Following the success of A+ (hardware) and Network+ (networking), CompTIA launched i-Net+ at a time when many were still trying to figure out what Internet technology really was. The exam covered some of the material from Network+, but also included a basic knowledge of protocols and technologies specific to Internet/intranet/extranet application.

The exam and certification, good for life, never attracted as much attention as many other CompTIA offerings, and its popularity suffered for a number of years before the decision to abandon it was announced.

For more information on the retirement, go here.

You Pick Tommy, I'll Take Billy
As of Aug. 1, Cisco will no longer be using Prometric for test delivery. Instead, the company has chosen Pearson Vue to be its primary test vendor as, according to Cisco's site, "shifting to a primary vendor strategy worldwide will enable Cisco to advance test security through the deployment of advanced biometric technologies, facilitate the rapid localization of exams around the world, and allow for increased certification scalability and coverage."

Surprisingly, Microsoft has announced that it is no longer going to be using Vue, and will be settling on Prometric as its sole provider starting Sept. 1.

Heaven forbid they both agree on the same company and allow economies of scale kick in!

Lest we forget, we're talking about the delivery of mainly multiple-choice exams here -- just slightly more rigorous than true/false. Just the fact that two certification giants still use any multiple-choice questions instead of hands-on labs is enough to make your head swim.

If testing is really important to vendors, why, oh, why, oh, why don't they invest in some testing centers of their own? Then you could have centers where exam administrators know what they're talking about and not just how to verify an ID. You could have test centers where you could do more than randomly pick A because it sounds better than the other choices. Maybe you could even type in commands, install, configure and do something!

Best of all, you could have test centers which have greater requirements than those set by the current vendors for testing machines: Pentium III, 1 GHz, 512MB RAM, dial-up Internet connection and IE 6.0.

Where Is the Vista Certification Demand?
According the Microsoft site, Exam 70-620: TS: "Microsoft Windows Vista, Configuring" became available on January, and Exam 70-624, TS: "Deploying and Maintaining Windows Vista Client and 2007 Microsoft Office System Desktops" became available in February. This means that both exams -- and the certification tracks they belong to -- have been in existence for at least five months now.

Given that, you'd expect there to be some demand in the marketplace for those possessing these certifications. But when I searched for "WINDOWS VISTA" CERTIFICATION in Monster.com, the giant job bank, 11 results came back (the search criteria must be given as specified, or you get results for every listing from towns that have "vista" in their name). Changing the search to "WINDOWS XP" CERTIFICATION brought up 348 listings -- 32 times as many results for an operating system that has been out for years!

The same search returned five listings for Vista at CareerBuilder.com (compared to 252 listings for XP). At Dice.com, "WINDOWS VISTA" CERTIFICATION brought up 10 listings, while "WINDOWS XP" CERTIFICATION brought up 364. Last, at HotJobs.com, the Vista search brought up four listings, while substituting XP brought up 1,206 -- 301 times more!

In planning to implement a new operating system, many companies feel better if they know they have certified specialists who understand what they're switching to. If these numbers are indicative of anything, it's that not a lot of companies seem to be considering making a move at this point in time -- and that those XP skills may still serve you well in the short-term.

CIW Updates Foundations
The Foundations exam (1D0-510) is the one exam that's required for all Certified InterWeb (CIW) certifications. While the objectives for the exam have stayed the same, all test questions have been revised to reference the newest versions of software.

Internet Explorer 7, for example, is now being tested as opposed to IE6, and Firefox 2.0 was added while Netscape Navigator was taken out.

In a future update, Windows Vista will replace Windows XP, but no date has been announced for that change. More information on CIW certifications can be found at http://www.ciwcertified.com.

Book of the Week: 'Fedora 7 & Red Hat Enterprise Linux: TheComplete Reference'
The latest edition of Richard Petersen's Red Hat guide, Fedora 7 & Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The Complete Reference, is, in fact, a complete reference. At almost 1,000 pages, it's divided into seven parts and 39 chapters(!). The titles of the parts telegraph the content: Getting Started, Environments, Applications, Security, Red Hat and Fedora Servers, System Administration, and Network Administration.

The book is well-written and the topics build upon each other in such a way that it becomes more than just a reference; it can also be used as a study guide for most vendor-neutral Linux exams, as well as for RHEL study.