and then -- whoah! -- it all disintegrates and suddenly he's standing naked on what looks like the set of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? tenderly caressing his face. That guy. The naked jet pilot.
What a guy! I mean, he's lost it all: his uniform, his plane. What's he got left? A razor. Not even a can of shaving cream. But you can't keep him down. There he sits, rubbing his face. At least he got a smooth shave! He's looking on the bright side. Booyah naked jet pilot!
There's something homoerotic about a naked man standing around fondling his face, but I don't think the naked jet pilot is gay. If he is gay, it's just because he's so heterosexual that he's spun the meter all the way around. He appears gay because he's hyper-heterosexual in a way the rest of us can't understand. That's assuming he's an air force pilot. If he's in the navy, he's probably gay.
Gay or straight, he sure likes that razor! And why not? It's got three blades on it. Three! Check out the computer animated close-up: that'll take the hair off your face! I mean, the commercial implies that this razor disintegrated a state-of-the-art jet aircraft! That's a pretty good razor! They should drop planeloads of these things on Iraq! Even if they didn't destroy the Iraqi ability to make war at least Saddam Hussein could finally rid himself of that five-o'clock shadow he always seems to have.
(Then again, maybe the razor isn't responsible for the guy's plane falling apart. Maybe his plane just routinely fell apart because he's in the Canadian air force.)
Personally, I use the Gillette Sensor XL for my shaving needs. It can't destroy military equipment, but make no mistake -- it's a mighty razor. The top of the line in its day. You see, it has two blades. That's one to shave your face and another one, I guess, just to have. Plus, it has some kind of patented goop strip.
Admittedly the MACH 3, the naked jet-fighter's razor, has a higher blade count, but I'm not planning to upgrade at this time. And I'll tell you why: first off, I'm sitting on a large Costco-size stockpile of Sensor XL blades. Secondly, although I don't consider myself a nervous flier, the fact that the MACH 3 may cause jet aircraft to suddenly disintegrate gives me pause. Thirdly, and most importantly, I'm holding out for the new, four-bladed Gillette product which must be just around the corner.
Won't that be something! Four blades! One to shave your face, one just to have, one to be like the naked jet pilot, and a spare!That'll give you a smooth shave, I bet. Like, you'll really want to stand around naked caressing your face after using that thing!
I'm sure Gillette's labs are working on it now. Still, they have to be careful. I mean, if a MACH 3 can rip off a jet pilot's clothes and blow up his airplane and still leave him with a smooth shave, imagine what four blades could do? The guy wouldn't be left with any skin! He'd just be a manly skeleton, standing around on the set of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, smugly rubbing his mandible.
Re:An incredibly fun example of this from 1997
on
Mutating Animations
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· Score: 1
Incidentally, Karl Sims wrote some papers on similar topics, including a detailed SIGGRAPH paper on "Evolving Virtual Creatures" in 3D space.
Re:An incredibly fun example of this from 1997
on
Mutating Animations
·
· Score: 1
I took a class on A-life from Jeffrey Ventrella in 1995 or '96. He'd been doing this stuff at the Media Lab for years, as far as I can tell, including walking "contraptions" in 3D virtual space.
His own page has some cool (and popup free) other stuff as well. In particular, the alife page there has "Darwin Pool", the more fun and accessible (IMO) "Gene Pool", and some really interesting stuff that uses Genetic Algorithms to breed unique rules for Cellular Automatas! (If memory serves, I think I helped him rediscover the concept of evolving those during his class at Tufts, I remember him coding up the core idea on a SGI he was borrowing from work.)
Re: the original comment....Yeah, well, it's not like the "B"-wing is very B-ish either... (what does that stand for, bomber maybe?) it goes from I shape to T shape...
Anyway, according to Star Wars lore, the rise of the Emporer was a time of great increasing boxiness in the fighters and such, as hand-tooled craftsmanship gave way to more factory friendly designs. So an old ship should look more organic (ala the Naboo fighter) and not less.
Or not. I'm sure there would be tons of exceptions either way, and of course it has more to do with F/X technology than anything else...
this is so depressing...I wanted to be a lego designer when I was a kid, and of course I've had dark ages since then that are still kind of going on, and few of my creations where anywhere near as cool as these.
Lego is coming out with some really cool stuff these days, getting back to their roots a bit, without being too blocky. Designer series come with pamphlets with like 30 or so creations (you can build 2 or 3 at the same time with the bricks provided) and the new Star Wars mini stuff, tiny scale, is really clever (though I've seen fans do similar stuff earlier.)
People don't start their browser - they start the Internet. They'll tell you so - they click on the icon marked "Internet" and off they go. They don't use a document editor, they use Word, and if they use Wordperfect they'll usually say "Wordperfect", though in the back of their head they'll say "that thing I use for editing typed stuff". The interesting thing is that in some ways, this is pointing to the fufillment of a long term dream of computer usage patterns. You're not concerned about your tools, you're just doing your tasks. In its ubiquity, the brand is getting more and more transparent.
I'm not saying it's good that this path of carefree electronic life is looking so propietary, but it could be worse.
The problem with BSD is that it doesn't have enough visibility (or at least less visibility that Linux). Why is linux getting all that good press is the real puzzlement.
Linux has a better name than BSD. It's a word, not initials. It looks a bit friendlier, in a magazine article it doesn't look so technical. And in the early days at least, Linux seemed to have better momentum, more and more interesting stuff happening there. So it's become the poster child for free OS and cheap-to-run *nix systems.
Seriously? # of cycles per second is a hertz, right? The BBC article calling it "a measurement of frequency which can be used to measure how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second" puts all the zeroes on the bottom of the fraction so to speak, they shoulda said "how many millions of times the clock ticks within a second", but still.
Your dad was right on though, especially for sound. (Though talking about 2.3 gigacycle computer sounds very odd to me.)
I knew that herz = frequency. I didn't know, exactly, that MHz measured number of cycles in 1/whatevereth of a second. And that didn't mean I am not basically a technical person.
Even though there can be a lot of variation of performance with a given CPU, a CPU of a given speed from a reputable dealer will likely be in a certain class of performance. It's a useful rough estimate for judging class in a type. (as in, "typical consumer PC" or "high end gaming rig") I agree it is much poorer when comparing across types (Intel vs AMD vs PPC in particular.)
Interestingly, if a Joe Average was buying a PC, he probably wouldn't just look at MHz anyway. He'd probably read through that little list of specs they put on the front of the shelf, and compare most of the numbers, from memory amount and speed to harddrive space to bus speed etc. He might not have a sense for what's really important or what the absolute values are, but he can get a sense of where a system stands.
Actually, before I read the article, I probably couldn't have given a definition of Mhz, and I'm pretty technical.
Uh. The two statements above are contradictory.
No, they aren't. I'm pretty technical, but in a software sense, very much not a hardware guy, and absolutely not a PC hot rodder. Software is built on so many layers of abstraction that the fact it's a measure of "how many times the processor clock ticks every millionth of a second" doesn't contradict that. (I mean, I did know anything with herz has to do with frequency, and that's about all I need to know on a day to day basis for computers and sound) In fact, your own argument that MHz only tells a small part of the story--and with a modern OS, there's so many instructions being bounced around all the time--adds to the argument that knowing MHz as an absolute, rather than relative measure, is pointless.
Just like with cars; for anyone who's not a hot rodder, who takes a utilitarian viewpoint that they want to get from point A to B and maybe have a bit of fun (if they have the money to blow on a big engine), horsepower/torque/weight is an ok measure. Often horsepower and MHz will give you a decent rough idea of the class of a car or PC. You might run into rude surprises like "oh, well it has this [powerful engine|fast CPU] but the rest of the system means you won't get the full benefit of that", but you can either A. study up to really know or B. buy from people and reviews you trust.
Of course, even if people know the definition of a MHz, they'll still likely to think of it as "how fast your computer runs" in practical terms, which is still problematic.
Actually, before I read the article, I probably couldn't have given a definition of Mhz, and I'm pretty technical. I think of it as basically a form of MIPS (meaningless indicator of processor speed). I'm not a "speed queen", I'm vaguely aware of what's considered "normal" for speed these days, I know Ghz is 1000Mhz, and that it's a useful metric that doesn't always tell the whole story of PC performance... now, why is just thinking of it as "how fast your computer runs" so bad?
Anyway, I think there is a big difference between useful technical terms and jargon and rampant acronym-making and political double speak.
I'd like to attest to the coolness of "Tuf Voyaging". (actually it's a bit episodic, I think any of the chapters could (and have) stood alone as a short story). A tall "humble space merchant"--who plays everything in life as if he was super naive, but is actually super duper slick and good at negotiating-- gets hold of an "Ark ship" of the old COnfederation -usual 'wonder of the ancients' with lots of lost technology--in this case, biotech. With the cell samples onboard and the vats, he can clone and make up any dang thing. He goes to various planets and 'solves' or solves their problems by making up realy interesting life forms. He needs to earn money for paying for the repair of ship, dealing with the planet that can do that is one of the only recurring type of chapter.
For those who don't use X11, Meta, Super and Hyper are three additional shift keys that the X11 standard specifies. A lot of software uses Meta (especially Emacs - which uses it eveywhere), but most programs do not use Super or Hyper, because most keybaords don't have those keys.
If I had to guess, I'd say there are more reasons than that not to have so many difficult-to-conceptualize-the-difference-of modifier keys...
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, the title of the book is becoming an oxymoron in the USA.
I don't know that it is.
Surely, the offshore issue is going to be larger and larger. For large "death march" projects, the chance it's going to be outsourced. I may be optimistic here, but I think there's going continue to be room for people here doing smaller, tighter, leaner projects; ones where the 6-12 hour time difference and language/dialect issues will prove to be a big obstacle in the communication that kind of work needs.
"Don't think of it as programming. think of it as warfare." --Dmitry Orlov, 99-5-13
Perl 5's OO model is really, really painful.
I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. The way it makes you put different objects in different files/modules is so counter to Perl's scripting heritage that a good procedural/reusability-based outlook will get a lot more traction than this OO mess, at least 'til Perl 6.
I've only tried this for a few days at work, but I've found disconnecting my web browser (by removing the proxy server info at work, though at home I could do the same thing by typing gibberish into the setting) except for at lunchtime, and when I *really* need to Google for something, helps a lot. When I'm on a dull but difficult project, it's too easy to bounce to the web after every little microstep of accomplishment, and then stay there. Even though I can trivially re-enable it, disabling the browser proxy is enough of a "doorway" that a decision to jump over is going to be very deliberate, and therefore less likely.
Plus, as cheesy as it sounds, I printed out the word "TRUST" in a big font and hung it on the wall. I want to be a trustworthy employee in terms of effort applied.
I used to do tech support at one of the large OEMs, and everytime someone called in complaining, I always wanted to ask them WHY the asked for the highest resolution if they had no idea what that meant. Why would you buy something before seeing it or trying it?
It wasn't like I was offered a choice!
I used to run by 17" monitor at 800x600 'cause it was more comfortable. In fact, I asked for a LCD flatpanel and got the laptop instead. I was just sick of CRTs.
It is true that LCDs actually have a fixed resolution, but you can actually adjust them. When this happens, the monitor makes two or more pixels represent one.
No, what people are saying is that most new monitors have antialiasing built-in now, so it's not some old pixel = 1 new pixel and some old pixels = 2 new pixels, it's every new pixels = 1.3 or something old pixels. Like "smart resizing" an image in photoshop or irfanview.
It's a bit on most monitors, but at work I have a laptop that has an insanely useless rez of 1600x1200 pixels--the screen just isn't big enough to justify that resolution, and images are tiny, tiny. Luckily, the native pixels are tiny enough that the blurring is barely noticealbe at 1024 or 1280.
OK, is New Scientist more of a scientific rag, meaning it's Celsius (and 30-40 is quite a lot!) or more of an American 'zine, meaning its Fahrenheit?
thanks for the "overrated", jerky. "offtopic", maybe, but yeesh.
Anyway, getting into why the Mach 3 is so coveted...those blades are so overpriced. But Gilette stuff is really good. (those bunnies didn't die in vain). Still, the Mach 3 is a bit too much of a giant sharp shaving surface, I think the Sensor is much better.
Karma Whoring, mirroring from this sadly defunct comedy site...but I did go and order his book already
Right now, I want to be like the naked jet pilot, but I'm not like the naked jet pilot. He has three blades on his razor and I have only two.
You know who I'm talking about? The naked jet pilot on the Gillette commercial? He's got a uniform and a plane and then -- whoah! -- it all disintegrates and suddenly he's standing naked on what looks like the set of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? tenderly caressing his face. That guy. The naked jet pilot.
What a guy! I mean, he's lost it all: his uniform, his plane. What's he got left? A razor. Not even a can of shaving cream. But you can't keep him down. There he sits, rubbing his face. At least he got a smooth shave! He's looking on the bright side. Booyah naked jet pilot!
There's something homoerotic about a naked man standing around fondling his face, but I don't think the naked jet pilot is gay. If he is gay, it's just because he's so heterosexual that he's spun the meter all the way around. He appears gay because he's hyper-heterosexual in a way the rest of us can't understand. That's assuming he's an air force pilot. If he's in the navy, he's probably gay.
Gay or straight, he sure likes that razor! And why not? It's got three blades on it. Three! Check out the computer animated close-up: that'll take the hair off your face! I mean, the commercial implies that this razor disintegrated a state-of-the-art jet aircraft! That's a pretty good razor! They should drop planeloads of these things on Iraq! Even if they didn't destroy the Iraqi ability to make war at least Saddam Hussein could finally rid himself of that five-o'clock shadow he always seems to have.
(Then again, maybe the razor isn't responsible for the guy's plane falling apart. Maybe his plane just routinely fell apart because he's in the Canadian air force.)
Personally, I use the Gillette Sensor XL for my shaving needs. It can't destroy military equipment, but make no mistake -- it's a mighty razor. The top of the line in its day. You see, it has two blades. That's one to shave your face and another one, I guess, just to have. Plus, it has some kind of patented goop strip.
Admittedly the MACH 3, the naked jet-fighter's razor, has a higher blade count, but I'm not planning to upgrade at this time. And I'll tell you why: first off, I'm sitting on a large Costco-size stockpile of Sensor XL blades. Secondly, although I don't consider myself a nervous flier, the fact that the MACH 3 may cause jet aircraft to suddenly disintegrate gives me pause. Thirdly, and most importantly, I'm holding out for the new, four-bladed Gillette product which must be just around the corner.
Won't that be something! Four blades! One to shave your face, one just to have, one to be like the naked jet pilot, and a spare! That'll give you a smooth shave, I bet. Like, you'll really want to stand around naked caressing your face after using that thing!
I'm sure Gillette's labs are working on it now. Still, they have to be careful. I mean, if a MACH 3 can rip off a jet pilot's clothes and blow up his airplane and still leave him with a smooth shave, imagine what four blades could do? The guy wouldn't be left with any skin! He'd just be a manly skeleton, standing around on the set of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, smugly rubbing his mandible.
Incidentally, Karl Sims wrote some papers on similar topics, including a detailed SIGGRAPH paper on "Evolving Virtual Creatures" in 3D space.
I took a class on A-life from Jeffrey Ventrella in 1995 or '96. He'd been doing this stuff at the Media Lab for years, as far as I can tell, including walking "contraptions" in 3D virtual space.
His own page has some cool (and popup free) other stuff as well. In particular, the alife page there has "Darwin Pool", the more fun and accessible (IMO) "Gene Pool", and some really interesting stuff that uses Genetic Algorithms to breed unique rules for Cellular Automatas! (If memory serves, I think I helped him rediscover the concept of evolving those during his class at Tufts, I remember him coding up the core idea on a SGI he was borrowing from work.)
You might say, "he let go of his conscious self and acted on instinct." Don't seem to have hurt the boy none.
Compared to Greedo shooting first, that's pretty small potatoes...
Lego is getting better, actually, check out it's Designer series.
But things aren't so blocky...instead there's a focus on joints, and things that move in interesting ways (love the new clicky joint pieces)
I hear a rumor that normal Lego spacecraft are being surpressed while this whole star wars thing is going on...Lucas doesn't like the competition.
Re: the original comment....Yeah, well, it's not like the "B"-wing is very B-ish either... (what does that stand for, bomber maybe?) it goes from I shape to T shape...
Anyway, according to Star Wars lore, the rise of the Emporer was a time of great increasing boxiness in the fighters and such, as hand-tooled craftsmanship gave way to more factory friendly designs. So an old ship should look more organic (ala the Naboo fighter) and not less.
Or not. I'm sure there would be tons of exceptions either way, and of course it has more to do with F/X technology than anything else...
this is so depressing...I wanted to be a lego designer when I was a kid, and of course I've had dark ages since then that are still kind of going on, and few of my creations where anywhere near as cool as these.
Lego is coming out with some really cool stuff these days, getting back to their roots a bit, without being too blocky. Designer series come with pamphlets with like 30 or so creations (you can build 2 or 3 at the same time with the bricks provided) and the new Star Wars mini stuff, tiny scale, is really clever (though I've seen fans do similar stuff earlier.)
People don't start their browser - they start the Internet. They'll tell you so - they click on the icon marked "Internet" and off they go. They don't use a document editor, they use Word, and if they use Wordperfect they'll usually say "Wordperfect", though in the back of their head they'll say "that thing I use for editing typed stuff".
The interesting thing is that in some ways, this is pointing to the fufillment of a long term dream of computer usage patterns. You're not concerned about your tools, you're just doing your tasks. In its ubiquity, the brand is getting more and more transparent.
I'm not saying it's good that this path of carefree electronic life is looking so propietary, but it could be worse.
The problem with BSD is that it doesn't have enough visibility (or at least less visibility that Linux). Why is linux getting all that good press is the real puzzlement.
Linux has a better name than BSD. It's a word, not initials. It looks a bit friendlier, in a magazine article it doesn't look so technical. And in the early days at least, Linux seemed to have better momentum, more and more interesting stuff happening there. So it's become the poster child for free OS and cheap-to-run *nix systems.
Err, what's funny? Who said what was dying in the firstplace?
I like Salon, though, and would regret its passing. At the very minimum it provides a good cartoon M-Th.
Seriously? # of cycles per second is a hertz, right? The BBC article calling it "a measurement of frequency which can be used to measure how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second" puts all the zeroes on the bottom of the fraction so to speak, they shoulda said "how many millions of times the clock ticks within a second", but still.
Your dad was right on though, especially for sound. (Though talking about 2.3 gigacycle computer sounds very odd to me.)
Not contradictory.
I knew that herz = frequency. I didn't know, exactly, that MHz measured number of cycles in 1/whatevereth of a second. And that didn't mean I am not basically a technical person.
Even though there can be a lot of variation of performance with a given CPU, a CPU of a given speed from a reputable dealer will likely be in a certain class of performance. It's a useful rough estimate for judging class in a type. (as in, "typical consumer PC" or "high end gaming rig") I agree it is much poorer when comparing across types (Intel vs AMD vs PPC in particular.)
Interestingly, if a Joe Average was buying a PC, he probably wouldn't just look at MHz anyway. He'd probably read through that little list of specs they put on the front of the shelf, and compare most of the numbers, from memory amount and speed to harddrive space to bus speed etc. He might not have a sense for what's really important or what the absolute values are, but he can get a sense of where a system stands.
No, they aren't. I'm pretty technical, but in a software sense, very much not a hardware guy, and absolutely not a PC hot rodder. Software is built on so many layers of abstraction that the fact it's a measure of "how many times the processor clock ticks every millionth of a second" doesn't contradict that. (I mean, I did know anything with herz has to do with frequency, and that's about all I need to know on a day to day basis for computers and sound) In fact, your own argument that MHz only tells a small part of the story--and with a modern OS, there's so many instructions being bounced around all the time--adds to the argument that knowing MHz as an absolute, rather than relative measure, is pointless.
Just like with cars; for anyone who's not a hot rodder, who takes a utilitarian viewpoint that they want to get from point A to B and maybe have a bit of fun (if they have the money to blow on a big engine), horsepower/torque/weight is an ok measure. Often horsepower and MHz will give you a decent rough idea of the class of a car or PC. You might run into rude surprises like "oh, well it has this [powerful engine|fast CPU] but the rest of the system means you won't get the full benefit of that", but you can either A. study up to really know or B. buy from people and reviews you trust.
Better than the jargon file for techno words (as opposed to techno-cultural words) is whatis.
Just missed getting a job w/ those folks, darn the luck.
Of course, even if people know the definition of a MHz, they'll still likely to think of it as "how fast your computer runs" in practical terms, which is still problematic.
Actually, before I read the article, I probably couldn't have given a definition of Mhz, and I'm pretty technical. I think of it as basically a form of MIPS (meaningless indicator of processor speed). I'm not a "speed queen", I'm vaguely aware of what's considered "normal" for speed these days, I know Ghz is 1000Mhz, and that it's a useful metric that doesn't always tell the whole story of PC performance... now, why is just thinking of it as "how fast your computer runs" so bad?
Anyway, I think there is a big difference between useful technical terms and jargon and rampant acronym-making and political double speak.
I'd like to attest to the coolness of "Tuf Voyaging". (actually it's a bit episodic, I think any of the chapters could (and have) stood alone as a short story). A tall "humble space merchant"--who plays everything in life as if he was super naive, but is actually super duper slick and good at negotiating-- gets hold of an "Ark ship" of the old COnfederation -usual 'wonder of the ancients' with lots of lost technology--in this case, biotech. With the cell samples onboard and the vats, he can clone and make up any dang thing. He goes to various planets and 'solves' or solves their problems by making up realy interesting life forms. He needs to earn money for paying for the repair of ship, dealing with the planet that can do that is one of the only recurring type of chapter.
For those who don't use X11, Meta, Super and Hyper are three additional shift keys that the X11 standard specifies. A lot of software uses Meta (especially Emacs - which uses it eveywhere), but most programs do not use Super or Hyper, because most keybaords don't have those keys.
If I had to guess, I'd say there are more reasons than that not to have so many difficult-to-conceptualize-the-difference-of modifier keys...
I didn't switch to IE until I discovered shift-click
Oh, right, RIGHT, thanks.
shift-enter also works wonders.