Razer Announces Long-Overdue Peripheral Settings Cloud Service

[Rob Williams]

In 2006, Razer released the world's first gaming peripherals with built-in memory for storing profiles, and today, you would almost have to go out of your way to purchase a high-end gaming mouse without the same feature. Razer called its original implementation "Synapse", and today, the company has announced its cloud-based counterpart, Synapse 2.0.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Jakal]

Why did they even go through the trouble to set that service up? If you save your profile to your computer you can just load it to a different mouse...

How often have you went to a LAN party and your mouse DIDN'T work? I have never once had that issue.
AND
If there's no way to share you profile IT CAN'T BE STOLEN.

Directly from the product link:

On-board memory, with its limited storage for user profiles, becomes obsolete when Razer Synapse 2.0 offers essentially unlimited space for all of your hardware settings.

Isn't it possible to save profiles to your computer? Jump drive? With Synapse 2.0 now I have the option to lose a useful profile to the "cloud" when I DON'T have internet connectivity. Fantastic!

Most games have built in mouse speed/sensitivity. I know dpi switches are important for snipers/speed, but how often does that get changed? Only thing I can see being useful are keybinds which are saved pc side anyway..

So please, tell me why was this created. Why go through the trouble of setting up a service that now creates ANOTHER security issue for what was never a security issue. Mouse profiles.. yeah that's what I want to steal...

Razer, seriously. What were you thinking?

 

[marfig]

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. [...] The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."
-- Larry Ellison, CEO - Oracle Corporation

 

[Kougar]

Granted, it's kinda silly for a mouse profile. But I wouldn't knock cloud computing itself... Gmail counts as cloud computing, and I am not the only person that very much relies on that service.

Having Steam's cloud service remember game presets, profiles, and settings across multiple installs on different installations, I'd shudder to have to go back to the old school method of manually configuring everything!

Actually, come to think of it Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 8... just use your Live account info to automatically import your desktop settings, profile, and apparently apps into a new installation or someone else's computer. It certainly has potential.

 

[marfig]

The issue is that what some overly excited marketing department likes to call Cloud, we call it server-client relationship and network data storage, which is older than dirt. When the press follows up with this travesty, we have yet another term being artificially introduced and misused to the point of becoming meaningless.

Larry is right. It's just fashion design.

There's also the argument how user-unfriendly this whole move is. I choose to stay out of it because I don't own -- and now surely don't plan to anymore -- a Razer mouse. That said, I fully understand the grief this move produces, since the whole idea of constantly and increasingly moving all my computer storage capacity to online and out of my control infrastructures is like putting my hand on the mouth of the wolf. Not only we don't have yet an internet technology capable of guaranteeing security (the internet infrastructure and base protocols are 40 year old and not capable of handling today's security challenges as it has become more then obvious over the years), but we cannot even guarantee we can stay online at all times we require this data. It's not in our control.