Glide File Sharing Service Debuts

Dotnaught writes "Glide Effortless has gone live. New York Times columnist David Pogue describes it as "full-blown online operating system" that's a mix of genius and interface awkwardness. (Glide has been covered previously on Slashdot.) Pogue concludes "Glide's core idea is unassailably fresh and useful. If TransMedia's plans for world domination fall into place, maybe it won't need an elevator pitch. Maybe 'You gotta try this' will be the only pitch it needs.""

Comments

Secure?

[SecureTheNet]

Glide looks like a well put together app, and I imagine it will become quite popular. But I for one would never use it. I prefer to keep my data locally, for privacy and security reasons.

Re:Why would I use this?

[littlepill]

"This site requires you to be 18 years of age or older"

Re:YOU NEED MY CREDIT CARD???

[ortholattice]

A made-up credit card number might get you into the free service unless they verify each one with the credit card company (which I think costs them money, although not sure, so they might not do it for the free account, but might wait until you are tricked into upgrading via the fine print on some T&C-like page you ACCEPT). On the other hand they may have a local validity check using the LUHN formula - see http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html - so you could invent a number to pass that check. I don't think this is fraud since you aren't buying anything with the made-up card, and it could never be charged to anyone anyway even if it matched a real one because the name won't match, but hey IANAL.

Herald Tribune Web Design

[nucal]

Somewhat off topic, but I thought that the interface for the IHT webpage was one of the best I'd ever seen - it really minimizes the amount of scrolling you have to do and it felt much easier to read. Why haven't more news sites used this?

Re:Herald Tribune Web Design

[Sparr0]

That has nothing to do with the web site and everything to do with your web browser and OS. Points are a PHYSICAL measurement. 1/72 of an inch. 36 point type is 1/2 inch tall. If your text gets smaller when you raise your monitor resolution then either your font sizes are specified in pixels, not points, or your software is broken.

Windows takes a naive approach with a global DPI setting, but if you make sure that that setting is correct then compliant software will render fonts the right size. Most Linux GUIs actually poll the monitor for the proper measurements so they get it right automagically, but some environments and individual programs (like GIMP and Inkscape) let you do exact calibration via a 'Measure this line. How many inches long is it?' dialog. When I open a 4x6 photo in GIMP it displays exactly 4"x6". When I draw 36pt text it is exactly 1/2" tall. If you suffer from shrinking fonts, get better software.

Re:YOU NEED MY CREDIT CARD???

[ortholattice]

Oh, now I see from another post that any made up credit card number will work. So they never even bothered to program in the LUHN check. (A well-designed site would do that, by the way, as a courtesy to the customer to provide instant feedback - without the "this may take several minutes" verification delay - when an obviously bad number is mistyped.) I guess I gave them more credit for their technical adeptness than they deserved.

Re:YOU NEED MY CREDIT CARD???

[greguly]

You can use my card.
Visa
4444.3333.2222.1111

Re:Amateurish.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a Troll for criticising the subject of one of Slashdot's advertisements disguised as stories.

Anyway yeah it did that for me too, what a piece of shit. Seems like a useless service anyway, complete waste of time.

Re:As with...

[antifoidulus]

If you are that worried, get a one time use number, most credit cards can generate them online. You use it once, and poof, in a few hours it is no longer valid.

Re:Oh, ho...

[Anonymous Coward]

The webpage is a mess, if any indication you should learn it should be to avoid Glide.

No screenshot is presented 1:1 ratio

      they are all zoomed out (hence unreadable)
      rotated and skewed. Software looks as if it
      was made by some 'Xtreme' sport enthusiast
      and will keep on shaking on your screen

  some screenshots are fake

"An artist's rendition depicting Glide's intelligent online storage solution."... need I say more?

lacks normal links

  every link is a javascript script. It does not
matter if you want a screenshot, or some other page. Why? why do web 'developers' do it?

promises

more than half of products are just promises. heck, just try to sign up.

cc test number

[Frogg]

mastercard 4929 123 123 123 passes luhn10 -- we use it when testing ecommerce systems.

Re:cc test number

[Raithmir]

4 prefix is VISA.

Re:cc test number

[prell]

Mastercard 4xxx works? I guess "mastercard" isn't part of LUHN, but that could also be an easy test:

if (selectedCardType == MASTERCARD && cardDigits[0] != 5) {
throw PoopPantsError("Aint no MC startin' with not 5");
}

Re:cc test number

[MemeRot]

The classic test card is visa 4111 1111 1111 1111.

As another poster pointed out, your mastercard doesn't start with a 5, which they all do. Also, if you meant visa, you don't have the right number of digits.

Re:Yep - I stopped there too

[Anonymous Coward]

Visa and Discover offer one time use credit card numbers from their website, incase
someone else steals your number. If you actually purchase something at that one time,
it will process on your real account. If not, like in this case, it just verifys you
have an account, and are + 18 years old.

Re:YOU NEED MY CREDIT CARD???

[GweeDo]

Let VeriSign help

All these cards pass the LUHN-10 test and if they try and ding it..will always fail. Use any Expiry, they arne't even running an AVS check on it for any validation.

Disturbing Terms and Conditions

[Hrvat]

From TransMedia (Glide creator) Terms and Conditions:

Materials provided to TransMedia or Posted at any TransMedia Web Site

TransMedia does not claim ownership of the materials you provide to TransMedia (including feedback and suggestions) or post, upload, input or submit to any Services or its associated services for review by the general public, or by the members of any public or private community, (each a "Submission" and collectively "Submissions"). However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting ("Posting") your Submission you are granting TransMedia, its affiliated companies and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses (including, without limitation, all TransMedia Services), including, without limitation, the license rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; to publish your name in connection with your Submission; and the right to sublicense such rights to any supplier of the Services....

What this basically means is that you're giving them management rights to whatever you're posting on their service. So if you're a starving artist and you store your next hit song on their service, they have the right to copy, distribute, transmit etc. that song, or just sublicense it to someone else.

This is wrong. They are basically asking for you to give up all the rights without any compensation for it just by using the service. I definitively won't be using this service.

Not Ajax

[MemeRot]

Look at the page javascript: http://www.iht.com/js/articlelayout.js/.

It's pretty clever, they just divide up the article text and show/hide it with style settings. If you do View->Page Style->No Style (in firefox) you see the raw page layout (including the full article text), everything else, like positioning the main article and everything, is CSS.