pegasus

Pegasus statue fashioned from 3,500 phones

In Greek mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse that was very handy when it came to slaying monsters. Huawei is hoping its Pegasus smartphone sculpture at Mobile World Congress 2012 will help slay some competitors.

As the Chinese manufacturer pulled the wraps off what it calls the world's fastest smartphone, the Ascend D Quad, it also unveiled this striking statue outside the MWC venue in Spain. … Read more

High-tech ghost town planned for New Mexico

Families and retirees come to New Mexico to chill in the sun; aliens come to crash-land their ships; scientologists come to build secret compounds and prepare to visit the aliens; the government comes to hide the crashed alien ships and blow stuff up; and studios come to make movies about all of the above. Now, a private company is coming to build a 20-square-mile ghost town of the future.

D.C.-based Pegasus Global Holdings is planning to build the model city to test new and up-and-coming technologies such as smart grids, renewable energy, intelligent traffic systems and next generation Wi-Fi. The company says the huge facility, dubbed "The Center," would likely be located somewhere near the Albuquerque or Las Cruces metro areas, giving the company access to multiple Interstate corridors, nearby national labs, universities, and military installations.… Read more

Promise Pegasus R6 review: Thunderbolt is here

If you're looking for a storage device that only a few deserving computers can handle, Promise Technology's Thunderbolt-enabled Pegasus R6 external hard drive is for you. It's a storage device like no other.

And it was hard to review it. For one thing, as it's the first storage device with Thunderbolt, we needed to think of a new set of tests for it while still comparing it with existing storage devices in a way that makes sense. However, the hardest part was not the logistics but how to rate the drive.

As Thunderbolt currently offers 10Gbps … Read more

Thunderbolt vs. USB 3.0: Why it's a lose-lose

Ever since Intel announced Thunderbolt and made it exclusively available to Macs, Windows users have been wondering if they are missing out. The truth is: yes, they are, big-time. I've been working with the first Thunderbolt storage device, the Pegasus R6 from Promise, and find it to be the fastest consumer-grade storage device out there, period. (Stay tuned for my full review, coming up soon.)

On the other hand, since Macs generally don't support USB 3.0, which has been out for a long time and is becoming more and more popular in the PC world, Mac users have also been missing out quite a bit. Many people are wondering which is better, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0. This is a hard question, as Thunderbolt is about more than data storage; it's also about video transport, connectivity, expandability, and synced audio. However, strictly in terms of storage applications, neither is better. Consumers should really have both. The current separation of the two standards is a lose-lose situation for Windows and Mac users alike. … Read more

Promise ships first Thunderbolt storage solution

It's been a while since Intel announced Thunderbolt, but now the first storage solution based on the new peripheral standard is finally available for purchase, if you can afford it.

Promise, one of the hardware vendors that participated along with LaCie in the Intel Thunderbolt event with demo products, announced today that it is now shipping the Pegasus line of high-performance RAID storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology. LaCie, on the other hand, says it will ship its own Thunderbolt device sometime this summer.

The line includes four- and six-bay external storage enclosures that offer between 4TB and 12TB of … Read more

Thunderbolt is go from Apple

Thunderbolt became more than just a Mini DisplayPort with potential this morning. The iMac and MacBook Pro both received Thunderbolt-related software updates yesterday, and this morning the Apple store has added the first Thunderbolt cable, as well as the first Thunderbolt peripheral in the form of the Promise Pegasus R6 external RAID array.

The cable costs $49 and works for both data and display connections. The RAID drive is a bigger commitment, starting at $1,499 for the 6TB model. Apple has previously mentioned eight Thunderbolt devices, ranging from external storage to video capture hubs, but as of this morning, … Read more

Sync to-do lists and blow away terrorists: iPhone apps of the week

If you've been checking out the most popular list at the iTunes App Store recently, you might have noticed that a new game has reached the top of the charts--even unseating the mega-popular Angry Birds. It's called Cut the Rope and it challenges you to feed candy to a hungry little monster named Om Nom by cutting various ropes to direct the candy to his waiting mouth. It's a little hard to describe here, so check out Rick Broida's coverage of Cut the Rope here.

Beating out Angry Birds at the top of the charts is no small feat (it's been sitting pretty there for months), so it got me thinking about what type of game reaches the top of the iTunes App Store.

It seems you must have polish--both games were obviously painstakingly produced. From the main characters down to the menus and even the design of the buttons, the whole experience captures the ambiance the developers are trying to convey making the game more immersive. Both games have extremely cute characters; each of the different birds are adorable in their anger, and the little green monster Om Nom couldn't be cuter when he opens wide for the candy. Both games have simple controls that can be played by anyone--this seems to be the biggest factor. Just about anyone from any age group can grasp the simple controls, but the games are still plenty challenging.

Finally, you need airtight audio, with little nuanced and silly additions like the muttering birds in Angry Birds, or the sigh of sadness when the candy misses Om Nom's mouth. Judging from these games' success, it seems as though the combination of these ingredients casts the widest net for capturing most iPhone gamers' hearts.

So what will the next big iPhone game be? My bet is \it will include all of these ingredients. You can be sure there are developers working right now to capture that perfect combination that makes a hit at the App Store. The only question is, what's the next big hit?

This week's apps include a cloud-synced to-do list manager and an excellent sequel to one of the best first-person shooters on the iPhone.… Read more

Microsoft opens up to Linux for System Center, but on a very short leash

Today Microsoft announced its System Center's ability to deliver automated management across heterogeneous IT environments, such as UNIX and Linux, as Sam Ramji notes on his blog. Great news, I suppose, in that Microsoft increasingly understands that it's not the center of the universe anymore.

The agent infrastructure Microsoft is building to interoperate with UNIX and Linux is built leveraging industry standards and open source such as WS-Management and OpenPegasus....It simply makes great technical and business sense to cooperate with the OpenPegasus community to build upon industry-standards based cross-platform technology.

Indeed it does, Sam, which is why … Read more