Researchers from the Tohoku University, in conjunction with Sony have announced the active development of a "blue-violet ultrafast pulsed semiconductor laser" that will be used for disc storage.

Say the researchers: "This latest successful development is an all-semiconductor laser picosecond pulse source with a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers (1 nm = one-billionth of a meter) in the blue-violet region. It is capable of generating optical pulses in the ultrafast duration of 3 picoseconds (1 picosecond = one-trillionth of a second), with ultrahigh output peak power of 100 watts and repetition frequency of 1 gigahertz. Advanced control of the newly-developed and proprietarily-constructed GaN-based mode-locked semiconductor laser and semiconductor optical amplifier have enabled peak output power in excess of 100 watts to be achieved, which is more than a hundred times the world's highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers."

Additionally, "there are high expectations that this newly-developed semiconductor laser system, which incorporates semiconductor diodes, will be able to be used in a much wider range of applications in the future thanks to technology such as this, which enables the size of devices such as the light source box to be drastically reduced."

Sony says they will use the laser in next-generation disc storage devices, as the laser will allow for discs to hold up to 1TB of storage.

I, for one, would love to have full seasons of television shows on one disc.

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Dell and its founder Michael S. Dell have agreed to pay over $100 million in penalties to settle charges of accounting fraud brought forward by the SEC.

The computer maker was accused of misleading investors after it used money received from Intel to pad its bottom line. Without the money, the company would have likely fallen short of analyst expectations, thus leading to a hit on their stock price.

Intel paid Dell the money as "rebates," part of shady agreement that would ensure Dell used Intel processors in their computers and not rival processors from AMD.

Dell eventually started offering computers with processors from AMD, and Intel cut the rebate checks. This led to a downturn in the computer maker's finances, and a hit on the stock share price, losing investors money.

"Dell manipulated its accounting over an extended period to project financial results that the company wished it had achieved but could not," says Christopher Conte, associate director of the S.E.C.'s enforcement division. "Dell was only able to meet Wall Street targets consistently during this period by breaking the rules."

In a separate lawsuit, filed in 2007, Dell was sued over selling faulty computers to not only individual consumers, but also to corporations and big universities who needed Dell's OptiPlex business units.

Over the last couple of months unsealed documents in the long-standing case have been revealed, showing that Dell employees knew that the company was selling faulty units, and decided to instead play off the issues, allowing the corporations and schools use the computers, at risk to their business.

There will likely be a settlement in that case soon, as well.

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Steven Bird, the dev who goes by the alias "Birdman" has posted today that he has successfully rooted the Motorola Droid X, just six days after launch, easing worries that the locked-down smartphone would take weeks or even months to root.

There have been no custom ROMs created yet, but those are likely in the works over the next few weeks.

Says Phil Nickinson of Android Central: "We're talking root access, not custom ROMs just yet. But it's a big step. You'll need to be handy with the command line (and if you can copy and paste, you should be) and read the instructions, because everything on the Droid X will have root access after this."

Root access, and eventually custom ROMs, will give Droid X owners the advantages that other rooted Android device owners have, including the ability to backup your system to the SD card, superuser access to the Android operating system, running apps that require root, the ability to remove all apps installed on your phone (including MotoBLUR) and the ability to save apps to the SD card, to save internal memory space.

You can view a full tutorial here: Gaining root access to the Droid X

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Microsoft has set the lofty goal of selling 30 million Windows 7 phones over the next few years, and the company has apparently gotten off to a quick start, purchasing a handset for all of their 90,000 employees.

Mary Jo Foley, the Microsoft guru behind ZDNet, tweeted the move today, retweeting a Microsoft employee: "90K down... just under 30 million to go: RT @simchabe: Woot. Every single microsoft employee will get a windows phone 7 #mgx"

Earlier in the day, senior product manager for Microsoft Greg Sullivan confirmed that Dell, Asus, LG, HTC and Samsung each have Windows Phone 7 devices in the pipeline.

Dell has already announced theirs, the extremely elegant Lightning, which uses Windows Phone 7, has a large 4.1-inch OLED screen, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a full QWERTY keypad, 512MB RAM, 1GB ROM, 8GB of internal storage for music, movies, etc, a 5MP camera with LED flash, and Adobe Flash, DivX and Microsoft Silverlight support.

Aiming to differentiate itself from the iPhone and Android phones, which use home screens of widgets and icons, Microsoft says it has tried to blend applications together for a more "integrated experience," allowing the OS and applications to "share information with the user in a natural and seamless fashion."

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AT&T, the second largest wireless carrier in the United States posted their quarterly earnings today, announcing a 26 percent jump in profit on a slight increase in revenue.

The company said they activated 3.2 million iPhones and an overall net wireless subscriber gain of 1.6 million.

Profit rose from $3.02 billion to $4.01 billion year-on-year, with revenue staying about even at $30.8 billion, up from $30.7 billion.

AT&T added that its U-verse TV revenues exceeded $1 billion for the first time, with subscribers jumping to 2.5 million, a 60 percent gain.

"We continue to see positive signs of growth in almost every customer segment of our business, especially wireless, which speaks to the quality of our execution and our leadership in the industry's most powerful growth driver -- mobile broadband," says Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO.

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Microsoft reported their latest quarterly earnings today and the company had its best quarter ever, thanks mainly to incredibly strong sales of the Windows 7 operating system.

The software giant says they have sold about 175 million licenses of Window 7, making it easily the fastest selling operating system in the company's history.

Furthermore, consumers and especially corporations have increased their purchases of Microsoft software.

Microsoft posted revenue of $16.04 billion, on 22 percent growth. Earlier this week, rival Apple posted their best quarter ever as well, seeing revenue of $15.7 billion.

The company had net profit of $4.52 billion, a 33 percent jump year-on-year.

Sales of Windows rose to $4.55 billion from $3.17 billion and sales of Office and other software rose to $5.25 billion from $4.57 billion.

The company's Entertainment and Devices group, which includes the Xbox 360 and Zune players, lost $172 million, closing in on profitability.

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During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has confirmed that the company, under the new management of HP, will also be creating WebOS netbooks, alongside tablets, smartphones and printers.

Says Rubinstein: "We're working a wide variety, as Todd said, smartphones definitely, slates, netbooks, working with the guys in the printer group. webOS [...] will have a unified user interface across all of these, will have a unified developer environment, and it's all based on the foundation that we build in webOS from day one.

When we developed webOS, we thought about making this scalable across a variety of mobile devices; that's what we'll be delivering going forward."

While tablets, printers and smartphones had been confirmed in the past by either HP or Palm, netbooks had only vaguely been mentioned.

In April, HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, after outbidding RIM, Apple and Lenovo.

With the acquisition, the company also acquired all of Palm's patents and its WebOS mobile operating system.

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