my balance is stuck at zero even after a day.
It's been 1 day 7.5 hours since the last block was found. You get paid when blocks are found. Sometimes we find the next block quickly, other times it takes longer. There's some further details on the payouts here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27062.msg2769824#msg2769824That is an interesting idea. Doc could you not actually just make the shift length equal to the block? or last 2 blocks or 5 to reduce variance.
That's the proportional reward system. It was very popular in the early days of mining pools until pool hopping was invented. Pool hoppers would abuse this reward system to get more than their fair share - resulting in 24/7 miners getting less than fair pay. You can read more about pool hopping here:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping - the top answer is by Meni Rosenfeld who literally wrote the book on pool reward systems.