Google homepage hauntedhouse08 broken link / HTTP 404 error

Are you seeing this? Google has a new homepage with a link that says :

"Haunted by high energy costs? Here are some easy ways to save."

But the link is broken and brings you to a HTTP 404 error page :

"404 - Page Not Found" eh?

The link is supposed to be :
http://www.google.com/hauntedhouse08/

According to blogoscoped.com, it looks like this is working in San Francisco (and by extension probably the continental US), but not in other places like Slovakia, France, Hong Kong and Singapore here.

- I'd suppose it's interesting and news-worthy whenever there's any sort of hiccup or unusual happening with Google seeing how millions of people rely on it every day.

Chartered Semiconductor salary cut - all employees pay reduced by 5-10% on economic slowdown

Employees of Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing are the latest casualties of the electronics slowdown that has been hitting the Singapore economy for nearly 2 years running. Reliable sources have informed me that the company has just announced an across-the-board salary cut by between 5% to 10% as follows :

Director level : 10%
Manager level : 7.5%
All other employees : 5%

Apparently senior management is trying to avoid outright layoffs by implementing this pay cut, and it is at least encouraging to note that the management is taking the lead by absorbing a larger reduction on their own wages.

The slowdown is not going away any time soon, with the credit crisis not over yet, and with more to come as more mortgage loans reset in 2009, interest rates go up, and housing prices continue to fall. There will be no respite for the American consumer, whose support in purchasing all manner of electronics goods has been so vital to semiconductor makers like Chartered, which churns out chips for the likes of AMD and Microsoft's Xbox360, and various chipsets for mobile phones and other equipment.

Chartered employes around 5000-6000 employees, and you can be sure that these will be 5000-6000 employees who will definitely be pulling back and will not be spending further in the local economy, or that of our neighbour Malaysia where many of these employees come from. One can well imagine the wider impact as the ripple effects reverberate through the system.

I have been advising all around me to move on to more defensive sectors of the economy, and those who have listened and taken action are doing comparatively well. Now, as the governments of the world start pumping up the money supply in order to try to cope with the financial crisis, the next step you must take is to prepare for the next wave of inflation, which is due to return with a vengeance.

(2008-10-21 08:40:53 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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