Razer Co-Founder and Gaming Mouse Inventor Robert Krakoff Has Passed Away | Hacker News Reader

Razer Co-Founder and Gaming Mouse Inventor Robert Krakoff Has Passed Away

vervetimes.com

125 pointsbookofjoe39 comments

Vervetimes is an aggregator site that bloats the original article with copious amounts of obnoxious ads.

Here is the original source: https://www.theverge.com/23050951/razer-co-founder-robert-kr...

I thought the site was The Verge at first... darn quasihomographic domain-names.

>Robert “Razerguy” Krakoff, the co-founder and former president of gaming hardware company Razer, passed away last week at the age of 81.

>In 1999, Krakoff was behind the first-ever gaming mouse: the Razer Boomslang.

He was 58 when founding a company for gaming peripherals, pretty cool IMO. Always make me feel better to see other accomplish successful and fun things later in life and maybe I am not over the hill in tech in my mid forties, never too late etc.

In 2005 he was still responding to customer emails directly.

I sent in some (mostly positive) feedback then, and I got a very thoughtful reply in return including detailing some upcoming plans relating to my mail.

I miss that version of the company.

Heck I miss the version of Razer bold enough to make gaming phones. I tell you what, if Razer came out with a phone with slide-away controls like a modern Xperia Play I would be frothing at the mouth to buy it.

The problem is the android game ecosystem- a lot of the “higher end” mobile games are for iOS (I moved from android to iOS and back several times and it was always easier to find games on iPhone).

Understandably though, with iPhones you have only 5-ish base models to focus your development on (if you're targeting only the currently on sale models), and they're all relatively the same from a hardware perspective spanning three generations of Apple's Bionic CPU/GPU.

In contrast, Android is wildly fragmented which blows up the compatibility and testing matrix, and on top of that all device manufacturers have their own quirks in their implementations, and on top of that you have different versions of the OS, the drivers, kernel patches, ... - in short, Android has been, is and will always be a huge mess.

Why is that not a problem on PC? My non-game programmer intuition would've guessed it's not much different.

On the PC we have only three GPU vendors: AMD, NVIDIA and Intel, all three of which have been around for decades and have substantial commercial contracts to deliver stuff that at least isn't horribly broken, as well as the users regularly updating their drivers in case bugs (or, for major AAA titles, hand-optimized shaders) appear.

Meanwhile in embedded space, Broadcom can't even be arsed to implement PCI Express according to spec for a product of the scale and importance of the Raspberry Pi[1], and Android users have literally no say in updating their devices because they don't even have root access on them. Assuming someone discovers a bug in the GPU side, the bug has to go from the discoverer to the device manufacturer, from there to the SoC vendor, hope that the SoC vendor is willing and able to fix the bug, then that has to go back to the manufacturer, who has to prepare a firmware update, test and certify that with phone carriers and their bloatware, and then ship the updated firmware. As you can guess from the process, that rarely happens for anything except the flagship devices from Samsung and Google.

Anything outside of the x86, mainframe and Apple world can plainly be summarized as "it's a horrible horrible mess".

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-gpu-success

Yep, good luck with getting the soc vendor to look at your bug on IP that's probably EOL'd in their eyes.

Graphics drivers seem to be more broken in the Android ecosystem if Dolphin Emulator’s Twitter is any indication.

Mobile games are for chumps. I'm talking about emulation. Every SoC with a performance profile matching or exceeding a Snapdragon 845 is fully capable of playing the entire GameCube and Playstation 2 library through Dolphin and AetherSX2, to say nothing of older consoles.

Games from when the only way to make money from games was to make good games are better games.

LTT recently did a video revisiting the Razor Boomslang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUw5tR0BdEc

That pretty much fits into the "data" for most companies, and especially high-growth ones are actually made by people well into their 40s if not 50s.

I recall reading this paper[0] which really bursted some of the myths/legends regarding age and entrepreneurship. The take is that a high-growth company happens more rarely to very young individuals compared to older ones. And this makes sense: to run a company you need to fail in order to gain the experience and insight into what means success. This is not to say "give up", but that one should expect ups and downs alongside the road (which let's be honest many of us 'youngsters' [<35] don't do this). [0] https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20180582

The video on that page says its from 2002. So, in that video he was 61!

Its never too late.

For a 61 year old in that video, he looks great

Runs a nice counter to the thread the other day about getting hired past 50.

I found the included case study [1] about a marketing agency designing Razer’s branding and first mouse particularly interesting.

[1]: http://toddpr.com/articles/ProductPR.pdf

>Kärna, which had invented an opto-mechanical encoding wheel that could track a mouse’s movements at 2000 dpi, far higher resolution than other mice at the time.

http://www.dansdata.com/images/boomslang/bswheels480.jpg

Instead of quadrature encoding the disks are filled with little slopes and sensors seem to be taking analog readings. In 1999 it directly competed with optical IntelliMouse Explorer and imo didnt do a good job. The shape was a gimmick and unwieldy - designed purely by marketing (confirmed by Fitch PR material linked in another post here), not someone actually looking into ergonomics (IntelliMouse Optical shape prevails to this day as the go to for all gaming mice).

I've been a sucker for Razer mouses for about 15 years. using Viper Mini right now

Looking for a mouse that requires very little pressure to click the buttons. Any recommendations from the Razer lineup?

Any mouse could be modified to accommodate your needs.

I've repaired like 20 high end gaming mice, and changing the microswitches in them were really easy.

You just have to find any company doing component level notebook board repair, or similar electronics repair in your area, and ask them whether they would do it for you.

Then you just have to find the microswitch with the proper (low actuation force) specs you are looking for.

Didn't know mouse microswitches were standardized/interchangeable. Are they like mechanical keyboard switches?

Where can I learn more about them and buy different kinds?

20? years ago OMRON D2F was the switch to have. Sadly around 2010 OMRON moved all manufacturing to China (D2FC) and quality went down from mice surviving 5-10 years down to max 2, then Chinese started counterfeiting D2F/D2FC and now you can get switches failing within one year.

I don't know about today's but back in the day I always accidentally pressed the mouse buttons on my brother's Diamondback because they were so light to press.

I believe the Diamondback has not been manufactured for a while now though...

Diamondbacks were my favorite mouse, and you might be right as the longer mouse buttons have a bigger leverage on the microswitches.

I've hunted for unboxed diamondbacks a couple of years ago, and some items were available on Ebay, but were priced like 3× MSRP.

Not to take away from the invention (I mean, my gaming mice are optical mice with a higher resolution, what was invented here?) but I've had such bad experiences with Razer that I stopped buying them. Both of my RazerPro stopped working just after 2-3 years. I've had Logitech ones work for 10 years and Roccat ones work for 5 years. A lifespan 2 years is simply unacceptable for me.

Clearly experiences in this thread vary but I just had to throw my story in as it's the same as you. I've bought two Razer mice and quickly regretted it both times. It seems like their QA can burn you if you get unlucky!

Most recently the Viper Mini: After less than two years the main button clicks became spongier and spongier until they started erroneously reporting double-clicks. The razer utility is also a piece of junk! The logitech mouse I had between these two Razers lasted nearly 10 years and was only replaced due to cosmetic wear.

I got a higher-end logitech mouse this time and they now have this 'esports configurator' which lets you set up your keybinds, sensitivity, LEDs etc, and save it to the onboard memory - no need for an always-on utility app and your settings persist on different devices!

I can see your point but Razer had the best gaming mice for quite a while. The Boomslang was sort of revolutionary. My original Diamondback was released almost 20 years ago and there was nothing like it for quite a while.

Remember what Logitech have at the time? Huge, heavy, imprecise dual sensor crap

They'd be good mice if they didn't come with dark-pattern-filled trash software that requires a cloud login to turn off the RGB lights. There was a "workaround" at the time to create an offline installer for your preferred mouse configuration: a completely unnecessary hurdle, created by Razer to annoy customers into logging in --but that was broken, too. The accompanying software, for a mouse, was so excruciatingly bad that I will never buy another device with the Razer name.

Right. I haven't purchased anything Razer since they forced this account thing. Even before that, now that I think about it.

I was just saying they used to be very good at getting great mice in the hands of gamers when no one else would.

Whereas I've had Logitechs fail in months whilst my daily mouse at work has been the same Razer for over a decade now.

It doesn't look very nice though, I'll concede...

soooo when do we buy the coffin with tons of led lights that needs to get a driver update daily?

reboot whenever a new version of the driver is required which changed nothing was seriously destroying my uptime.

Uptime of a gaming PC matters why?

Objectively, probably about as much as pretty LEDs, which is zero. Subjectively, maybe even as much as pretty LEDs, which can be really really high for some people. Given how much Razer counts on people who care about their computers, I wish Razer respected their customers' time and resources more by making their software less intrusive and bloated.

Hmm, I have a Razer Blade laptop and it pretty much runs off stock drivers (directly from Windows Update). The only exception is a single piece of software - Razer Synapse - which can configure settings both for the laptop and the eGPU enclosure I use. It's not a really lean piece of software but really far from bloated ad ridden Vantage thing that I've gotten with a Lenovo?

Yeah, I have a keyboard of theirs. It works, I'll get use out of it but come time to replace I will avoid Razor like the plague thanks to that software.

Next keyboard will have onboard firmware to store settings.

I hate how when I switch the racer death adder mouse from one computer to another their stupid software installer pops up automatically on windows.

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