Vedran Martinovic

Major gauges seek direction after weak new home sales report, drop in GDP growth; Microsoft, Bear Stearns in focus.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks were mixed Thursday morning as a big drop in new home sales vied with continued enthusiasm about the prospect of Bear Stearns selling a minority stake in the company.

The Dow Jones industrial average (Charts) was little changed in the early going, after ending the previous session 122 points away from its all-time high above 14,000, which it hit in July.

The broader S&P 500 (Charts) index and the tech-fueled Nasdaq composite (Charts) both added a few points.

All three major gauges had been even higher in the early going, but lost momentum after the new home sales report was released.

New home sales fell to a 795,000 annual unit rate in August, the lowest level in seven years, from an 867,000 unit rate in July. It was a steeper-than-expected decline.

Stocks rose Wednesday after General Motors (Charts, Fortune 500) and its workers' union reached a deal that ended a two-day strike. Also boosting stocks: news that Bear Stearns (Charts, Fortune 500) is talking with Warren Buffett and other investors about buying a stake in the company.

The Bear Stearns news continued to be a support for the stock market Thursday, but it was countered somewhat by the morning's weak economic news, including the new home sales report.

Another report showed that GDP growth was revised down to 3.8 percent in the second quarter from a previous read of 4.0 percent. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com thought it would be revised down to 3.9 percent.

A separate report showed a surprise drop in weekly jobless claims last week.

In corporate news, Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) said its Halo 3 video game racked up about $170 million in first day sales.

U.S. light crude oil for November delivery rose $1.25 to $81.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Last week, the October contract settled at a record high of $83.32. However, the record price remains below inflation-adjusted highs hit in the early 1980s, which would be equal to at least $95 a barrel today.

Treasury prices rose, lowering the yield on the 10-year note to 4.61 percent from 4.62 percent late Wednesday. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.

In currency trading, the dollar fell to another record low versus the euro and also dipped versus other major currencies.

COMEX gold for December delivery rose $4.20 to $739.70 an ounce. 

 

Having enjoyed a brief taste of UEFA Champions League action with Real Madrid CF, Royston Drenthe and Arjen Robben are keen to shine in next Wednesday's trip to S.S. Lazio.

by Paul Bryan from Madrid

Late arrival
The Dutch duo joined from Feyenoord and Chelsea FC respectively in the summer and made their competition bows for Madrid in the 2-1 home defeat of Werder Bremen on Matchday 1 last week. Drenthe entered in the 77th minute for Guti while Robben had to wait until four minutes from time to take over from Raúl González. The substitutions of the two Spanish favourites, who had played key roles in the victory, for the Dutch flyers underlined the new Oranje flavour at Madrid with Ruud van Nistelrooy and Wesley Sneijder also in action.

'I feel good'
Drenthe, who will not play in tonight's home game against Real Betis Balompié, when a win will send Madrid back to the top of the Primera División, spoke to uefa.com about the thrill of top-level European football. "Every player wants to play in the Champions League," he said. "I want to play well in all the games I play in. I'm only 20 so I want to grow as a player and as a person. By the end of the season I want to say to myself: 'Royston, you've made progress.'

Spanish lessons
"It's nice for me that there are so many Dutch people here, especially as I can't speak Spanish yet," he added. Thankfully there is no real problem as his new coach Bernd Schuster has found a common language. "He speaks English to the players who can't speak Spanish," Drenthe said. "In the short time I've been here it's been very nice. It's not difficult to live here. I've got a Spanish teacher. I think that in six months or a year I'll be able to speak Spanish well."

The warm welcome I got when I came on gave me a very special feelingArjen Robben

'Warm welcome'
Robben, who was making his first Madrid appearance in any competition, was equally happy to get a run-out. "I've been training for a very long time and I was happy I could make my debut," he said. "The warm welcome I got when I came on gave me a very special feeling. That's why you play. You play for the fans and you want to show them how good you are."

'Too early'
The 23-year-old knows he and Drenthe have a job on their hands to win a regular place with Madrid going so well. The nine-time winners appear likely to mount a serious European challenge again this season, but Robben is aware from experience just how hard it is to claim Europe's top club prize. "It's too early to talk about winning the Champions League," he said. "Every game is a new one for us and it's important that we focus on each one. We have a lot of quality here but we have to show it in every game."

©uefa.com 1998-2007. All rights reserved.

By Nathan Sanders

Linux users are as evangelical about desktop environments, the all-encompassing graphical user interface software responsible for providing everything from taskbars to office suites, as they are about operating systems. It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that the first major release in over five years of the most popular desktop environment available is causing quite a stir. Due to be released on December 11th, KDE 4.0 is bringing exhilarating graphical, usability, and functionality improvements to the Unix-like systems it is designed for—and Windows users will get a taste, too.

click on image for full view

Free software desktop environments evolved from simple window managers that controlled little beyond the placement and decoration of application windows to facilitate multi-tasking. They slowly accumulated features, utilities, services, and applications until they achieved a dominant position in the user's computing experience.

If you use a modern Linux distribution, almost everything you see on the screen will probably be a component of KDE or its foremost rival, GNOME. Desktop wallpaper, icons, widgets, panels (flexible applet containers similar to the Windows taskbar), file managers, and configuration utilities are all supplied by the desktop environment—as well as, still, window decorations.

The unification of all these packages into a single project serves a valuable purpose. Open source development is notorious for forks, fractures, and, generally, a smorgasbord of competition that, many believe, confuses users and detracts from the progress of individual projects. Desktop environments establish uniform development frameworks that provide a robust base that makes application development less a process of reinventing-the-wheel while also encouraging consistency, integration, and quality assurance in the applications built on top of them.

For most desktop environments, this framework consists chiefly of a standardized GUI toolkit (the building blocks of interfaces), themed formats, multimedia infrastructure, reasonably rigid interface guidelines, and an integrated development environment (IDE).

By supplying these frameworks, desktop environments become platforms that attract third-party development in the same way alternatives like Microsoft Windows do. KDE has spawned an impressive range of applications, including lots of multimedia and graphics software, text editors, web browsers, instant messengers, a comprehensive office suite, and more. Unlike on Microsoft's platform, however, these applications usually get amalgamated with the KDE project itself and end up being distributed (free of charge, of course) alongside the desktop environment.

While Linux users rarely remain exclusive to the programs included in their desktop environment of choice, and most Linux distributions do not even install the full range of those applications by default, it is convenient to have a harmonized base of packages where, for instance, users know that every program can print in PDF format or assign global keyboard shortcuts to any function. Let's look at KDE 4, including its range of freely available applications that take advantage of its new development framework and the latest version of the Qt GUI toolkit.

 

Sales weaker than forecasts as lower prices can't clear out glut; pace of sales falls to levels not seen since June 2000.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The pace of new home sales fell to a seven-year low in August, according to a government report Thursday that showed the battered housing and home building markets even worse than forecasts.

New homes sold at an annual pace of 795,000 in August, according to the Census Bureau, down 8 percent from the revised 867,000 sales pace in July.

It was the slowest pace of sales since June 2000, as buyers had trouble finding mortgages or selling their existing homes. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast that sales would fall to a pace of 840,000.

The report also showed the median price of a new home fell 7.4 percent from year earlier levels to $225,700 in the month, as prices were pressured by both the problems in mortgage finance and the glut of homes on the market. The inventory of new homes on the market rose to an 8.2 month supply, as the glut of completed homes without a buyer was near a record high.

On Tuesday, a report from the National Association of Realtors showed the pace of existing home sales dropped in August for the sixth straight month to their lowest level in five years.

And the new home sales report did a better job capturing the turmoil in the new home market in August, as it is based on contracts for new homes sold in the month. The existing home sales figures are based on when a deal is closed, typically a month or two after the contract is signed.

The nation's major home builders have been hammered by the downturn in both home sales and prices in the last year. On Thursday, KB Home (Charts, Fortune 500), the nation's No. 5 home builder, reported a loss in its most recent quarter, compared to a solid profit a year ago, as the company warned it expects conditions to worsen through 2008.

Lennar (Charts, Fortune 500), the nation's No. 1 home builder by revenue, posted a bigger than expected loss Tuesday.

In addition, No. 2 homebuilder D.R. Horton (Charts, Fortune 500) and No. 3 Centex (Charts, Fortune 500) both reported losses far bigger than Wall Street had expected, while No. 4 Pulte Homes (Charts, Fortune 500) and No. 6 Hovnanian Enterprises (Charts, Fortune 500) both have reported losses for the last two quarters and analysts project losses for at least the next year.

Hi, and welcome to Vivvo 4.0 !

As a general guideline, we suggest taking the following steps to get the most out of our technical support service:

• Online Documentation - Updated regularly with each version release, Online Documentation contains product-specific information - from instructions on how to install and get started, to detailed product features, tutorials and references.

• Consult Our Knowledge Base - Need an answer fast? Browse our knowledgebase for articles on a broad range of topics.

• Participate in Discussion Forums - Our support Forums allow users to exchange valuable information with other users and developers on general technical issues and product-specific topics.

• Submit a Support Request - Submitting your support questions through the online support form is the best way to ensure that your requests are properly tracked and answered by our technical support team. Each license level is assigned the appropriate number of support incidents, and an upgraded support package can be obtained if necessary.

• Vivvo introduces new set of AJAX features to enable fast and easy content publishing administration of your site!
• New features include drag'n'drop for re-arranging articles and categories, rotation of headlines,
front-end article tools…..!
• Social bookmarking (Tags) Tag-cloud, navigation and ability for registered users to tag articles…
• Page Caching - Blocks of outputs are now being cached for servers with high load to achieve optimum speed and performance. Now it is possible to run up to 500,000 articles!
• Full media and streaming integration
This time, media streaming is tightly integrated into Article system (no additional plug-in needed) and supports even more formats ('swf', 'dcr', 'mov', 'qt', 'mpg', 'mp3', 'mp4', 'mpeg', 'avi', 'wmv', 'wm', 'asf', 'asx', 'wmx', 'wvx', 'rm', 'ra', 'ram'). Also, you’ll be able to easily embed into article body a link from YouTube or Google Video.
• Custom skins and templates for individual sections
Vivvo Template Engine (VTE), a proprietary template system we developed makes possible to choose individual article templates, set different templates/skins for different sections of your website and do much more. Our pre-made layout gallery will consists 3-6 templates for basic layout (2-col, 3-col, etc.) you’ll be able to choose from when constructing basic pages.
• Multi-lingual Administration
Site Administration will be available in different languages.
• Two levels of registered members (free/basic, paid/premium)
This option will allow you easily distinguish different levels of membership for accessing your website
• Article Generator plug-in
A plug-in that will let you create custom article output lists and generate any desired article boxes for your website. In other words - no need to comply to standard boxes anymoreWith a new set of features, you will be able to update various page elements without reloading the entire page, which will save you even more time!
• SEO Friendly Article Publishing
• Our websites are designed to be well balanced and search-engine-friendly and we position all the relevant elements (the titles of articles, important keywords, etc.) in the highly valued heading positions on the page.
• Thus, we allow very specific fine tuning of every individual page thru series of options and features Vivvo has like:
• Full mod rewrite support for complete website with shortest and most keyword-rich approach
• Custom titles and .html page names of every respective page and article you generate
• Automatically populated META Keyword and Description tags
• Automatically populated META Robots index and follow tags
• Custom fine-tuning of all META tags
• Automatic Sitemap

Vivvo CMS is a news, article and media publishing software that enables you to create a full website easily without any knowledge or experience with HTML, Web site design or management through the comfortable Ajax-based site structure management interface and high flexibility of design, content, and functionality integration.

It gives you the power to create different layouts and different styles for each section of the site, different user groups to help you manage your content with a built-in privilege system, and above all, the ultimate Search Engine ranking capability.

Features:

  Full AJAX front-end widgets and drag'n'drop for administrating categories and articles
  Completely automated SEO with Google Sitemap for your web site and pages
  Support for Mobile/PDA devices
  Open Search for major browsers
  Ideal for multi-user environment
  Easy configurable and swappable skins, with custom templates and CSS styles for each category
  Multi-language support
  AJAX based Administration - manage content with ease and elegance.
  The system auto-dates new articles, or you can change the date manually.
  Easily customize HTML templates to match the look and feel of your website.
  Supports multiple users with different access levels and permissions.
  Format content with no HTML skills using the WYSIWYG editor
  Build Static SE Friendly Pages.
  Ability to publish different kinds of articles: Full Article, Summary only, Internet URL (summary and link to an outside website), Uploaded file (summary and link to a document like a PDF, spreadsheet, or Word Document).
  Ability to control individual article components (comments, ratings, position, etc.)
  Webmaster syndication: share content of your website via JavaScript or XML feeds.
  NEW! - Automatically import feeds from other websites ad articles and news!
  NEW! - Upload media files with full streaming capability!

System Requirements:

  Website - You must have a website in order to install the software. The software does not run on your PC, it runs on the actual computer that hosts your web pages.
  PHP 4+ - Your web server must have PHP 4 or better. Your network administrator can download the latest version of PHP from http://www.php.net. PHP is extremely common though, and installed on virtually every webserver on Earth.
  MySQL - Your web server must be setup to allow database access. MySQL 3.23 or later required.
  FTP Access - You will be transferring files from your local computer to your website, so you will need some kind of "File Transfer Protocol" software. We recommend CuteFTP
  Write Access - You must be able to make files and directories writable on your web server. If the software doesn't have write access it won't be able to update its data files.
  Sendmail/SMTP - Mail server required for optional email notification functionality.
  mod_rewrite - Apache Web server module required for usage of Search Engine Friendly URLs.
 

Congratulations!

You have successfully installed and configured Vivvo. You can delete this article at any moment by logging into the admin and choosing Manage article options -> delete.

The Vivvo Team