CIO.COM is suggesting in this article that IT certificates are mostly useless. Slashdot has a bit of discussion about it as well.

It's so funny, for years and years, anyone who tried to compete with Microsoft found themselves faced with 'not so nice' tactics from them. Now Microsoft (and SUN for that matter) are complaining about unfair competition from the 'Free Software Movement', in other words, from Open Source.

Quite a few years ago now, SUN came up with this really cool idea, make a language and a runtime environment that are portable to almost any platform, and that would allow transfering binaries between platforms and run them directly by means of using bytecode.