Posts by Ian

Brussels: Old-school lightbulbs to be gone by 2012

The message is indeed clear

that the EU couldn't give a toss. Given the bulk of the energy efficiency gain is through the reduction in the amount of heat the light sources generate and that we'll therefore need to heat our homes fractionally more during the months when we need the most artificial light, the net energy saving will be minute.

As a man-made global warming skeptic, I see this as a means to simply force everyone to go through an expensive conversion exercise. If they were serious about reducing carbon emissions, there are far more effective targets than light bulbs, such as simple home insulation.

Zhao 'C' - Chinese police computer says no

Let's not use any characters at all

Given that Birmingham has decided apostrophes are a no-go in street signs (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/30/brum_apostrophe_shocker/), and everyone's complaining about non-phonetic spelling and we can't do it anyway (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/09/spelling_woes/) let's just go the whole hog and abolish all letters entirely. We can make do with numbers. And if we did binary only, that would really keep things simple and then perhaps we could just get Skynet to do it all for us.

11

The Sun shines out of certified Java programmers

To travel's more interesting than to arrive

The main point about certification is that to get there you have to know a defined, bounded subject. Despite my natural developer's cynicism, the route to achieving that is more likely to have been mapped out by an organisation with a vested in interest in getting the best out of the target technology and people associated with it. By following it, you encounter stuff that you might never have come across otherwise, extending the value of that technology to you. So certification of itself isn't for me the end objective, it's the discovery & exploration of a curriculum that's been designed to throw light on a technology. That said, taking the test allows you to tell how well you've understood the curriculum, especially if you get comparative metrics; and frankly, if you've gone to the effort of learning, you might as well go the final step. For me the litmus test of whether the certification is a money-making scheme or actually useful is directly correlated to whether you have to take mandatory training, or are free to follow your own learning path through the curriculum.