Slashdot Mirror
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.""
...that's a mix of genius and interface awkwardness...
Sounds like the night I lost my virginity.
The Apple® Mac OSX(TM) version of Glide Effortless is scheduled to be available on Christmas Day December 25, 2005.
Great, a reason for me to get up early of Christmas Day. Good thing I haven't got any family or friends!
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.
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
Why do they want my credit card for the free subscription?
I don't plan on buying anything from their glide store, why assume I will?
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
What kind of legitimate service needs my credit card information to "verify" the details of my registration? I thought to myself, yeah, this sounds cool...give them my usual false info...then BANG...Please give us your credit card information even though you have selected the free account...We promise that no bad hackers can get your personal information... Whatever...these bozos wont last long... I use everything GOOGLE all day long, and they have never EVER asked me for my credit card.
MPAA and RIAA vs Glide
No way will I ever use this while it asks for a Credit Card when you click Free Subscription.
Why would I give you that? Why do you need access to my money when I have no intention of buying anything from you. After all that was why I selected free.
So basically, it's a system that's let's me let other people see what I have, but they can't copy the file for themselves... Ingenious, from a legal standpoint, but I really doubt it'll pick up. From an older article: "The system is smart enough to identify copyrighted music that has been uploaded by users into the system."http://informationweek.com/story/showArtic le.jhtml?articleID=173402852
If the system is that smart, why would a "no-copying"policy be required? Hmmm ? Since the files being shared aren't copyrighted, I shouldn't be prohibited from sharing them.
Me says this is a piece of schizophrenic software that doesn't really know where it wants to be, and it probably will be too bandwidth hungry for most people to present any kind of interest.
But then again, maybe I haven't understood the thing :-/
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?
David Pogue describes it as "full-blown online operating system"
Right... so why on earth should I give his opinon any creedance when its ovbious he does not even know what an OS does, to me Glide... look like Yet Another Blog Site
The core concept is good. I'd like to be able to store documents online so I could access them from anywhere, and it would also be useful to allow others to see them. But a hundred megabytes isn't much in the way of storage (many of my graphics files are 10-20mb), and I can have twenty times that for free if I just email files to my Gmail account for storage. Sure, they offer more, but the problem is (as the New York Times is finding with it's TimesSelect premium online content) that on the internet, people are used to getting stuff for free.
As for buying them out, I suspect that it would be easiest for Google/Microsoft to simply duplicate the site's functionality while improving on the interface and offering more storage for free.
Pie menus, web services, file sharing and DRM... this has the makings of the longest Slashdot flamewar in history. I suppose the only remaining question is, does it run faster in Gnome or KDE?
They don't even support ogg-vorbis, PNG or OASIS openDocuments.
x
http://www.glidedigital.com/supported_formats.asp
Obligatory: ... with everyone on MS windows. Albeit unwillingly.
For a long time people have been able to share their documents, music,
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
...many others here, I find it very off-putting that I'm required to enter my credit card details for a free trial. That very requirement has just lost them a customer, since I refuse to provide credit card details to people who don't intend to charge me for anything.
:(
I remember free-trial-card-required things like this from a few years back, and I didn't take them up then. I don't really enjoy having sites store my credit card information at all, and wish they wouldn't. After all, what's to stop a billing error, or a hacker harvesting my card number, or a disgruntled employee using my card to buy kiddie porn, or anything else? One-off entry is much nicer. I just wish I knew for sure how many internet stores kept records of my card details, before finding out the hard way one day
Game dev and music blog
...or does this news post seem more like an ad than news? 83% of it is just blather from some journalist whose seems as far from being a Slashdotter as I am from being a Chinese jet pilot.
And here I was thinking that 3dfx's work was all for nothing.
I don't see how this is new. It exists already a long time and it's called .Mac
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Gee, thanks for the 'Troll' mod. I was simply pointing out the fact that if these idiots can't even synchronize access to a simple Image object, how can they be trusted with our (albeit made-up) credit card numbers?
Mods on crack, heh.
The article says:
The Glide of today is already a vast collection of tools. But it's nothing compared with what the company says is on the way: a full-blown Internet music store; an online store that lets you order products by dragging their icons into a shopping-cart "container"; a Unix version; a timeline calendar module; a built-in photo-editing suite; playback of music file formats beyond MP3; and even a corporate version.
All this from a company of only 24 people?
Behold the advantage of open source: a small number of people quickly can make something really cool, by building on code that is already out there. You need to play any music file format? No problem, just hack something together using SOX. Photo-editing suite? Reading multiple image-formats is simple, just take some code from GIMP or SDLimage.
Back in the 90s one of the big selling points of OOP was code reusability saving time developing new products. Didn't work so well then, partly because of the difficulty in developing a collection of high quality parts. What we are seeing now with the internet and open source is a rich library of useful code that anyone can use, so long as they are willing to give back to the community.
Qxe4
Reality or nothing.
as it turns out, when the trial period expires they charge you for the next month, ie. its an *opt-out* 'free' trial.
not only that, but you cant even email them to opt-out, you have to call them during *their* business hours... this really gave me the shits being in singapore and having to wait around till they decide to pick up the phone.
lets hope these characters arent going down that path... roping people into ongoing payments is pretty high on my do not touch list.
mastercard 4929 123 123 123 passes luhn10 -- we use it when testing ecommerce systems.
I started signing up, just to check out the site. Got to the mandatory credit card, pressed Cancel, and probably won't try it again for a few weeks to see if they've changed it. If not, this'll be a service I simply don't use.
Glide: I don't lightly give my credit card number out to random internet sites -- especially when I'm not buying anyting. I'm not paying for the next gimmick until I've seen if it's useful. If you won't let me see if it's useful without my credit card, then you've lost a potential customer, and I've moved on with my life the way it's always been.
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.
TANSTAAFL
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.