How to go to M.I.T. for free

Online 'intellectual philanthropy' attracts students from every nation on earth. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge. The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn."

Cobol: The New Latin

Computerworld:"Almost everyone I spoke to about my curriculum for that year had the same reaction. They all asked why I would want to study Latin; it was, after all, a "dead language."

Cobol Cobbled?

People are saying the same thing about Cobol. Don’t waste your time learning Cobol. If they put you into a Cobol project, your career will be over.

Cobol is for geezers. It’s a dead language.

Let’s put a couple of things to rest right now.

First, the statuses of Latin and Cobol are quite similar. Neither is really dead; both are deeply ingrained, intertwined and embedded in our contemporary world — the former in many of our written and spoken languages, and the latter as the underpinning of much of the world’s existing data systems.

If you ignore Latin, you risk losing the ability to understand the derivation of thousands of words in many modern languages, and hence your full understanding will be compromised. If you ignore Cobol, you run the risk of failing to understand how your enterprise actually works. It is impossible to fully understand the processes within your organization without understanding the systems that support them. Grace Hopper didn’t just invent a programming language; she invented the concept of business rules."