Microsoft is going to end volume discounts on consumer operating systems for its corporate customers. The obvious conclusion is that they are trying to drive up demand for Windows 2000 (analysts say sales of 2000 have been lower than expected) by making it more expensive for businesses to choose other Microsoft operating systems. File this item under “proof of monopoly.”

If you use Perl under Windows, you really need to know about PPM. It’s a tool that enables you to install Perl modules on your computer without make or a C compiler. This makes it possible to easily install some of the more complex modules like DBI and LWP.

I just wanted to make sure to credit Dan Hartung with making the first mention I saw of the hanging chad problem in association with the current election. Way back on 11/9, he discussed Votamatic punch card voting machines and the hanging chad problem associated with them. Nice work, Dan.

Quote of the day, from Scott Shuger in Today’s Papers:

In case you have accidentally swallowed poison, please read this item repeatedly. The WP’s Lloyd Grove reports that Wednesday night, Dick Cheney partied with Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy.

News.com has a story analyzing the causes of Microsoft’s well-publicized profit warning (their profits are still going to be through the roof, just a bit off expectations). One big problem is slow movement toward Windows 2000 and Office 2000. I haven’t upgraded to Office 2000 at home because I have it at work, and it offers absolutely nothing that I’ll use that isn’t already in Office 97. I’ve avoided moving from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000 at work because I don’t want to risk the nonproductivity that upgrading my operating system might potentially cause.

MIT and Cal Tech have obtained an initial grant of $250,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to come up with new voting machines. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. What will be more interesting to see is how much the voting mechanisms change before the elections in 2002 and 2004. People are pretty worked up about our obsolete voting machines now, but I can see that petering out pretty fast.

Organic Online is laying off 270 people for the holidays. Meet the new economy, same as the old economy. Seriously though, I remember when Organic was this funky Web development firm in San Francisco. The article doesn’t say how many employees they have, but if they’re laying off 270 of them, then they must be huge. (I see from their website that they have 9 offices now including one in Sao Paulo.)

Looks like Amazon.com’s free shipping promotion was a success. I can tell you that I took advantage of it twice this holiday season, and saved myself about 30 bucks in shipping. Not too shabby.

I’ve long been interested in Grameen Bank — a microcredit lender in Bangladesh. Grameen Foundation USA is one of five charities the Motley Fool is promoting this year, and they have a story on Grameen Bank specifically, which is making real strides in the fight against poverty in Bangladesh. I love innovative approaches like theirs.

The naked partisanship that Justice Scalia has displayed in the Supreme Court cases revolving around the Presidential election have been most disheartening to me. I don’t agree with him a lot of the time, but I’ve respected him as a principled jurist. At this point, the idea of his becoming Chief Justice in the future completely outrages me. I really think the court is, in general, best served by a moderate Chief Justice (in terms of the debate between strict construction and judicial activism), so from that standpoint Scalia’s strict constructionist stance is a bit unnerving. Unfortunately, Scalia’s partisanship is an even bigger problem. His attacks on the Florida Supreme Court rulings have shown that even his beloved federalism is less dear to him than the political outcomes that he desires, and that’s completely unacceptable. (I removed the link to the Jim Dwyer column from the New York Daily News that was here earlier because a friend sent me a criticism of the column that I agreed with, and the column wasn’t the basis for my distaste for Scalia.)