Just in time for Father’s Day, Toshiba America Consumer Products, L.L.C. (”Toshiba”) announces two new HD DVD promotions to help make shopping for dad easy.

Working to ensure dads get the high definition set up they crave, Toshiba is offering a variety of rebates on HD DVD players.

NEW - Instant Rebates:
- From May 20 through June 9, movie enthusiasts that purchase an HD-A2 HD DVD player will receive a $100 in-store instant rebate.
- From June 10 through June 16, consumers that purchase any Toshiba HD DVD player will receive a $100 in-store instant rebate.
For individuals seeking the complete home theater package, an HD DVD player can be purchased with any Toshiba 42″ or larger HDTV for a $200 in-store instant rebate.

Attention Matrix Fans: If dad is a fan of the Matrix movies, there is more exciting news: The Complete Matrix Trilogy and The Ultimate Matrix Collection will be released by Warner Home Video in high definition only on HD DVD on May 22.

Regulators approved Apple Inc.’s iPhone for sale in the United States on Thursday paving the way for the much anticipated device to be sold by the wireless unit of AT&T in late June.

News of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission certification helped send Apple shares up 2.2 percent to $109.70 in late afternoon trading.

“That’s the primary reason why the stock’s up today,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research, adding that it was welcome news despite there being little doubt the device would win approval.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is migrating off a 1,600 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) mainframe to IBM System p servers running AIX and x86 Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) servers running Linux, with the first part of the move going live today.

Francis Feldman, the vice president of the shared data center for Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC), the NYSE’s technology arm, said the bottom line for the migration was the bottom line. He estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions, and though he wouldn’t detail how much that would mean on a yearly basis, he said it is “serious financial savings, very serious.”

Microsoft said that it has voted in favor of making OpenDocument Format, or ODF, a recognized standard at the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

The company said it also anticipates that its Open XML File Formats will be submitted and approved by ANSI as well.

More than 5,000 letters written by Charles Darwin have been put online at the Darwin Correspondence Project, a sister project to the Darwin Online database collated and maintained by researchers at the Cambridge University Library.

The letters are fully searchable, and reveal much about the personal as well as scientific endeavours of the so-called father of evolution.

For instance, we can all now read for ourselves that Darwin was looking forward to the trip on The Beagle, which he described as a “magnificent scheme” for “larking around the world”. This was the journey that would allow him time on the Galapagos Islands, which inspired much of his thinking on natural selection.

There are also letters he exchanged with scientific colleagues and rivals. For instance, he corresponded with fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace published a paper detailing his own thoughts on evolution through natural selections, a theory he had developed independently of Darwin’s work.

A civilian member of Metropolitan Police Service staff, Thomas Lund-Lack, was arrested last night in connection with the leaking of information to a reporter.

Lund-Lack is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court today, charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Act and misconduct. He is claimed to have passed an intelligence report claiming that Al Qaeda was planning a UK attack on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki” to the Sunday Times.
Click here to find out more!

The Sunday Times ran a story to this effect on 22 April, claiming that it had been passed a report compiled by JTAC (Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre).

Firefox users have something new to brag about. Security vendor Secunia reports that users of the open-source browser are more likely to have installed the latest security updates than Web surfers running Internet Explorer or Opera.

Secunia’s analysis is based on more than 350,000 software checks, performed over the past five months by its free Secunia Software Inspector service.

According to Secunia, 5.19 percent of all Firefox 2 users had missed security updates. For IE6, which is used by nearly half of all Web surfers, that number was 9.61 percent. Microsoft’s latest IE7 browser had a number much closer to Firefox’s results: 5.40 percent.

Opera was the least likely to be patched. 11.96 percent of all Opera 9.x browsers were missing updates, Secunia found.

What a day for Apple investors. The stock started off strong today on a lot of pre-market buying, despite news that Amazon will finally start competing on sales of DRM-free music.

Then, whoops, at 11:49 AM EST Engadget posted saying that the iPhone and Leopard operating system launches would be seriously delayed. They based the story on an internal Apple email that was forwarded to them.

Apple’s stock promptly tanked on massive selling, going from $107.89 to $103.42 in six minutes (11:56 - 12:02). This wiped just over $4 billion off of Apple’s market capitalization. A lot of people lost a lot of money very quickly.

Well, it turns out that the email was a hoax. In an update, Engadget said that the email was in fact sent from Apple’s internal email system, but that it was not accurate. Apple quickly notified Engadget of the error, saying “This communication is fake and did not come from Apple. Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in October.”

By 12:22 Apple stock had mostly recovered and it ended the day down just $1.40/share, or $1.25 billion in market cap.