IT Insights Blog — technology

We've spoken out here before about the damage done — both to IT certification as a whole and to individual careers — by exam candidates who cheat to pass a certification exam. Most people in certification can probably empathize with anyone experiencing the various stresses that cause people to resort to gimmicks and shortcuts to pass an exam. Yet because of the ripple effects of cheating, a certification cheater really is the proverbial bad apple that spoils the whole bunch.

Just like the song says, when you read you begin with A-B-C, when you sing you begin with do-re-mi, and when you start learning about computers you begin with, well, what exactly? For most kids these days, it's probably a smartphone or tablet that belongs to Mom or Dad, or maybe even one that is their very own. Today's children have technology in their hands at an age that would have been essentially unthinkable just 40 or 50 years ago.

We here at TestOut Continuing Education are in the midst of offering one of our biggest discounts of the year. Right now you can sign up for any training course we offer and get your first month of training for just $5, a discount of more than 90 percent off the normal monthly cost of $79. It's our annual Presidents Day sale, and the $5 price tag is in honor of Abraham Lincoln, one of America's greatest presidents.

Probably almost everyone who has ever been to Yellowstone National Park in (mostly) Wyoming knows about the Old Faithful Geyser. Millions of visitors have stood and waited for one of its frequent eruptions to spew boiling water more than 100 feet into the air. Old Faithful blows its stack at regular intervals of between 44 minutes and 2 hours, and has done so for decades. The carefully managed area around the geyser's mouth might be the most visited spot in the entire park.

The Information Age gives us something new to marvel over on such a regular basis that it's starting to feel like there's no problem in the world such that the right application of IT ingeniousness can't provide a solution. Self-driving cars are already on the road, if not yet performing in such a way that they are fully ready to be left to their own devices.