You could store almost 500,000 of these 3.5 hour movies, uncompressed (I didn't include the sound because I don't know how much bandwidth fraunhofer's method uses, but I doubt it would affect much; fraunhofer doesn't use 300 separate PCM streams to drive the 300 speakers). I really don't see a problem with that limit, especially when you consider the sheer amount of storage media needed to store that information. If you could store one bit per atom on the surface of your hard disk, it would take a disk with seven square _meters_ of disk space just to store the information (assuming a 2 angstrom bond length between atoms).
I agree that people should learn C or assembly language in school, as part of their education on how computers work. That doesn't mean that C should be used for writing real programs for desktop computers.
Solving programming-language deficiencies by chanting "write safer code" is much, much worse than solving algorithmic deficiencies by buying hardware. Besides, algorithmic problems aren't an argument against better languages such as Java. You can write the same algorithms in Java as in C, and they will perform about the same if you are marginally competent in both languages. C is obsolete and dangerous; checked buffers and garbage collection are the way of the future.
Note: I am talking about programming for the desktop computers of today and tomorrow. For small embedded systems, C is still a viable (though risky) choice.
A company with a million employees, each with a terabyte of files on the company file server, wouldn't be able to fill up a single 64-bit filesystem. Even a thousand years of uncompressed video at 1600x1200 resolution (!), 60 frames per second, with sound, wouldn't fill up a 64-bit filesystem. A 64-bit filesystem IS enough for everybody.
You shouldn't worry about standardized DRM. As the number of people using a single DRM scheme increases, the incentive to crack the DRM also increases. If Microsoft succeeds in forcing a single DRM standard on the industry, then every cracker in the world will be cracking the same DRM, and only one of them needs to succeed for the whole DRM scheme to come tumbling down.
Unfortunately, using lots of fancy economics jargon doesn't make you right. Price discrimination only works when there are two or more classes of consumers who can be separated and offered different prices. When everyone has access to the same Internet, everyone has the same opportunity to pirate stuff for free. If there are barriers to piracy (lawsuits, availability of P2P software, technical know-how, sense of morals, etc), as the media industry wants, then some people might pay instead of facing those barriers. In that case it does sort of work like a strange price discrimination scenario (some people are less willing to face the barriers to piracy, so they pay instead, and you have your two classes of consumers). But if the Internet really provides any media you want for free with no consequences (and it will in the future if secure anonymous filesharing takes off), then almost everybody will pirate instead of buying. That absolutely cuts into the income of media companies, no matter how many fancy economics terms you use to describe it...
Technically, it is an error. Practically, it is used all the time in speech and somewhat less often in writing. IMHO it should and will soon become accepted as a part of English grammar. English does change, you know. It makes it so much easier to be politically correct when giving an example, since you don't have to specify gender.
FYI, here's the American Heritige Dictionary's informative usage note on the word "they":
Usage Note: The use of the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested as early as 1300, and many admired writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each. W.M. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, "A person can't help their birth," and more recent writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction, in sentences such as "To do a person in means to kill them," and "When you love someone you do not love them all the time." The practice is widespread and can be found in such mainstream publications as the Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and the Washington Post. The usage is so common in speech that it generally passes unnoticed. However, despite the convenience of third-person plural forms as substitutes for generic he and for structurally awkward coordinate forms like his/her, many people avoid using they to refer to a singular antecedent out of respect for the traditional grammatical rule concerning pronoun agreement. Most of the Usage Panelists reject the use of they with singular antecedents. Eighty-two percent find the sentence The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work unacceptable. Thus, the writer who chooses to use they in similar contexts in writing should do so only if assured that the usage will be read as a conscious choice rather than an error. Interestingly, Panel members do seem to distinguish between singular nouns, such as the typical student, and pronouns that are grammatically singular but semantically plural, such as anyone and everyone. Sixty-four percent of panel members accept the sentence No one is willing to work for those wages anymore, are they? in informal speech. See Usage Note at any. See Usage Note at anyone. See Usage Note at he1. See Usage Note at she.
The problem is, Linus is letting his pursuit of one goal (encourage open-source drivers) hurt progress toward another (stable, user-friendly drivers for every single device out there). Changing the kernel APIs all the time does encourage open-source drivers, and it allows easier kernel innovation, but it has many, many disadvantages:
It requires changes in many drivers for every single kernel release, which takes valuable developer time.
It makes drivers less stable and testable due to the constant changes they must undergo.
It discourages driver development outside of the main kernel tree, which in turn...
bloats the main kernel with too many drivers.
Upgrading the kernel requires an upgrade and recompile of every driver you use, or you risk incompatibility or instability.
It is nearly impossible to have a database holding every driver you might need for a desktop Linux system.
Hardware detection and setup software requires constant changes to keep up with drivers and because of this is often unreliable.
I'm sure I could think of more disadvantages too, given enough time. Given the number and magnitude of these problems, it should be Linus's top priority to find a different way of encouraging open-source drivers, so that these problems can be solved. Changing the APIs willy-nilly can't be the only way to encourage open-source.
If Linus won't listen to reason, I propose it's time for a kernel fork. Nothing less will solve Linux's driver situation, and it does need solving. Linus himself has already said that the 2.6 kernel isn't "stable" as such, and it's the responsibility of distributions to ensure that their kernels are stable. I propose that the distributions take Linus at his word and cooperate on forking the 2.6 kernel into a "stable" version with a focus on stable, user-friendly drivers and driver installation. Then Linus can remove a ton of irrelevant drivers out of the core kernel and focus on improving the guts for the next major release, while the rest of us enjoy better hardware support.
If Linus wants his tree to be a permanent development tree, so be it. The core kernel has now improved to the point where it is good enough for 99.9% of users, so further improvements in the development tree are becoming less and less relevant to Linux distribution users. Drivers are what users look forward to improvements in, not the kernel.
Closed-source drivers are still a concern, but I'm convinced that there are better ways to encourage manufacturers to open their source. Linus's way is not the only way.
There's no doubt our goverment knows whether or not the explosion was a nuclear test. The question is whether they would tell us. I guess they probably would, but you never know.
What else might create an explosion of this size? How much conventional explosive would be required? That's what I'm wondering. My purely speculative theory is that the explosion was purely a show by North Korea to drum up patriotism. North Korea is probably right now telling its citizens it has nuclear bombs, even though this explosion likely wasn't nuclear at all.
A poster above pointed out that it could concievably use information from multiple frames to enhance the picture. Consolidating information from multiple frames into one with sophisticated matching algorithms could concievably result in an output image with more real detail than any single image from the input set, but it would only work in cases where roughly the same picture is in many frames (which is true most of the time for most video, but not always). Plus to do it right would require more processing power than I think is likely to be in Sony's product, although I could be wrong. Another way it could work is by exploiting statistical properties of images to produce a scaled image that is more likely to be correct than a simple trilinear filtered image, though if the statistical assumptions turn out to be wrong it would produce a worse image. I suspect this is what Sony's doing.
Our eyes already do much of this processing for us when images are shown normally, so Sony's efforts are unlikely to produce results better than normal TV, and they certainly won't add any true detail that couldn't be seen watching TV normally. So calling it "true zoom" is really incorrect, even if they do use one of the above methods.
In fact, a narrow column of text is often faster to read than a wide block of text, because it is easier for your eyes to follow the short lines. In a wide text block your eye tends to lose track of which line you were looking at, especially when you reach the end of a line and need to skip to the beginning of the next across the whole monitor. One narrow column does leave a lot of wasted white space on the side of the monitor, and it requires more frequent scrolling, which can also slow you down as well. Really, computer monitors should be taller than they are wide for reading text. If you have a rotatable LCD and a video card that supports display rotation, you might find it nicer to read web pages the other way. Although for Quake you'll want to rotate it back.
I think spelling and grammar are emphasized just about the right amount in English classes; maybe not quite enough actually. When I got into college and started grading other peoples' essays, I was appalled at the bad grammar even in essays getting Bs from professors. Of course, I've had different English classes than you.
But I do agree that essay rules ruin the essay: the *#@&% page requirements ruin essays. They teach that verbosity is more important than thought, that multiple pages are required to communicate a single simple point, and that tricks such as BSing or over-quoting make better papers.
Throughout high school and college I was frustrated by page requirements because I am a concise writer. I would labor over papers for hours, turn them in two pages too short, and have them returned with comments like "you make good points" and "your writing is very clear" because my essays weren't filled with BS to pad the page lengths; however, I would get marked down for not having enough pages. As if that was the point of the essay.
If the Slashdot editors wanted to change the FAQ, they would have already. Slashdot IS US-focused. They are, always have been, and will be for the forseeable future. The editors live in the US and care more about what goes on in the US than in other countries.
Now, a lot of people from other countries come here, there's no doubt of that. People from all over the world read Slashdot and make comments. And that's great. But that doesn't make Slashdot not US-focused. Nor should it. If people from other countries want to come to this US site, that's fine. If CmdrTaco is interested in attracting an international audience, THEN he should start doing all the things you suggest to make Slashdot more international. But time and time again, CmdrTaco has said that he is NOT interested in making Slashdot appeal more to an international audience. He realizes that Slashdot does have an international audience, and he doesn't go out of his way to alienate them, but he doesn't go out of his way to serve them either. They just come. If you think CmdrTaco should change his mind and attempt to make Slashdot an international site, then it's him you should be talking to, not me. I'm just telling you what he thinks, as expressed in the FAQ and other places.
The idea that a simple picture of the American flag somehow will encourage a perception of being isolated from the rest of the world is preposterous. Slashdot is a US-based and US-focused site (see the FAQ that I'm too lazy to link to). This politics section has been started with the explicit purpose of giving better coverage of the issues surrounding the upcoming US presidential election (which will obviously include a lot of international coverage). It is perfectly appropriate for there to be an American flag in the section logo. Non-US focused but tech/media-related political articles can still go in the Your Rights Online section. If you are an international reader and you don't like reading about American politics, then feel free to start a political discussion site in your country and put up pictures of whatever flag you want.
Actually, I think this section is the most pleasing to the eye of all Slashdot sections (not that that's saying much...). Be careful what you wish for; we might end up with another it.slashdot.org. (not that CmdrTaco's likely to listen to your complaint anyway)
That patent is disturbing, but it hasn't been granted. And I can't imagine that it will be, with claims like those. In fact, if this patent is granted as-is, practically every open-source or commercial project under the sun will violate it, not just Mono. Furthermore, Mono was started in 2001; this patent wasn't filed until 2002 so Mono itself counts as prior art. If Microsoft gets anything out of this patent, it is likely to be the parts that deal specifically with web applications. But even if Microsoft does have patents on System.Web.Services or Windows.Forms and the like, that doesn't affect GNOME development since they use GTK#. So this silly bias against everything written in C# is ridiculous.
Hey, if he wants to spend hours of his own time researching stories for Slashdot, I don't see why Slashdot shouldn't reward him by putting his stories on the front page. Especially since they are often about interesting things, and he doesn't have obnoxious advertising on his page or anything. What's wrong with that? Isn't that why you read Slashdot, to find interesting stories about technology, submitted by readers?
HAS microsoft patented the libraries? If they haven't the point is moot. I have yet to see any evidence of Microsoft patents on the C# libraries. People were all up in arms about this a few years ago when C# came out, but any patents Microsoft had pending on C# are either granted or rejected by now, so they're open to public scrutiny. So show us the patents you're so worried about already! And even if Microsoft does have direct patents on several parts of the core C# libraries, my argument still stands. It's not in Microsoft's best interest to enforce those patents.
They can't patent the libraries, only ways of implementing the libraries. Mono can either work around the patents (assuming microsoft ever tries to enforce any), or they can break with Microsoft compatibility in the few patented places. However, as I argued in my previous post, though you seemed to miss it, it's not in Microsoft's bset interest to do this because it would fragment the C# community and destroy any perception of C# being cross-platform. Since it wouldn't destroy Mono and it would have bad consequences for C#, Microsoft has no incentive to do it. Furthermore it would be very bad press for Microsoft to start suing open-source developers. There's no precedent for that kind of behavior. Mono is safe.
There is nothing wrong with C#. It performs well, is a nice language to program in, and has an excellent standard library. Microsoft can't assert complete control over C# to somehow cripple open source, as some feared. Doing so would simply cause open-source implementations to break from Microsoft's standard and create incompatible versions of C#, fragmenting the C# language, which Microsoft doesn't want. Your bias against C# is unfounded.
Re:Sigh, Andrew Morton seemed to be right...
on
Database File System
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· Score: 1
... and it would be practically hard to retrofit every single Linux program from GIMP to grep to support this new library. Why waste all that effort when enhancing the kernel could solve all the same problems much more easily, and in a backwards-compatible manner as well?
You think that if Nike makes $1000000 extra, all that will do is give a $1000000 bonus to their CEO? You are too cynical. Yes, execs may get million-dollar bonuses, but in a company with 11,000 US employees that's just a drop in the bucket compared to all the money spent on employee salaries. Nike spends *WAY* more money on lowly employee salaries than it spends on executive compensation, and if they make profits eventually their employee salaries will go up as well, or they will create more jobs, or both.
I'm not at all confused about stock. I didn't say anybody could become a millionaire overnight investing in Nike, I said anybody could benefit. The benefit is spread out over Nike's entire (large) shareholder population, but that doesn't mean it's small. Also, you failed to take into account the increase in the stock's value as Nike succeeds.
You could make the window bigger as it comes to the front for a nice visual effect but it won't help you glance at the screen and tell which window is on top when the focus isn't currently changing, like shadows can. Also it would be annoying to have the window shift position under your mouse as it came to the front. You'd have to make sure the focus of expansion is the mouse cursor so that point doesn't shift as the window enlarges. Also it would be hard to avoid aliasing artifacts when resizing windows such a small amount all the time.
I agree that some of the screenshot shadows looked weird, but these are all just proof-of-concept type things so far. There were several different types of shadows shown. They are probably implemented as part of the window manager theme, so if you don't like the shadows in the default theme you can just pick a different theme, or munge the shadows to your liking with GIMP. The shadows aren't hardcoded into X11; they're trivial to change so there's no need to decide on what they'll look like now.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that's not true, it would take 59 square meters. (I did the calculation for 2^64 bits instead of bytes...)
You could store almost 500,000 of these 3.5 hour movies, uncompressed (I didn't include the sound because I don't know how much bandwidth fraunhofer's method uses, but I doubt it would affect much; fraunhofer doesn't use 300 separate PCM streams to drive the 300 speakers). I really don't see a problem with that limit, especially when you consider the sheer amount of storage media needed to store that information. If you could store one bit per atom on the surface of your hard disk, it would take a disk with seven square _meters_ of disk space just to store the information (assuming a 2 angstrom bond length between atoms).
I agree that people should learn C or assembly language in school, as part of their education on how computers work. That doesn't mean that C should be used for writing real programs for desktop computers.
Note: I am talking about programming for the desktop computers of today and tomorrow. For small embedded systems, C is still a viable (though risky) choice.
A company with a million employees, each with a terabyte of files on the company file server, wouldn't be able to fill up a single 64-bit filesystem. Even a thousand years of uncompressed video at 1600x1200 resolution (!), 60 frames per second, with sound, wouldn't fill up a 64-bit filesystem. A 64-bit filesystem IS enough for everybody.
You shouldn't worry about standardized DRM. As the number of people using a single DRM scheme increases, the incentive to crack the DRM also increases. If Microsoft succeeds in forcing a single DRM standard on the industry, then every cracker in the world will be cracking the same DRM, and only one of them needs to succeed for the whole DRM scheme to come tumbling down.
Unfortunately, using lots of fancy economics jargon doesn't make you right. Price discrimination only works when there are two or more classes of consumers who can be separated and offered different prices. When everyone has access to the same Internet, everyone has the same opportunity to pirate stuff for free. If there are barriers to piracy (lawsuits, availability of P2P software, technical know-how, sense of morals, etc), as the media industry wants, then some people might pay instead of facing those barriers. In that case it does sort of work like a strange price discrimination scenario (some people are less willing to face the barriers to piracy, so they pay instead, and you have your two classes of consumers). But if the Internet really provides any media you want for free with no consequences (and it will in the future if secure anonymous filesharing takes off), then almost everybody will pirate instead of buying. That absolutely cuts into the income of media companies, no matter how many fancy economics terms you use to describe it...
FYI, here's the American Heritige Dictionary's informative usage note on the word "they":
Usage Note: The use of the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested as early as 1300, and many admired writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each. W.M. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, "A person can't help their birth," and more recent writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction, in sentences such as "To do a person in means to kill them," and "When you love someone you do not love them all the time." The practice is widespread and can be found in such mainstream publications as the Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and the Washington Post. The usage is so common in speech that it generally passes unnoticed. However, despite the convenience of third-person plural forms as substitutes for generic he and for structurally awkward coordinate forms like his/her, many people avoid using they to refer to a singular antecedent out of respect for the traditional grammatical rule concerning pronoun agreement. Most of the Usage Panelists reject the use of they with singular antecedents. Eighty-two percent find the sentence The typical student in the program takes about six years to complete their course work unacceptable. Thus, the writer who chooses to use they in similar contexts in writing should do so only if assured that the usage will be read as a conscious choice rather than an error. Interestingly, Panel members do seem to distinguish between singular nouns, such as the typical student, and pronouns that are grammatically singular but semantically plural, such as anyone and everyone. Sixty-four percent of panel members accept the sentence No one is willing to work for those wages anymore, are they? in informal speech. See Usage Note at any. See Usage Note at anyone. See Usage Note at he1. See Usage Note at she.
- It requires changes in many drivers for every single kernel release, which takes valuable developer time.
- It makes drivers less stable and testable due to the constant changes they must undergo.
- It discourages driver development outside of the main kernel tree, which in turn...
- bloats the main kernel with too many drivers.
- Upgrading the kernel requires an upgrade and recompile of every driver you use, or you risk incompatibility or instability.
- It is nearly impossible to have a database holding every driver you might need for a desktop Linux system.
- Hardware detection and setup software requires constant changes to keep up with drivers and because of this is often unreliable.
I'm sure I could think of more disadvantages too, given enough time. Given the number and magnitude of these problems, it should be Linus's top priority to find a different way of encouraging open-source drivers, so that these problems can be solved. Changing the APIs willy-nilly can't be the only way to encourage open-source.If Linus won't listen to reason, I propose it's time for a kernel fork. Nothing less will solve Linux's driver situation, and it does need solving. Linus himself has already said that the 2.6 kernel isn't "stable" as such, and it's the responsibility of distributions to ensure that their kernels are stable. I propose that the distributions take Linus at his word and cooperate on forking the 2.6 kernel into a "stable" version with a focus on stable, user-friendly drivers and driver installation. Then Linus can remove a ton of irrelevant drivers out of the core kernel and focus on improving the guts for the next major release, while the rest of us enjoy better hardware support.
If Linus wants his tree to be a permanent development tree, so be it. The core kernel has now improved to the point where it is good enough for 99.9% of users, so further improvements in the development tree are becoming less and less relevant to Linux distribution users. Drivers are what users look forward to improvements in, not the kernel.
Closed-source drivers are still a concern, but I'm convinced that there are better ways to encourage manufacturers to open their source. Linus's way is not the only way.
What else might create an explosion of this size? How much conventional explosive would be required? That's what I'm wondering. My purely speculative theory is that the explosion was purely a show by North Korea to drum up patriotism. North Korea is probably right now telling its citizens it has nuclear bombs, even though this explosion likely wasn't nuclear at all.
Our eyes already do much of this processing for us when images are shown normally, so Sony's efforts are unlikely to produce results better than normal TV, and they certainly won't add any true detail that couldn't be seen watching TV normally. So calling it "true zoom" is really incorrect, even if they do use one of the above methods.
Cool, thanks for the info, Mr. AC.
In fact, a narrow column of text is often faster to read than a wide block of text, because it is easier for your eyes to follow the short lines. In a wide text block your eye tends to lose track of which line you were looking at, especially when you reach the end of a line and need to skip to the beginning of the next across the whole monitor. One narrow column does leave a lot of wasted white space on the side of the monitor, and it requires more frequent scrolling, which can also slow you down as well. Really, computer monitors should be taller than they are wide for reading text. If you have a rotatable LCD and a video card that supports display rotation, you might find it nicer to read web pages the other way. Although for Quake you'll want to rotate it back.
But I do agree that essay rules ruin the essay: the *#@&% page requirements ruin essays. They teach that verbosity is more important than thought, that multiple pages are required to communicate a single simple point, and that tricks such as BSing or over-quoting make better papers.
Throughout high school and college I was frustrated by page requirements because I am a concise writer. I would labor over papers for hours, turn them in two pages too short, and have them returned with comments like "you make good points" and "your writing is very clear" because my essays weren't filled with BS to pad the page lengths; however, I would get marked down for not having enough pages. As if that was the point of the essay.
Now, a lot of people from other countries come here, there's no doubt of that. People from all over the world read Slashdot and make comments. And that's great. But that doesn't make Slashdot not US-focused. Nor should it. If people from other countries want to come to this US site, that's fine. If CmdrTaco is interested in attracting an international audience, THEN he should start doing all the things you suggest to make Slashdot more international. But time and time again, CmdrTaco has said that he is NOT interested in making Slashdot appeal more to an international audience. He realizes that Slashdot does have an international audience, and he doesn't go out of his way to alienate them, but he doesn't go out of his way to serve them either. They just come. If you think CmdrTaco should change his mind and attempt to make Slashdot an international site, then it's him you should be talking to, not me. I'm just telling you what he thinks, as expressed in the FAQ and other places.
P.S. nice use of the nyud.net caching system; if only the slashdot editors would catch on to it...
Actually, I think this section is the most pleasing to the eye of all Slashdot sections (not that that's saying much...). Be careful what you wish for; we might end up with another it.slashdot.org. (not that CmdrTaco's likely to listen to your complaint anyway)
That patent is disturbing, but it hasn't been granted. And I can't imagine that it will be, with claims like those. In fact, if this patent is granted as-is, practically every open-source or commercial project under the sun will violate it, not just Mono. Furthermore, Mono was started in 2001; this patent wasn't filed until 2002 so Mono itself counts as prior art. If Microsoft gets anything out of this patent, it is likely to be the parts that deal specifically with web applications. But even if Microsoft does have patents on System.Web.Services or Windows.Forms and the like, that doesn't affect GNOME development since they use GTK#. So this silly bias against everything written in C# is ridiculous.
Hey, if he wants to spend hours of his own time researching stories for Slashdot, I don't see why Slashdot shouldn't reward him by putting his stories on the front page. Especially since they are often about interesting things, and he doesn't have obnoxious advertising on his page or anything. What's wrong with that? Isn't that why you read Slashdot, to find interesting stories about technology, submitted by readers?
HAS microsoft patented the libraries? If they haven't the point is moot. I have yet to see any evidence of Microsoft patents on the C# libraries. People were all up in arms about this a few years ago when C# came out, but any patents Microsoft had pending on C# are either granted or rejected by now, so they're open to public scrutiny. So show us the patents you're so worried about already! And even if Microsoft does have direct patents on several parts of the core C# libraries, my argument still stands. It's not in Microsoft's best interest to enforce those patents.
They can't patent the libraries, only ways of implementing the libraries. Mono can either work around the patents (assuming microsoft ever tries to enforce any), or they can break with Microsoft compatibility in the few patented places. However, as I argued in my previous post, though you seemed to miss it, it's not in Microsoft's bset interest to do this because it would fragment the C# community and destroy any perception of C# being cross-platform. Since it wouldn't destroy Mono and it would have bad consequences for C#, Microsoft has no incentive to do it. Furthermore it would be very bad press for Microsoft to start suing open-source developers. There's no precedent for that kind of behavior. Mono is safe.
There is nothing wrong with C#. It performs well, is a nice language to program in, and has an excellent standard library. Microsoft can't assert complete control over C# to somehow cripple open source, as some feared. Doing so would simply cause open-source implementations to break from Microsoft's standard and create incompatible versions of C#, fragmenting the C# language, which Microsoft doesn't want. Your bias against C# is unfounded.
... and it would be practically hard to retrofit every single Linux program from GIMP to grep to support this new library. Why waste all that effort when enhancing the kernel could solve all the same problems much more easily, and in a backwards-compatible manner as well?
I'm not at all confused about stock. I didn't say anybody could become a millionaire overnight investing in Nike, I said anybody could benefit. The benefit is spread out over Nike's entire (large) shareholder population, but that doesn't mean it's small. Also, you failed to take into account the increase in the stock's value as Nike succeeds.
I agree that some of the screenshot shadows looked weird, but these are all just proof-of-concept type things so far. There were several different types of shadows shown. They are probably implemented as part of the window manager theme, so if you don't like the shadows in the default theme you can just pick a different theme, or munge the shadows to your liking with GIMP. The shadows aren't hardcoded into X11; they're trivial to change so there's no need to decide on what they'll look like now.