This has got to be the funniest executive annoucement that I ever heard. Yahoo! is said to be freezing pay increases of employees for this year in a cost cutting measure. What I would like to know is if there is anyone who dares to expect a pay increase. I think that he would be darn lucky not to suffer from a pay cut or to totally lose his job.

If you look at the various companies that have laid off their staff left, right and centre, you could see that the economic woes haven’t just touched the finance or credit industry or the auto industry only. Many other industries like technology and manufacturing are also duly affected. Microsoft has plans to cut 5,000 jobs within the next one to two years.

While companies lay off staff by the thousands, those that are lucky enough to remain have had to let go of perks and other benefits. Yahoo! themselves cut 1,500 jobs. So isn’t this announcement laughable?

Somebody’s got to be kidding!

The U.S. Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court that this federal law on online pornography violates the constitutional rights to free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal and rightly so too, I think!

I personally think that online pornography needs a little restrictions seeing that web surfers are getting younger and younger and most times without supervision too because the parents would be busy with work and what not.

I think the U.S. Justice Department should know that although children are surfing the web at a younger age, which just means that they know how to operate the computer and navigate the web. And this does not mean that they could differentiate right from wrong, fantasy from reality.

The U.S. Justice Department thinks that filtering technologies and parental control would be sufficient. I don’t think so seeing how there are millions of pornographic web pages live on the web waiting to be stumbled upon by children.

China conceded that their battle against pornography on the web to create a cleaner and healthier online environment for the youth of China moving forward will be long lasting.

As the authorities continue to delete websites and blogs that have been identified as pornographic, even more are being set up. Moral issues aside, pornographic websites are highly profitable, hence the fast and furious pace that they are set up.

In any case, I think that China’s moving in the right direction considering that the majority of web users in China right now is under 19 years old only, a most vulnerable age, if you asked me!

Right now, they haven’t been too successful in their operations, if you asked me. If they were, the United States and Europe would have to take a lesson from China. By the way, I am only talking about the serials only, OK?

Amidst a global recession, Google reported its quarterly decline in profits, writing off some major investments, namely in AOL and Clearwire.

Compared with a year ago, Google’s revenue rose by 18% showing that search marketing and online advertising are still very much relevant in today’s economic climate. I would say that they are even MORE relevant because of the relatively low cost of online advertising and marketing compared to traditional methods.

Despite the gloomy employment market, Google added a hundred new jobs even if they did let go a hundred recruiters and 75 engineers last month and scrapped development of Google Notebook and Jaiku.

Google says they are not worried about the recession because they could pull through this since they are in for the long haul. Their tone is a vast contrast to Microsoft’s!

Most of my friends are not very comfortable with shopping online. They are worried about disclosing financial information over the web. However, I do know of a friend who have no qualms buying anything and everything online, from clothes to shoes to books, music CDs and DVDs online, including medication; especially medication.

At first, I thought that was pretty odd for him to shop at an Online Pharmacy when he could buy the same from his local pharmacy. He told me that most times, a prescription comes free with his order. That’s not a problem because these are U.S. Licensed Pharmacies and U.S. Licensed Physicians.

Online US Health is an online pharmacy which offers a huge selection of medication. Visit them to see if they have what you require. Most importantly, they offer buyers complete privacy shopping with them and the best customer service one could ask for so they are able to assist you in shopping for medication online at their pharmacy.

Right now, they are offering “New low price” on a selection of medication and in addition to that, free shipping too! With all these savings, no wonder my friend was telling me that he prefers to shop online because of all the savings. Well, these would be great for those who need them!

I am happy to note that Microsoft is taking a different approach with their Office Genuine Advantage (OGA). Previously, they installed an update to our systems which would cause our screen to black out if we were running pirated Windows software.

That was pretty irritating and rendered many computers useless in the sense that a “victim” could not work with the computer without the screen going black. That practically forces users to cart their computers to the store as soon as possible for a format and install an original copy of Windows, which could be SUPER expensive.

This time, what OGA will do beginning 27th January, 2009, is to only pop up a dialog box twice a day for thirty days. Meanwhile, the three software in question, Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and XP could still function.

After thirty days, there will be a star on the toolbar as a reminder to upgrade to genuine software. This is fine, better than the black screen, right?

Almost a year ago, Microsoft started to offer free online drive but it was only 5GB per account. A couple of days ago, I was very happy to note that they have increased it to 25GB. That’s a lot of free online space, isn’t it?

For 5GB previously, we could use a pendrive and we don’t even need an internet connection but for 25GB, if we don’t want to bring along a laptop, external drive or burn our files into DVDs, this is an excellent choice.

You can say that there are other online storage sites but most I know are actually large file sharing sites and we are not able to keep our files private. Besides, Microsoft is an established brand name and they have been reliable so far.

The only thing to beat Windows Live SkyDrive is for Google to offer us a larger online storage. Will they do it? Can they do it?