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An Alabama woman has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the iPhone 3G's network is slower than advertised.

In a 10-page complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Northern Alabama, Birmingham resident Jessica Alena Smith charged Apple with breach of express and implied warranty and with unjust enrichment. Smith, who refers to the phone she purchased throughout the complaint as "Defective iPhone 3G," is seeking class action status.

The lawsuit claims that Apple's iPhone 3G advertising campaign is misleading.

"Defendant intended for customers to believe its statements and representations about the Defective iPhone 3Gs, and to trust that the device was 'twice as fast at half the price'," the lawsuit states.

The charges in the lawsuit mirror widespread complaints about the iPhone 3G's reception that have crisscrossed the Internet since Apple and AT&T released the successor to the original iPhone on July 11. Affected owners have said the iPhone 3G will switch between 3G networks and EDGE networks even when the device is sitting still and that they will lose reception in the middle of a call while in a 3G-rich environment.

"Immediately after purchase, plaintiff soon noticed that her Internet connection, receipt and sending of e-mail, text messages and other data transfers were slower than expected and advertised," the lawsuit states.

After weeks of silence regarding the complaints, Apple finally acknowledged earlier this week that reception issues existed. An Apple representative told the Associated Press that the iPhone OS 2.0.2 software update, released Monday, is designed to provide "improved communication with 3G networks."

But Monday's update was labeled with the briefest of descriptions--"bug fixes"--making it difficult to know exactly what was addressed with the update.

The suit asks that Apple be ordered to repair or replace all defective devices and pay unspecified damages, interest, and attorney fees.

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar - without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.

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Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.

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Gmail Notifier 0.6.3.8

Categories

• Alerts & Updates

The original notifier for Gmail. Supports checking multiple accounts as well as Gmail Hosted accounts.

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Like so many pursuits in life, it is easy for blogs to get stuck in an intermediate rut. I know, because I've been there. My site, Herbivoracious.com, has hit several plateaus in its first year of life. Each time the visits started to level out, I debated whether it was worth the effort to keep writing if only a few people were going to read it.

Naturally I wondered what it would take to get more exposure for my site. So I began to research all of the great information out there on promoting your blog. And there is no shortage of advice. I know, because I've spent countless hours reading articles, with more tips than you could ever follow - some of them contradictory.

Aaron & Giovanna's Blogger's Guide to Search Engine Optimization provided the most straightforward and usable techniques that I found, and since I've put them into play, my search hits have gone up dramatically, as you can see:

In this article I'll share with you some of their ideas that I found especially easy and effective to implement, along with a few practical suggestions of my own.

Allocate Your Time Wisely

When I lived in Milwaukee, I used to pass a corner grocery whose hand-painted sign said "Where Cash Is King". If the Internet could paint a sign for itself, it would say "Where Content Is King".

Far and away the most important thing you can do on your blog is write great posts and include great pictures and video. Even if you manage to draw visitors to a site with relatively few, crappy articles, they won't come back. The search engines are actually pretty smart, and they aren't going to send traffic to you if there isn't value there, and other quality sites aren't going to link to you either. Besides, how happy are you going to be if you aren't proud of your material? You won't be blogging for long.

So bottom line, you should be spending at least 80% of your time developing content, and only 20% improving the site. Naturally it will be sporadic. I've had brief periods, such as when I recently added this Visual Index, where I spent a ton of time on site design. But most weeks I don't mess with the blog at all, I just write my posts. Remember that your design is a work in progress, don't feel as if you have to perfect it out of the gate.

Get Off The Beaten Path

It is a lot easier to be a big fish in a small pond than a minnow in the ocean. If your posts are all on extremely popular topics, it will be hard for them to get to the front page of a search engine no matter how good they are. That is where the long tail of the curve comes in. This post I wrote about making fluffy couscous is number 5 on Google for "how to make couscous", and generates traffic every day. Imagine how much more effective that is than a post about chocolate chip cookies, which everyone and their grandmother has written about. The same is true in any subject area. Your thoughts about what a fine orator Barack Obama is are no doubt incisive, but probably not going to send you a lot of hits.

Get To Know Your Blogging Platform

When I first started blogging, I was happy enough to use a basic template. Before long I'd graduated to the pro level of TypePad, where I could tweak my own CSS. Then when I was ready to do more sophisticated design and SEO, I moved to their top-of-the-line Advanced Templates system so I can implement just about any feature I want.

Whichever blog platform you use, there is a lot of power under the hood. Don't expect to absorb it all at once, but learn about the pieces that are relevant to your current goals, and build an arsenal over time. Even the simplest things, like knowing how to schedule posts for future delivery so you can keep content flowing during a vacation, can make a huge difference.

Besides reading the documentation for your platform, learn which external websites are considered the experts and hang out there. For example, John T. Unger's TypePad Hacks is a legendary resource for TypePad users. Many of the concepts I learned from SEOBook were then implemented using code I found there.

Get To Know An Analytics Tool

Your blogging platform or host probably let's you do a basic review of your referrer logs. You should look at them regularly to get a sense of how your traffic is doing and where it is coming from. Before long you are going to want to dig deeper. I recommend Google Analytics because it is free, easy to set up and use, and let's you drill down deep to figure out what is and isn't working on your site.

Likewise, you should immediately move your RSS feed over to FeedBurner. It is also free, they will give you good stats on people that are reading your content without going to the site, and lots of useful features too. Their FeedFlare service let's you trivially add links so that users can socially share your post via digg/stumble/facebook/email and so forth.

Don't Waste My Time, Man

There are a ton of sites out there that offer badges and widgets which promise to network traffic too and from your site. I won't name names, but for the most part I think this is a waste of time. At least in my niche, I just never saw any significant hits coming in from them, and they make your blog look like a tacky MySpace page, which will cause visitors to click away in horror.

Also, until you are getting at least 1,000 page views a day, don't waste a lot of time on monetization. (Unless of course the point of your blog is to review products). On Herbivoracious I have Google AdSense between posts, adsdaq ads, and a featured publisher deal with a food blog aggregator. I also include Amazon affiliate links whenever I mention a food, utensil, or book that my readers might like. I've screwed around a fair amount with the types of ads, positioning, and style. My total earnings from all of that is negligible, maybe $50/month. I probably shouldn't tell you that, but I want to be honest to spare you the pain of thinking you are doing it wrong. If I were doing it over, I'd skip it for the first year and just focus on building content and credibility.

Along those lines, you need to be realistic about your niche. Herbivoracious is sort of triply niched: food > vegetarian > fine dining, which means that my readers are loyal but not necessarily legion. I don't have any illusion that it can have the same readership as Gizmodo! It might someday lead to a book deal, or a job offer or some other amazing thing, but it is unrealistic to think it can ever be my day job.

Finally, please don't bother trying to do so-called Black Hat SEO. Google is smarter than you. Trust me. No link farms. No hidden text on your pages. Don't try to spam StumbleUpon or digg. All you are going to do is get yourself blackballed.

Optimize Your Design

There are a few basic things you should do in your design to make sure that both users and search engines can find your best content.

• Write good page titles with specific keywords, preferably near the beginning. For example, imagine I started with a hypothetical post title of "Recipe: Tofu Grilled With Lemongrass And Thai Chilis". "Recipe" is generic and though useful, is going to appear on millions of pages, so let's move it to the end to get "Tofu Grilled With Lemongrass and Thai Chilis - Recipe". I thought I was done at this point, but when Aaron reviewed this article, he pointed out that using keyword suggestion tools we can see that people search for "grilled tofu" rather than "tofu grilled", so let's make our final title "Grilled Tofu With Lemongrass and Thai Chilis - Recipe". The other descriptors (lemongrass, Thai chilis) will help people envision the dish, and will generate search results as well, because of the long tail we discussed above.
• Be sure your meta description tag for each post is clear, as it can appears in search results. Well written descriptions increase the odds that a user will actually click to your page.
• The meta keywords tag, on the other hand, is pretty useless. Search engines mostly ignore them because they are so easily manipulated. So set them if it is easy for you but don't worry about it.
• Put a caption on every image you use, so that image search engines will find them. Set the alt attribute on the img tag as well.
• Include a navigation bar that encourages new users to find your best content. For example, I have a "Most Popular Recipes" link. People who look at your best stuff are more likely to subscribe and visit often.
• Prominently feature links for readers to subscribe via RSS or email.
• If you feel comfortable, include a picture of yourself - people relate to faces.
• Include a "recent comments" section in your sidebar, and then be sure and respond to most or all comments. When other users see that you, the author, are responding they will be more likely to join in.
• Include a "recent posts" (or "related posts") list after each post. When the user reaches that decision point after an article, they will be encouraged to remain on your site longer.
• Simplify, and then simplify some more. Make sure that everything on your site is there for a reason, especially the stuff "above the fold" on the front page. If you've got something useless on there, those are pixels that could be left pleasingly blank, or could be put to work driving traffic. For example, I replaced my list of Archives By Date which was filling a few hundred pixels of sidebar space, with a popup that serves the same function. The date archives are pretty obligatory, but really how many of my readers are looking for what I wrote in November, 2007 specifically? The popup fills the need but saves the pixels.

Don't Forget, SEO is Only Part of the Traffic Story

Besides creating great content and optimizing for search engines, there are a lot of other things you can do to build traffic. Here's are some of the keys, each of which is worth of a whole article:

• Build relationships with other bloggers, especially those in your niche and in your geographic area. You can start this by commenting respectfully on their blogs, or dropping them an email. Don't ask for favors until you know someone a little. Instead, do small favors for them like linking to their blog, commenting with valuable info, suggesting related story ideas, participating in contests or surveys they are running and so forth.
• While you are reading other blogs, don't just skim to find stuff you can comment on. Go deep, and learn from what is working for each author. Don't try to copy their style. Be yourself but accumulate good ideas that you can incorporate.
• Learn about non-blog websites in your niche. For example, TasteSpotting, FoodGawker, and PhotoGrazing are invaluable for food blogs with good photography. They send hundreds of hits to each of my posts that they accept, and those are well targeted visitors that love food and have the potential to visit Herbivoracious regularly. Urbanspoon not only links all my restaurant reviews, they provide me with a way for users to automatically see the location, phone number and hours of each business, and simple social ranking. What are the equivalents in your neck of the net?
• The web is a huge place and you can't know everything that is happening on it, but you can use Google Alerts to keep track of new web pages that refer to you or your site, and to keywords that are relevant to your niche. If someone writes about you, be sure and say thanks and go comment on that page. When a topic you care about comes up, strike while the iron is hot and write a post too. Watching your logs and analytics data pays off here too. If you see a burst of hits coming in from a site you didn't know about, go check it out right away and see what you can do to to help that trend continue!

Wrap It Up, I'll Take It

Blogging can be great fun, whether it is primarily an outlet for your thoughts, a way to showcase your talents or build your credibility as an asset to your profession or business, or even as a way to directly make money. If monetization really is your primary goal, you should definitely dive deep into the business side and do Aaron's SEO Training Course. If your goals are more modest (at least for now), the tips above should help you get your hits growing in an encouraging direction.

By : Michael Natkin
source : Seobook

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By the way it would be nice to see what you guys did with the devkit. If you wanna show off your artwork, join the Smiley Flickr Group and post your smilies. Im curious…

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Source : http://www.bartelme.at/journal/archive/smiley_devkit/

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Windows XP is the only product available of the operating system market capable of rivaling Windows Vista, and Microsoft's indecision when it comes to pronounce it expired will backfire in 2008. In the coming year, Windows Vista adoption will be hurt by a Windows platform released all the way back in 2001. By 2008, Windows XP will be seven years old, and a worthy competitor to Windows Vista, according to Microsoft. The coming year will prove that Windows XP is far from expired when it comes to customer perception and that the operating system which

hit the shelves on October 25 2001 is alive and kicking, and stealing Microsoft customers away from Windows Vista.

At the end of the past week, Microsoft made public record annual revenue, surpassing $50 Billion. Additionally, the Redmond company, revealed that Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System have had a major impact on the $51.12 billion revenue of the past fiscal year, and the $13.37 billion revenue of the quarter ended on June 30. "This fiscal year marked the general availability of Microsoft’s flagship products, Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Revenue growth was primarily driven by solid customer acceptance of these products," Microsoft stated.

"Surpassing $50 billion in annual sales is a testament to the innovation and value that our product groups delivered into the marketplace, as well as the outstanding execution by our field sales, marketing teams and partners to bring that value to life with our customers," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. "In fiscal year 2008, we will continue to drive growth through new product offerings, such as Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM."

"Our results this quarter cap off an extremely strong fiscal year for the company," said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft. "We have healthy core businesses and are strategically investing in growth opportunities, which will build on our success and contribute to continued double-digit revenue and earnings growth in fiscal year 2008."

But in the coming fiscal year, there will be another product that will generate profit for Microsoft in the detriment of Windows Vista. The Redmond company announced that it expects strong sales from Windows XP in 2008. "We fine-tuned the Vista/XP mix for next year" Liddell said cited by PC World. "We changed it from 85 percent to 78 percent. Now, it's a lower number for Vista, but it's still a very high number overall from our perspective, so 78 percent Vista mix in terms of sales next year."

Going from an 85/15 split for Windows Vista/Windows XP sales in the 2008 fiscal year to a 78/22 split in sales, represents an illustration of the market reality that XP is selling, and selling well even in the context of Windows Vista.

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Midori aims to uncouple its software from the hardware it runs o

Microsoft has kicked off a research project to create software that will take over when it retires Windows.

Called Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different to Microsoft's older programs.

It is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC.

It is seen as Microsoft's answer to rivals' use of "virtualisation" as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.

Tie breaking

Although Midori has been heard about before now, more details have now been published by Software Development Times after viewing internal Microsoft documents describing the technology.

Midori is believed to be under development because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology and the way people use it.

Windows worked well in an age when most people used one machine to do all their work. The operating system acted as the holder for the common elements Windows programs needed to call on.

"If you think about how an operating system is loaded," said Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, "it's loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine.

"The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware," he said.

That, he said, created all kinds of dependencies that arose out of the collection of hardware in a particular machine.

If Windows ends up being less important over time as applications become more OS agnostic where will Microsoft make its money? Michael Silver, Gartner

This means, he said, that Windows can struggle with more modern ways of working in which people are very mobile and very promiscuous in the devices they use to get at their data - be that pictures, spreadsheets or e-mail.

Equally, he said, when people worked or played now, they did it using a combination of data and processes held locally or in any of a number of other places online.

When asked about Midori by BBC News, Microsoft issued a statement that said: "Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft. It's simply a matter of being too early in the incubation to talk about it."

Virtual machines

Midori is widely seen as an ambitious attempt by Microsoft to catch up on the work on virtualisation being undertaken in the wider computer industry.

Darren Brown, data centre lead at consulting firm Avanade, said virtualisation had first established itself in data centres among companies with huge numbers of servers to manage.

Putting applications, such as an e-mail engine or a database, on one machine brought up all kinds of problems when those machines had to undergo maintenance, needed updating or required a security patch to be applied.

By putting virtual servers on one physical box, companies had been able to shrink the numbers of machines they managed and get more out of them, he said.

"The real savings are around physical management of the devices and associated licensing," he said. "Physically, there is less tin to manage."

Windows' history makes it hard to adapt to a more distributed age

Equally, said Mr Brown, if one physical server failed the virtualised application could easily be moved to a separate machine.

"The same benefits apply to the PC," he said. "Within the Microsoft environment, we have struggled for years with applications that are written so poorly that they will not work with others.

"Virtualising this gives you a couple of new ways to tackle those traditional problems," he said.

Many companies were still using very old applications that existing operating systems would not run, he said. By putting a virtual machine on a PC, those older programs can be kept going.

A virtual machine, like its name implies, is a software copy of a computer complete with operating system and associated programs.

Closing Windows

"On the desktop we are seeing people place great value in being able to abstract the desktop from actual physical hardware," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at virtualisation specialist VMWare.

Computer users in the future are likely to be much more mobile

Some virtual machines, he said, acted like Windows PCs to all intents and purposes. But many virtual machines were now emerging that were tuned for a particular industry, sector or job.

"People take their application, the operating system they want to run it against, package it up along with policy and security they want and use that as a virtual client," he said.

In such virtual machines, the core of the operating system can be very small and easy to transfer to different devices. This, many believe, is the idea behind Midori - to create a lightweight portable operating system that can easily be mated to many different applications.

Microsoft's licensing terms for Windows currently prohibited it acting this way within a virtual appliance, said Mr Chu.

Michael Silver, research vice president at Gartner, said the development of Midori was a sensible step for Microsoft.

"The value of Microsoft Windows, of what that product is today, will diminish as more applications move to the web and Microsoft needs to edge out in front of that," he said.

"I would be surprised if there was definitive evidence that nothing like this was not kicking around," he said.

The big problem that Microsoft faced in doing away with Windows, he said, was how to re-make its business to cope.

"Eighty percent of Windows sales are made when a new PC is sold," he said. "That's a huge amount of money for them that they do not have to go out and get.

"If Windows ends up being less important over time as applications become more OS agnostic where will Microsoft make its money?" he asked.

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The battery fault does not affect the vast majority of iPod Nanos

Apple has admitted that a battery fault had led to a small number of its first generation iPod Nanos overheating.

But it said that the problem was "rare", occurring in 0.001% of devices sold between 2005 and 2006 adding there had been no serious injuries or damage.

The comments came after the Japanese government began investigating a possible battery defect in the Nano.

There have been two reports of the music players overheating in Tokyo, scorching nearby paper.

Economy, Trade and Industry ministry official Hiroyuki Yoshitsune said the government was in touch with Apple to investigate the defect.

Battery problems

Apple said the overheating problem, which could lead to the iPod failing to work and being damaged, could be traced to a single battery supplier.

"There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod Nano model," it said.

Any customer worried about their device, bought between September 2005 and December 2006, should contact customer services, Apple added.

Lithium-ion batteries, which are used in iPods, have been blamed for a series of fires in laptops, which resulted in global recalls.

In 2006, Apple was forced to recall some 1.8 million lithium-ion Sony-made laptop batteries that were prone to overheating.

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Russia has rejected a draft UN Security Council resolution on Georgia, saying it contradicted the terms of last week's ceasefire deal.

The draft text called on Russia to pull back its forces to the positions held before the current conflict.

But Russia says the truce allows its troops to stay in a buffer zone on the Georgia side of South Ossetia's border.

Moscow earlier dismissed a Nato warning that normal relations were impossible while its troops remained in Georgia.

The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced beyond South Ossetia into Georgia's heartland.

Georgia says its action was in response to continuous provocation.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is visiting the region, is to visit a camp for displaced people in Georgia on Wednesday. Tens of thousand of people have been made homeless by the recent conflict.

On Tuesday, Mr Miliband held talks with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to update him on Nato's reaction at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels which demanded that Russia pull its troops out of Georgia.

The foreign secretary criticised Russia's failure to keep to a promise to withdraw troops from Georgia.

Meanwhile, a Russia's main security service, the FSB, says a Russian officer has been detained accused of spying for Georgia.

An ethnic Georgian, Mikhail Khachidze was arrested in the southern Russian region of Stavropol near Georgia, an FSB spokesman said.

"[He] was involved in collecting secret information on Russian armed forces, its combat readiness as well as data on other servicemen," he said.

Russian veto

At the UN, Russia's ambassador said the French-drafted UN resolution went against the terms of the ceasefire brokered by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Vitaly Churkin said the resolution should incorporate all elements of the six-point peace plan agreed last week.

PEACE PLAN No more use of force Stop all military actions for good Free access to humanitarian aid Georgian troops return to their places of permanent deployment Russian troops to return to pre-conflict positions International talks about security in South Ossetia and Abkhazia Georgia faces reality of defeat Nato's Russia dilemma Georgia conflict: Key statements

He also objected to language in the draft reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity, saying South Ossetia and Abkhazia did not want to be part of Georgia.

Russia can veto UN resolutions and the ambassador told the BBC that putting the text to a vote would be pointless.

He said: "It's a waste of time because the process of the withdrawal of Russian forces will continue."

Following a rebuke from Nato's 26 foreign ministers in Brussels, Moscow accused Nato of bias in favour of the "criminal regime" in Tbilisi.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Russia risked becoming the "outlaw" of the conflict, in an interview with CBS news on the sidelines of the Nato emergency meeting.

Russia says President Dmitry Medvedev told President Sarkozy that by Friday, Russian troops would either be sent home, be pulled back to South Ossetia or to a buffer zone along the border.

Russia said it had begun a pullback on Tuesday as it withdrew 11 military vehicles from the Georgian town of Gori.

A Russian officer told reporters invited to watch that the column was heading for South Ossetia and then home to Russia, but Georgia dismissed it all as a show.

BBC correspondents there say there are still several artillery positions and checkpoints in Gori.

And the operators of the Georgian Black Sea port of Poti told the BBC that Russian forces had seized the commercial harbour.

In an apparent goodwill gesture on Tuesday, the two sides exchanged prisoners at a checkpoint near Tbilisi, but on the same day Russia paraded captive Georgians on armoured vehicles.

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How to Manage Priorities With Excel

Writing your priorities on paper works if you’re able to knock them off in an afternoon. With a torrent of incoming tasks at home or work, many get carried over to the next day (or week or month). This Excel spreadsheet watches approaching deadlines and shifts task priorities accordingly. In 20 minutes the steps below provide a more effective way to manage your priorities.

Tips

• Keep separate Excel files for family/home and work.
• Split large tasks into smaller ones.
• Read articles listed below on prioritizing and time management.
• Sort the task list every day if necessary.
• Copy recurring tasks to the Templates tab, so you can find and recopy them back easily.
• Add conditional formats on Due date to indicate when it is overdue.
  
  
• Weekly, monthly (or perhaps double that) count the number of completed tasks in each period. This may be the only positive feedback you might get on your work.
• Feel free to change the points given for each part of priority.
• Feel free to add more columns - who assigned the task, category, etc.
• Use AutoFilter to select past due tasks (Urgency=1) or highly important tasks (Importance="A")

Warnings

• Save the spreadsheet every few sessions for recovery.
• The calculated priorities are not ordinal numbers. Completing a “1” priority task doesn’t shift all the others up. Priorities can range to over a hundred and not all numbers are possible. Focus usually on priorities between 1 and 12.
• Don't worry about having too many tasks - even two months of tasks can wait at the bottom of the list until their due date approaches.
• Time management is highly personal and this spreadsheet may not fit with your needs and preferences. It may feel intrusive or just too demanding to visit daily. It may work for you, but not your friends or vice versa.
• Instead of carrying your Excel files with you all the time, use Google Spreadsheet so your files will always be available to you.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Home building projects started in July fell 11 percent to the lowest annual rate in more than 17 years, while building permits tumbled 17.7 percent, the Commerce Department reported on Tuesday.

The annual pace of housing starts at 965,000 slimly beat Wall Street's expectations of 960,000, but it was the lowest since a 921,000 unit rate in March 1991. In June, housing starts rose 10.4 percent, revised up from the previously reported 9.1 percent.
Building permits, an indicator of future construction, dropped to an annual rate of 937,000, well below the 970,000 analysts polled by Reuters had forecast.
The magnitude of the drop in permits was the biggest since a plunge of almost 24 percent in February 1990, while the number was the lowest since March this year, when they were 932,000.

Single family homes, which constitute the bulk of new housing, were especially weak. The annual unit rate of 641,000 single family homes started in July was the lowest since January 1991, when they were 604,000. Building permits were 584,000, the lowest since 523,000 in August 1982.

U.S. stocks extended their losses and U.S. Treasury bond prices pared their gains after the data were released.

In June, new home construction was boosted by a change in New York City building codes. But July's national numbers hinted that the United States may still be mired in a housing downturn.
"It can be seen as a payback in June from the building code change in New York City. We may see another decline in August," said Dana Saporta, economist at New York's Dresdner Kleinwort Securities LLC.

"The fundamentals in housing are still poor," Saporta added.
(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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The last two champions of the Speed GT series will both be driving for Team Cadillac in 2007 in new CTS-V racers. Cadillac veteran Andy Pilgrim, the 2005 champ, will be joined by 2006 champion Lawson Aschenbach. Aschenbach finished in the top ten in every single 2006 race along with his single victory. The CTS-Vs will have a fresh color scheme of red and black with silver Cadillac script this year. They'll debut the new look publicly on February 3 at the Cadillac / Mobil 1 Super Bowl Celebrity Grand Prix go-kart race in Miami, Florida the day before the big game. Aschenbach and Pilgrim will run the full season and a third CTS may compete at certain events. For 2007 the CTS-V racer still has the look of the first generation production car, not the the new CTS that debuted at the recent Detroit Auto Show. The GM press release is posted after the jump.


[Source: General Motors]

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In a move to make the new CTS more appealing to European luxury buyers (read: compete with the Germans), Cadillac will begin offering their mid-sized sedan with a diesel sometime after its initial launch in October of this year.


Automotive News' sources are claiming that Italian engine manufacturer, VM Motori, will be tapped to produce the oil burner, likely a 3-liter V6, producing around 250 HP.


Considering that GM expects to sell approximately half of it European CTSs with diesels, and only 464 sedans were sold in 2006, this decision is crucial to the success of Cadillac abroad.


Also of note: AutoExpress is reporting that the Saab-based BLS and the new CTS will get wagon variants in the coming years. Expect the BLS estate to debut in Frankfurt, while the CTS will be unveiled sometime in 2008. No word yet on whether or not we'll be seeing the CTS wagon in the U.S.


[Sources:Automotive News - Sub. Req.,AutoExpress]

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