MMO fans, casting spells just got a little easier. Razer, the premier gaming peripherals company, just unleashed the Razer Naga, a mouse created just for you. This right-handed mouse offers a 12-button grid where your thumb sits giving you an alternate way of calling up your keyboard’s spell keys. That leaves your left hand free to work other keyboard controls.
The Naga comes with customization software that lets you create unlimited profiles for supported titles, and also program different in-game commands for each of your characters. For more, check out this YouTube video.
Razer also just introduced the Megasoma, a mousing surface that’s designed to combine the best features of hard and soft mats. Razer says it offers the superior tracking and durability of a hard mat, as well as the smooth glide of a soft mat.
Both products were announced today at Gamescom 2009 in Cologne, Germany. The Naga sells for $79.99 and the Megasoma for $49.99.
It’s already been available in Japan for a little while now, but it looks like folks in the US will soon finally be able to get their hands on Canon’s new VIXIA HF S11 HD camcorder as well. One of the biggest advantages this one has over the previous S10 model is 64GB of internal storage (or twice as much as before), which Canon assures us will let you record a full 24 hours of high definition video — or more if you toss a few SDHC cards in your bag. You’ll also be able to record full HD video in your choice of a 24p Cinema or 30p Progressive modes, capture some 8-megapixel still images, take advantage of features like face detection and a full range of manual controls, and make use of an all new RA-V1 Remote Control Adapter to pair it with various third-party remote controllers. Look for this one to hit in mid-September for $1,399.99, while the remote adapter will set you back $120.
Despite ongoing problems in the company as a whole, Sony’s electronics division is looking on the bright side when it comes to the all-important winter retail season.
Looking ahead to the holidays, Sony Electronics’ Executive Vice President Mike Fasulo said Tuesday at a small media gathering in San Francisco that the gadget maker is hopeful about better sales this year than last.
Sony has high hopes for its touch-screen Walkman this fall.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)
“I’m cautiously optimistic about (holiday retail sales). Though I’m cautious about saying I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said. Among retailers that sell Sony products, there’s also “some notion this will be a better holiday than the previous year.”
Sales of consumer electronics sunk 26 percent in the 2008 holiday season, according to one survey.
Fasulo’s remarks came on a day filled with announcements from Sony, both on the electronics side, and the video game division, Sony Computer Entertainment America. Although it’s only August, the company, like many in its industry, is already gearing up to introduce the products it hopes shoppers will snap up before they head back to school, as well as for holiday gifts.
Sony Electronics introduced a new line of home audio equipment Tuesday, called Altus, that it developed in partnership with Best Buy, though other retailers will eventually offer it too. Altus receivers, speakers, and iPod docks are aimed at a less tech-savvy audience, with minimal setup required.
Sony had itself quite a day yesterday, effectively reinvigorating the PlayStation brand with the $300 PS3 Slim and a host of upgrades and updates to the PSP, the PlayStation Store, and PlayStation Network. Now that the dust has settled, we thought we’d throw down a little recap in case you didn’t catch it all — it’s clear that the lower-priced Slim has a lot of people talking about finally buying a PS3, but we think things like PSP Minis “snackable” games and the new PS3 firmware 3.0 might be equally important in the long run. Here’s the full breakdown: Liveblog:
The Canon Vixia HF S11 equipped with the RA-V1 LANC adapter
(Credit: Matthew Fitzgerald/CNET)
If you’ve a yen to pay $1,399.99 for an HD camcorder, Canon now gives you an option. It extends its HF S10/S100 line upward to the HF S11, which adds another …
Sure, the G11 might grab all the headlines, but there’s tons of meat to the rest of Canon’s new point and shoots. The S90, for instance, packs the same sensor of the G11 into a deliciously compact (though scarily plastic) body, the new SD940 IS Digital ELPH cams show off slim, curved metal bodies befitting their lineage, and the SD980 IS doesn’t sacrifice much in the name of fashion — while using their ultra-sized touchscreens to the utmost. All the cameras we handled were labeled prototype, and so hopefully the d-pad jiggle we detected on most of these (particularly pronounced on the S90) will be rectified before these hit shelves, but otherwise we like what we see so far.
An ambitious group of hardware hackers have taken the fundamental building blocks of computing and turned them inside out in an attempt to make PCs significantly more efficient.
The group has created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules.
The design, called the Illuminato X Machina, is vastly different from the separate processor,memory and storage components that govern computers today.
“We are taking everything that goes into motherboard now and chopping it up,” says David Ackley, associate professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico and one of the contributors to the project. “We have a CPU, RAM, data storage and serial ports for connectivity on every two square inches.”
A modular architecture designed for parallel and distributed processing could help take computing to the next level, say its designers. Instead of having an entire system crash if a component experiences a fatal error, failure of a single cell can still leave the rest of the system operational. It also has the potential to change computing by ushering in machines that draw very little power.
“We are at a point where each computer processor maxes out at 3Ghz (clock speed) so you have to add more cores, but you are still sharing the resource within the system,” says Justin Huynh, one of the key members of the project. “Adding cores the way we are doing now will last about a decade.”
Huynh and his team are no strangers to experimenting with new ideas. Earlier this year, Huynh and his partner Matt Stack created the Open Source Hardware Bank, a peer-to-peer borrowing and lending club that funds open source hardware projects. Stack first started working on the X Machina idea about 10 months ago.
Computing today is based on the von Neumann architecture: a central processor, and separate memory and data storage. But that design poses a significant problem known as the von Neumann bottleneck. Though processors can get faster, the connection between the memory and the processor can get overloaded.That limits the speed of the computer to the pace at which it can transfer data between the two.
“A von Neumann machine is like the centrally planned economy, whereas the modular, bottom up, interconnected approach would be more capitalist,” says Ackley.”There are advantages to a centrally planned structure but eventually it will run into great inefficiencies.”
By creating modules, Huynh and his group hope to bring a more parallel and distributed architecture. Cluster-based systems aren’t new. They have been used in high end computing extensively. But with the Illuminato X Machina they hope to extend the idea to a larger community of general PC users.
“The way to think of this is that it is a system with a series of bacteria working together instead of a complex single cell amoeba,” says JP Norair, architect of Dash 7, a new wireless and data standard. An electrical and computer engineering graduate from Princeton University, Norair has studied modular architecture extensively.
Each X Machina module has a 72 MHz processor (currently an ARM chip), a solid state drive of 16KB and 128KB of storage in an EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-0nly memory) chip. There’s also an LED for display output and a button for user interaction.
Every module has four edges, and each edge can connect to its neighbors. It doesn’t have sockets, standardized interconnects or a proprietary bus. Instead, the system uses a reversible connector. It’s smart enough to know if it is plugged into a neighbor and can establish the correct power and signal wires to exchange power and information, says Mike Gionfriddo, one of the designers on the project.
The X Machina has software-controlled switches to gate the power moving through the system on the fly and a ‘jumping gene’ ability, which means executable code can flow directly from one module to another without always involving a PC-based program downloader.
Each Illuminato X Machina node also has a custom boot loader software that allows it to be programmed and reprogrammed by its neighbors, even as the overall system continues to run, explains Huynh. The X Machina creators hope to tie into the ardent Arduino community. Many simple Arduino sketches will run on the X Machina with no source code changes, they say.
Still there are many details that need to be worked out. Huynh and his group haven’t yet benchmarked the system against traditional PCs to establish exactly how the two compare in terms of power consumption and speeds. The lack of benchmarking also means that they have no data yet on how the computing power of an X Machina array compares to a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo chip.
Programs and applications have also yet to be written for the X Machina to show whether it can be an effective computing system for the kind of tasks most users perform. To answer some of these questions, Ackley plans to introduce the Illuminato X Machina to his class at the University of New Mexico later this month. Ackley hopes students of computer science will help understand how traditional computer programming concepts can be adapted to this new structure.
So far, just the first few steps towards this idea have been taken, says Huynh.
Norair agrees. “If they can successfully get half the power of an Intel chip with a cluster of microcontrollers, it will be a great success,” he says, “because the power consumption can be so low on these clusters and they have a level of robustness we haven’t seen yet.”
See the video to hear David Ackley talk about programming the Illuminato X Machina.
Canon might have announced a slew of new compacts today, but we’re thinking the most exciting news might be this image of the legendary EOS 7D. That flash button would indicate the presence of a built-in flash, and those mic holes hint at video features, but apart from that we’ve got little else to go on — there are whispers that the Best Buy inventory system is listing the body at $2700 and the kit with an EF 28-135 lens at $2900, but we can’t verify those at the moment. We’re dying to find out more about this one, stay tuned.
[Thanks, manhog]
Read – 7D image at dpreview forums Read – 7D in Best Buy systems at Canon Rumors
It really feels as though Canon’s trying to recapture the past, or at least make up for some possibly poor decisions it’s made over the past few years. For instance, though in many ways it …
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By creating modules, Huynh and his group hope to bring a more parallel and distributed architecture. Cluster-based systems aren’t new. They have been used in high end computing extensively. But with the Illuminato X Machina they hope to extend the idea to a larger community of general PC users.
