I've been daydreaming about linux or bsd certification lately, since people in my office are in the process of getting solaris certified. I wish that if I am going to jump through the hoops to get certified, I could do it with an OS I'm excited about. Of course, real experience is more important, but certification can help less experienced people get jobs, and may help experienced people round out their understanding.
There are many models that could be used to set up the certification; it could even be an application that could be downloaded. As for studying for it -- one approach would be to select questions from a large database of possible questions. The database of possible questions could be public, if the size of the database makes simple memorization impractical. I believe this is the approach here in the US for written pilots' tests. We could use an application to choose a sample of the database to produce tests. If we chose a multiple choice format, we could have the application mix up distractors and the like to produce a large number of equivalent tests. The application could either be run by some "certifying body" once in a while to produce new tests, or the application and the question database could be released so that employers or others could "roll their own". The application could even have an option to do the testing interactively and collect summary statistics; the database would need periodic updating to remove outdated, invalid, or unreliable questions. Most of this is just standard testing statistics stuff. Of course, however the thing would be done -- it would be sure to infuriate someone. What is important to include, what is a valid question, why didn't I pass when I'm a linux god -- I'm not sure that a sane person would get into building it. In an earlier incarnation, I was testing coordinator for the public school system in the Northern Mariana islands, and I assure you that such issues can take a lot of thought and time. Maybe somebody should hack together something and release it as a toy to see if enough people are really interested. I whipped up a little kludge of tutorial/test program in C last semester; after doing that, I think that perl or tcl/tk would be a better approach, since it's mostly text manipulation. For the forseeable future, having certification in solaris or whatever will be a bigger job getter, but I wish we had a certification to advertise our love of free software. steve -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
