Weighed down by heavy restructuring charges, Seagate reported a loss of $81 million, or 16 cents a share, compared to net income in the same quarter last year of $160 million, or 32 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected, on average, a loss of 10 cents per share, excluding special items.

Ugly. And it gets worse. For the year, Seagate said it lost a horrifying $3.09 billion, or $6.32 per share.

But the situation is improving–at least, Seagate hopes so. Looking ahead, the company sees revenue of $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion in the current quarter, better than it had predicted in June. “We are…seeing signs that the storage markets are improving,” Seagate CEO Steve Luczo said in a statement. Later, during a conference later, he added, “We are approaching the September quarter cautiously.”

Announced today and scheduled for beta in May, Vine is a hyperlocal messaging and alert system intended to be used to share information during a crisis. Properly configured, it will gather local news and public safety announcements along with location information, reports and messages from friends–eventually even those posted to other services, like Facebook and Twitter–into a handy little dashboard. This being Microsoft (MSFT), that dashboard will be proprietary and require PCs running XP SP2 or Vista and 600 MB of hard disk space.

So really, Vine is not so much a societal network for people you care about, but for the PC users you care about. A proprietary disaster messaging system… sigh, only from Microsoft.

Anyway…. It’s an interesting idea–not so much as the “societal network” Microsoft touts it as but as a cunning end run around established services. Twitter and Facebook are fun, recreational, but Vine has gravitas. It’s the network you turn to when things fall apart–assuming you meet the proper system requirements–because it consolidates the Tweets and status updates you actually want to read with need-to-know public safety announcements. Of course, Microsoft won’t admit that. “We intend this to be a service of services–to not replace social networking tools that exist today, but embrace them,” Tammy Savage, Microsoft Vine general manager, told TechFlash.

Yeah, embrace and extend and… well, we all know what comes next.

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.

” … Any Apple tablet would have to be, first and foremost, a laptop–not an über-iPhone,” writes Popular Mechanics’ Glenn Derene. “… [It should] have a full keyboard, and since the keyboard generally dictates the size of the screen, I’d propose a 13-in. widescreen. … It could, and should, be 2.5 pounds or less. To achieve that, the tablet should offload heavy components such as the optical drive, making do with, say, a 32 GB solid-state drive rather than a hard-disk drive. … That would let it run a full Leopard OS while delivering long battery life. … [And it] should ship with a desktop dock. … Much more than a simple port replicator, this dock would house a DVD burner (maybe even an HD-DVD/Blu-ray combo drive) and a 500 GB 2.5-in. hard-disk drive that could automatically sync with and back up the SSD onboard the MacBook Plus. The dock would bump up performance with a graphics card that could take over from the MacBook Plus’s motherboard GPU, plus some extra RAM and instructions to the CPU to kick up its clock speed.”

An imaginative little bit of fantasy, this, and one that makes for great reading. That said, if the Apple Industrial Design Group were ever to propose a device like the one pictured above to CEO Steve Jobs, he’d probably hurl them one-by-one from the roof of Apple HQ.

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.”

Odd way to promote your iPod challenger, don’t you think? Apologizing for its mediocrity. “It was just so-so on the software side. I’m sure a year from now we’ll do even better.” And hey, thanks for the $250. We know you could have put it toward an iPod.

Anyway …

As expected, Microsoft unveiled an update to its line of Zune music players yesterday, adding its first flash memory-based models and debuting a new Wi-Fi feature that will automatically synchronize music, photos and videos with PCs in homes with Wi-Fi networks. The company plans to peddle the flash version of Zune with four gigabytes of storage and one with eight gigabytes for $149.99 and $199.99, respectively. A Zune with an 80-gigabyte hard-disk drive will sell for $249.99. All three will arrive at market on November 13th.

Accompanying the new players is Zune Social, an online community where Zune users can keep tabs on one another’s musical tastes and, in a perfect Microsoft world, discover new content they can sample and purchase. “The whole idea behind Zune is much broader than the devices themselves,” J Allard, vice-president of design and development in Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, told the New York Times. “The conditioned thought is around a portable device being the center point of the experience, when in fact it’s not. It really is about how do we start taking Zune beyond that device.”

Sources with knowledge of the announcement tell BetaNews that Redmond is readying both hard disk and flash-based players for the launch. The flash device is said to be similar in size to the second-generation iPod Nano and will reportedly offer video and WiFi support. The existing hard disk drive device is said to be slightly leaner than its predecessor, but otherwise largely unchanged (no word yet on new color schemes, but it will be hard to match UPS brown). Which seems to suggest that Microsoft, against all odds, has managed to make the second-generation Zune just as underwhelming as the first generation.
(Photo courtesy Engadget)