Yesterday, Seagate (STX) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. (STEC), an early SSD maker, of patent infringement. In the suit, Seagate argues that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering the ways those products communicate with a computer. The company requested an injunction and unspecified damages, which it asks be tripled if STEC is found guilty of willful infringement.

“The public perception has been that solid-state will take over the world and run disk makers out of business, but you can’t bring that product to market without licensing disk-drive technology,” said Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. “STEC infringes on a number of Seagate’s patents which are important to the entire industry. We thought they would have to learn how to do storage differently to avoid our patents, but they decided to go ahead and violate them. … We have spent $7 billion over the last 10 years to optimize how our disks work. This is the first lawsuit brought by a hard-disk company against a solid-state company. We are protecting the entire industry.”

That’s an altruistic way of looking at litigation that Watkins suggested in an interview in March was designed to protect Seagate’s own turf. After all, a Seagate victory in the suit could pave the way for cross-licensing agreements, not just with STEC, but with other SSD makers as well.

Today Fert of the Université Paris-Sud in France and Grünberg of Forschungszentrum in Jülich, Germany, were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work that made “1,000 songs in your pocket” a reality.

“In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect–giant magnetoresistance, or GMR,” the academy’s prize citation explains. “Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. Soon researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads. In 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.”

Amazing, yeah? Without Fert and Grünberg’s work, we’d be lucky to store a single song in our iPods.

“It’s no good having computer hard drives that can store gigabytes of information if we can’t access it,” Jim Al-Khalili, physics professor at the University of Surrey, told the Financial Times. “The technology that has appeared thanks to the discovery of GMR has allowed hard-disk sensors to read and write much more data, allowing for bigger memory, cheaper and more reliable computers. GMR is one of those wonderful phenomena from the weird world of quantum physics that has been put to use very quickly.”

Asked if he’d ever thought his discovery would have such an impact on consumer electronics, Fert told the Associated Press, “You can never predict in physics. … These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say “‘Wow, he’s using something I put together in my mind.’ It’s wonderful.”

Macworld San Francisco is still quite a ways off, but the Mac rumor mill is gearing up already. 9to5Mac, which correctly predicted the recent iPod Nano redesign, says Apple may be prepping a new, slimmer line of MacBooks. The rumored machines reportedly feature black-aluminum and silver-aluminum enclosures and a “strange” touchpad, and are slimmer than current MacBook Pros.

Slim enough to require one of those bottom-mounted optical disk drives? We’ll have to wait for the follow-up rumors to find out.

Three days after the New York Times reported that an unnamed Chinese technology company was intent on acquiring Seagate, the hard-drive maker said that wasn’t really the case. “Seagate is not for sale,” said company spokesman Woody Monroy.

Seems the acquisition over which Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said “the U.S. government is freaking out” is largely a hypothetical one. “In general there has been speculation or discussion that there are some Chinese companies that would be interested in buying an American disk-drive company,” Monroy said. “I think Bill [Watkins] was speaking in general [terms to the New York Times]. There’s nothing, from our perspective, more to say about that other than to clarify that Seagate is not for sale. We haven’t had any offers or bids made for Seagate.”