Saturday Tech Blurbs

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The company said in a statement late Monday that it will begin mass production in mid-2005 of new 1.8-inch drives with capacities of 40GB and 80GB. Similar-size drives currently top out at 60GB. Apple did not immediately announce plans to incorporate the drives in future products, but new iPod configurations have closely tracked Toshiba hard-drive developments. Toshiba announced plans for a 60GB hard drive in June, followed a few months later by Apple's unveiling of a 60GB color-screen iPod.

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Initially, MMCmicro cards will only be available in 32MB, 64MB and 128MB sizes. Samsung says data can be read off the cards at 10MB per second and written to them at 7MB per second. The interface between card and handset can theoretically support a maximum transfer speed of 26MB per second.

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The drive, which fits into a standard USB type A socket, is 12-millimeters wide, 4.5mm high and 31.75mm long. The sturdy metal housing is intended to make the USB card suitable for use in a range of environments.

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In a milestone for Internet-based traffic services, Yahoo has beefed up its existing mapping services to allow customers to plot a route from one local destination to another, and overlay traffic data such as road speeds and potential delays.

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Meanwhile, the "ocean" on Titan may not be. Instead of a liquid body of water, the dark mass seen on the surface of the Titan may be a viscous fluid flowing onto the white "coastline," Parco said. Then again, the viscous fluid could be flowing down from a higher altitude, like a glacier, onto the white mass.

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Following more than a decade of joint development with HP, Intel released the first Itanium chip in 2001 to an unenthusiastic market. Years of delays on the project had meant that subsequent generations of other Intel chips offered superior levels of price and performance, many analysts have said.

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The goal is to create a self-sustaining solar industry in 10 years, making the zero-pollution power source so commonplace and cheap that costly incentives are no longer necessary, Joe Desmond, Schwarzenegger's deputy secretary for energy, said Monday.