I think the capcha thing is about over. One alternative is identifying new users by texting a password to their cell phone. One account per cell phone number. This limits access to people with computers but not cell phones, but that's not much of an issue at this point. GMail used to do this.
Yes, you can buy vast numbers of SIM cards, but they're not free.
The main problem with this approach is that sending SMS messages is not free. Bulk services charge around US$0.05 to US$0.11 per message. However, for any service where a customer is worth more than a dime, it's a feasible idea.
The problem is not threads per se, but the way they are generally used in programming languages like C and C++
Right. C and C++ provide zero help in dealing with the isolation issues of threading. The languages have no concept of parallelism (there's "volatile", but that's about it.) There were 1980s languages that did offer some help, such as Modula I/II/III, Ada, and Occam. Java has some minimal concurrency support, although it's not well thought out.
There's nothing wrong with multithreaded programming, but some help from the language would be nice. Major issues with threads are "which thread owns what", "which locks lock what data", and "what can I safely call concurrently". C and C++ do not help here. They push the problem off to the operating system, which has no idea what to do about thread level data ownership.
At the operating system level, we're not doing too well either. One good way to write concurrent programs is with multiple intercommunicating processes. Unfortunately, the Unix/POSIX/Linux mechanisms for interprocess communication are awful. You have byte-oriented pipes, sockets, and the seldom used "system V IPC" mechanism. None of these let you do something like an inter-process subroutine call. Subroutine call mechanisms built on top of these stream-like channels tend to be slow, clunky things like CORBA and SOAP. Windows does a bit better, but their fast approach is a legacy from OLE, which was designed for Windows 3.1 on DOS, and their slower approachs are more like SOAP. QNX has usable interprocess messaging, but few non-real-time systems are designed for QNX.
I've been writing heavily concurrent programs with threads since the 1970s. It's possible to do it well, but the tools have not improved much.
I don't remember particulars, but remember when IBM made "IBM PCs" and tried to sue the pants off of people making "clones"?
Wrong. IBM did not try to sue "clone" makers, because IBM already lost an antitrust case on that issue over mainframes. There were IBM mainframe clones, from Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and National Semiconductor. Hitachi still makes IBM mainframe clones, and they run IBM mainframe software, including IBM's OS/390.
Tomorrow, trial ends. In a few days or weeks, Judge Kimball renders a decision, which will be some dollar amount SCO has to pay to Novell.
The payment issue goes to bankruptcy court. Novell is now the lead creditor and can strongly influence the bankruptcy process.
SCO management tries something else in bankruptcy court, and it goes nowhere. The U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee is already fed up with SCO. The trustee's representative actually said "I don't think this case can take a fourth act", and started talking about plans to kick SCO management out and put a court-appointed fiduciary in.
The bankruptcy judge pulls the plug and puts SCO in liquidation. SCO management is fired. The U.S. Trustee puts a receiver in. The creditors divvy up the assets. SCO ceases to exist.
Right. He develops a new tiny power source that produces megawatts. Out of scrap.
If he developed a new power source that good, commercializing it would put the oil states out of business. Success is the best revenge.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum (Dubai) 1912-1990.
Presumably a better version will follow. There's no reason it has to be a full tower case with noisy fans. And if they get some volume, they can revise the BIOS to work better with the MacOS.
It would be amusing to see Dell or HP in talks with Apple. They both need something better than Vista. It would actually make sense for Apple to sell off the desktop market to another vendor, and concentrate on portable devices. "Never trust a computer you can't lift", remember.
The ultimate help desk job was being Bill Gates' technical assistant. There really was such a job, and one of the people who held it now is in charge of the entire Microsoft Office product line.
E-mail, a mature technology, is now 90% spam. The Web isn't quite there yet. Another five years, and we'll be there.
(Thought for today: does the infrastructure required to deliver e-mail spam and Internet ads use more energy than the paper-based direct mail industry?)
The Reg did a good job of summarizing the issue. The Slashdot "article" does not.
The main dispute regarding CAMERA's lobbying campaign is summarized on Wikipedia. That effort did not involve DoJ. (CAMERA, the "Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting", is an advocacy organization for Israel. CAMERA sometimes claims to be neutral, but even the Israeli press says they're pro-Israel.)
After the CAMERA lobbying effort had been detected, and edits related to CAMERA were being closly scrutinized, someone using a DOJ IP address made an somewhat suspicious edit which deleted information about CAMERA's Wikipedia lobbying effort from the CAMERA article. As I wrote at the time,
IP address [149.101.1.130] resolves to "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov". A whole series of "wdcsun*.usdoj.gov" machines appear in various logs, so it's probably an outgoing web proxy. If you try a traceroute, you get a "destination unreachable" at exit from QWest's network. That machine seems to be a source of miscellaneous browsing traffic by DC employees; "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov" comes up in blogs for Mini Cooper owners. --John Nagle (talk) 20:29, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
So either it's a DoJ employee browsing from work, or DoJ's proxy servers are open and can be abused from the outside. Probably the former. It would be interesting to make a Freedom of Information request of DoJ for the user information associated with that use of the proxy server. After all, DoJ is taking the position that ISPs should be required to retain such information, so it would be useful to see whether DoJ does so for their own servers when they're acting as an in-house ISP.
Myspace has very low ad rates for contextual ads, and very low quality advertisers. The typical Google AdSense ad is something like "Free MySpace Backgrounds, Profile Layouts, Smileys all in one place. Download them all for Free!"
Their banner ads tend to be from major consumer brands, and are probably more valuable than the contextual ads.
Increased click-through rate is not necessarily a win. Remember, there's that 10-15% of Internet users who produce 50% of the click-throughs, but don't buy much. (That's probably Myspace's demographic.) The advertiser problem today is to make those users go away, instead of paying Google money for their clicks.
As the metrics get better, it's becoming clearer that what's good for the advertiser is quite different from what's good for the online ad delivery service. The advertiser wants a sale; the ad service wants a click. This is starting to be a problem for Google as advertisers realize that the "Google content network" often has negative value and opt out.
IT is becoming like stationary engineering
on
Disillusioned With IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Around 1880 or so, an exciting, growing field was "stationary engineering". Factories and cities were getting steam and electric power, and people were needed to make it all work.
This was a good field for a bright young person interested in technology. "Stationary engineers" installed the equipment and kept it going.
Stationary engineering is still an active field. There are about 120,000 members of the Stationary Department of the International Union of Operating Engineers, keeping the wheels going around, the boilers hot, and the pressure within limits. The symbol of the IUOE is a steam pressure gauge. These are important jobs. Without them, industrial civilization would literally grind to a halt.
It's been a long time since stationary engineering was an exciting growth industry. Today, it's a dull maintenance job. That's where most of information technology is going.
Actually, no, it's not. At least through Dreamweaver 8, CSS is sort of a bolted-on afterthought. The Dreamweaver "Properties" pane and the CSS system do not play well together. Dreamweaver has a useful GUI for table-based layout, but falls down on DIV-based layout. (This isn't entirely Dreamweaver's fault. DIV-based "float" and "clear" just weren't a well chosen set of primitives. It's trying to solve a 2D problem with a 1D mechanism.)
If the standard was whether a manufacturer has market power in their exact product (not its category), then there would NEVER be a question. So, obviously not.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you.
See Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Tech Svcs. There, the issue was whether Kodak had tying power in replacement parts for Kodak copiers. That's tying with respect to an exact product, not a category.
Note that Apple has to win in court before they can stop Psystar. That could take years, and the odds are against Apple. Historically, manufacturers trying to enforce tying agreements have lost in court. IBM lost on mainframes. Ink-jet printer manufacturers lost on ink-jet cartridges. It's all uphill to get a court to enforce a tying arrangement.
On what grounds? Psystar is installing a retail boxed product of MacOS X on Psystar hardware.
There's no copyright violation, so none of the extreme remedies in the Copyright Act apply. Any legal restriction Apple seeks to impose that their software can only be run on their hardware runs afoul of "tying" restrictions in antitrust law. Apple would have to win an antitrust case before they could get a cease and desist order.
What we'll probably see is heavily restrictive DRM in future Macs to prevent this. Or an end to retail sales of MacOS.
Go spend a few hours doing recent changes patrol on Wikipedia. Then come back and talk about a "cognitive surplus".
It's more like the Descent of Man - from The Well to Wordpress to Myspace to Twitter.
"People spend hours bemoaning the fact that they cannot communicate. I feel that if a person cannot communicate, the least they can do is to shut up!" - Tom Lehrer
The Platonists are funny - they get all worked up about this "NO!!! WE ARE DISCOVERING TRUTHS!!!"
The original Platonists started from geometry, specifically the geometry of idealized abstract forms. Given that starting point, you're led to invent the mathematics of real numbers.
If you approach geometry from a numerical perspective, you're led in an entirely different direction.
Being one of the early developers of game physics engines, I've had the amusing experience of watching the top people in video game physics fill up whiteboards with math. No rigor at all. No proofs. But good work. Totally different from academia.
deterrence is the first line of home security (thus big signs saying protected by xyz alarm company etc.)
But not phony ones.
Last year, I saw water running down a driveway into the street, and walked up to the house to check it out. Water was leaking out of the garage. Nobody was home, but they had signs for an alarm company. So I called the alarm company, and after much checking at their end, they insisted that they'd never had a system at that address. Looking around, I found a window sticker for a different alarm company. They didn't know of the house either. There was even one of those cheezy "Protected by Electronic Alarm System" stickers you can buy at Radio Shack.
Finally I called the "Police non-emergency" number and left a message.
Besides, shipping a solid material to homes to make ethanol, then getting rid of the solid waste, is an incredibly inefficient process. You're going to need maybe 150-200 pounds of sugar to fill up the tank of an SUV. Then you have to get rid of maybe a hundred pounds of sludge. Does this thing come with a home forklift?
They're making it sound like it's almost impossible to opt out of the content network
No, they're saying that Google made the "content network" opt-in by default, in a way that's misleading and deceptive. It's like having an order form with some item you probably don't want stuck on the form with an empty "Quantity" blank. If you don't explicitly put 0 in the blank, you're billed for the unwanted product.
Google offers a number of services that don't make money. Why should they put more effort into them?
Even ads on the "Google Content Network" aren't worth much to actual advertisers. There's a class action lawsuit against Google over this.
AdWords customers are complaining that it's hard to opt out of running, and paying for, ads on the "Google Content Network". Ads on search result pages are valuable, but there's a growing opinion, backed up by ROI measurements, that putting vaguely relevant ads on random sites is just a money drain on advertisers.
Here's a step by step guide to what you have to do, as an AdWords customer, to turn off the running of your ads on the "Google Content Network". (After you've finished the setup phase, during which you're not offered an opportunity to opt out, click on "Edit Campaign Settings" and un-check the "Content Network" box).
For Google, Blogger is just a way to generate cheap pages for the "Google Content Network".
I can make a strong case that negative integers are invented.
In fact, in Boyer-Moore theory, negative numbers are defined by creating a type that has a nonnegative number and a sign. Then "Add" and "Sub" are defined for that type, in forms that have conditionals. Then the usual theorems are proved about the new type, with the prover doing the case analysis. It's kind of ugly looking from the perspective of traditional mathematics, and this used to bother some people. You get to the usual statements about the integers in a few seconds of prover time. But they're theorems, not axioms.
Integers were discovered. Beyond that, it's human invention.
I used to do work on mechanical theorem proving, and spent quite a bit of time using the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. When you try to mechanize the process, it's clearer what is discovered (and can be found by search algorithms) and what is made up. Boyer-Moore theory builds up mathematics from something close to the Peano axioms. But it's a purely constructive system. There are no quantifiers, only recursive functions. It's possible to start with a minimal set of definitions and build up number theory and set theory. The system is initialized with a few definitions, and, one at a time, theorems are fed in. Each theorem, once proved, can be used in other theorems. After a few hundred theorems, most of number theory is defined.
But you never get real numbers that way. Integer, yes. Fractions, yes. Floating point numbers, representation limits and all, yes. But no reals. Reals require additional axioms.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the capcha thing is about over. One alternative is identifying new users by texting a password to their cell phone. One account per cell phone number. This limits access to people with computers but not cell phones, but that's not much of an issue at this point. GMail used to do this.
Yes, you can buy vast numbers of SIM cards, but they're not free.
The main problem with this approach is that sending SMS messages is not free. Bulk services charge around US$0.05 to US$0.11 per message. However, for any service where a customer is worth more than a dime, it's a feasible idea.
The problem is not threads per se, but the way they are generally used in programming languages like C and C++
Right. C and C++ provide zero help in dealing with the isolation issues of threading. The languages have no concept of parallelism (there's "volatile", but that's about it.) There were 1980s languages that did offer some help, such as Modula I/II/III, Ada, and Occam. Java has some minimal concurrency support, although it's not well thought out.
There's nothing wrong with multithreaded programming, but some help from the language would be nice. Major issues with threads are "which thread owns what", "which locks lock what data", and "what can I safely call concurrently". C and C++ do not help here. They push the problem off to the operating system, which has no idea what to do about thread level data ownership.
At the operating system level, we're not doing too well either. One good way to write concurrent programs is with multiple intercommunicating processes. Unfortunately, the Unix/POSIX/Linux mechanisms for interprocess communication are awful. You have byte-oriented pipes, sockets, and the seldom used "system V IPC" mechanism. None of these let you do something like an inter-process subroutine call. Subroutine call mechanisms built on top of these stream-like channels tend to be slow, clunky things like CORBA and SOAP. Windows does a bit better, but their fast approach is a legacy from OLE, which was designed for Windows 3.1 on DOS, and their slower approachs are more like SOAP. QNX has usable interprocess messaging, but few non-real-time systems are designed for QNX.
I've been writing heavily concurrent programs with threads since the 1970s. It's possible to do it well, but the tools have not improved much.
I don't remember particulars, but remember when IBM made "IBM PCs" and tried to sue the pants off of people making "clones"?
Wrong. IBM did not try to sue "clone" makers, because IBM already lost an antitrust case on that issue over mainframes. There were IBM mainframe clones, from Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and National Semiconductor. Hitachi still makes IBM mainframe clones, and they run IBM mainframe software, including IBM's OS/390.
Here's how it plays out.
Tomorrow, trial ends. In a few days or weeks, Judge Kimball renders a decision, which will be some dollar amount SCO has to pay to Novell.
The payment issue goes to bankruptcy court. Novell is now the lead creditor and can strongly influence the bankruptcy process.
SCO management tries something else in bankruptcy court, and it goes nowhere. The U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee is already fed up with SCO. The trustee's representative actually said "I don't think this case can take a fourth act", and started talking about plans to kick SCO management out and put a court-appointed fiduciary in.
The bankruptcy judge pulls the plug and puts SCO in liquidation. SCO management is fired. The U.S. Trustee puts a receiver in. The creditors divvy up the assets. SCO ceases to exist.
Right. He develops a new tiny power source that produces megawatts. Out of scrap.
If he developed a new power source that good, commercializing it would put the oil states out of business. Success is the best revenge.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum (Dubai) 1912-1990.
Presumably a better version will follow. There's no reason it has to be a full tower case with noisy fans. And if they get some volume, they can revise the BIOS to work better with the MacOS.
It would be amusing to see Dell or HP in talks with Apple. They both need something better than Vista. It would actually make sense for Apple to sell off the desktop market to another vendor, and concentrate on portable devices. "Never trust a computer you can't lift", remember.
The ultimate help desk job was being Bill Gates' technical assistant. There really was such a job, and one of the people who held it now is in charge of the entire Microsoft Office product line.
E-mail, a mature technology, is now 90% spam. The Web isn't quite there yet. Another five years, and we'll be there.
(Thought for today: does the infrastructure required to deliver e-mail spam and Internet ads use more energy than the paper-based direct mail industry?)
The Reg did a good job of summarizing the issue. The Slashdot "article" does not.
The main dispute regarding CAMERA's lobbying campaign is summarized on Wikipedia. That effort did not involve DoJ. (CAMERA, the "Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting", is an advocacy organization for Israel. CAMERA sometimes claims to be neutral, but even the Israeli press says they're pro-Israel.)
After the CAMERA lobbying effort had been detected, and edits related to CAMERA were being closly scrutinized, someone using a DOJ IP address made an somewhat suspicious edit which deleted information about CAMERA's Wikipedia lobbying effort from the CAMERA article. As I wrote at the time, IP address [149.101.1.130] resolves to "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov". A whole series of "wdcsun*.usdoj.gov" machines appear in various logs, so it's probably an outgoing web proxy. If you try a traceroute, you get a "destination unreachable" at exit from QWest's network. That machine seems to be a source of miscellaneous browsing traffic by DC employees; "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov" comes up in blogs for Mini Cooper owners. --John Nagle (talk) 20:29, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
So either it's a DoJ employee browsing from work, or DoJ's proxy servers are open and can be abused from the outside. Probably the former. It would be interesting to make a Freedom of Information request of DoJ for the user information associated with that use of the proxy server. After all, DoJ is taking the position that ISPs should be required to retain such information, so it would be useful to see whether DoJ does so for their own servers when they're acting as an in-house ISP.
Myspace has very low ad rates for contextual ads, and very low quality advertisers. The typical Google AdSense ad is something like "Free MySpace Backgrounds, Profile Layouts, Smileys all in one place. Download them all for Free!"
Their banner ads tend to be from major consumer brands, and are probably more valuable than the contextual ads.
Increased click-through rate is not necessarily a win. Remember, there's that 10-15% of Internet users who produce 50% of the click-throughs, but don't buy much. (That's probably Myspace's demographic.) The advertiser problem today is to make those users go away, instead of paying Google money for their clicks.
As the metrics get better, it's becoming clearer that what's good for the advertiser is quite different from what's good for the online ad delivery service. The advertiser wants a sale; the ad service wants a click. This is starting to be a problem for Google as advertisers realize that the "Google content network" often has negative value and opt out.
Around 1880 or so, an exciting, growing field was "stationary engineering". Factories and cities were getting steam and electric power, and people were needed to make it all work. This was a good field for a bright young person interested in technology. "Stationary engineers" installed the equipment and kept it going.
Stationary engineering is still an active field. There are about 120,000 members of the Stationary Department of the International Union of Operating Engineers, keeping the wheels going around, the boilers hot, and the pressure within limits. The symbol of the IUOE is a steam pressure gauge. These are important jobs. Without them, industrial civilization would literally grind to a halt.
It's been a long time since stationary engineering was an exciting growth industry. Today, it's a dull maintenance job. That's where most of information technology is going.
Except that IT isn't unionized.
CSS support is very good in DW.
Actually, no, it's not. At least through Dreamweaver 8, CSS is sort of a bolted-on afterthought. The Dreamweaver "Properties" pane and the CSS system do not play well together. Dreamweaver has a useful GUI for table-based layout, but falls down on DIV-based layout. (This isn't entirely Dreamweaver's fault. DIV-based "float" and "clear" just weren't a well chosen set of primitives. It's trying to solve a 2D problem with a 1D mechanism.)
Dreamweaver 3 was easier to use.
If the standard was whether a manufacturer has market power in their exact product (not its category), then there would NEVER be a question. So, obviously not.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you. See Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Tech Svcs. There, the issue was whether Kodak had tying power in replacement parts for Kodak copiers. That's tying with respect to an exact product, not a category.
WRONG WRONG WRONG. Apple is not considered a monopoly
That's not the standard. Whether "the seller has market power in the tying product" is the issue. The "tying product" is the MacOS; the "tied product" is Apple hardware.
Note that Apple has to win in court before they can stop Psystar. That could take years, and the odds are against Apple. Historically, manufacturers trying to enforce tying agreements have lost in court. IBM lost on mainframes. Ink-jet printer manufacturers lost on ink-jet cartridges. It's all uphill to get a court to enforce a tying arrangement.
On what grounds? Psystar is installing a retail boxed product of MacOS X on Psystar hardware. There's no copyright violation, so none of the extreme remedies in the Copyright Act apply. Any legal restriction Apple seeks to impose that their software can only be run on their hardware runs afoul of "tying" restrictions in antitrust law. Apple would have to win an antitrust case before they could get a cease and desist order.
What we'll probably see is heavily restrictive DRM in future Macs to prevent this. Or an end to retail sales of MacOS.
So the "island of stability" beyond the transuranics does exist. And it's bigger than expected. Interesting.
Go spend a few hours doing recent changes patrol on Wikipedia. Then come back and talk about a "cognitive surplus".
It's more like the Descent of Man - from The Well to Wordpress to Myspace to Twitter.
"People spend hours bemoaning the fact that they cannot communicate. I feel that if a person cannot communicate, the least they can do is to shut up!" - Tom Lehrer
The Platonists are funny - they get all worked up about this "NO!!! WE ARE DISCOVERING TRUTHS!!!"
The original Platonists started from geometry, specifically the geometry of idealized abstract forms. Given that starting point, you're led to invent the mathematics of real numbers.
If you approach geometry from a numerical perspective, you're led in an entirely different direction.
Being one of the early developers of game physics engines, I've had the amusing experience of watching the top people in video game physics fill up whiteboards with math. No rigor at all. No proofs. But good work. Totally different from academia.
deterrence is the first line of home security (thus big signs saying protected by xyz alarm company etc.)
But not phony ones.
Last year, I saw water running down a driveway into the street, and walked up to the house to check it out. Water was leaking out of the garage. Nobody was home, but they had signs for an alarm company. So I called the alarm company, and after much checking at their end, they insisted that they'd never had a system at that address. Looking around, I found a window sticker for a different alarm company. They didn't know of the house either. There was even one of those cheezy "Protected by Electronic Alarm System" stickers you can buy at Radio Shack.
Finally I called the "Police non-emergency" number and left a message.
if this is such a great idea, why not just set up a medium-sized production plant, make ethanol from "inedible sugar", and make some money?
What do they mean by "inedible sugar", anyway? Bagasse? Ultra-high cellulose sugar cane? It's not a standard term.
Besides, shipping a solid material to homes to make ethanol, then getting rid of the solid waste, is an incredibly inefficient process. You're going to need maybe 150-200 pounds of sugar to fill up the tank of an SUV. Then you have to get rid of maybe a hundred pounds of sludge. Does this thing come with a home forklift?
They're making it sound like it's almost impossible to opt out of the content network
No, they're saying that Google made the "content network" opt-in by default, in a way that's misleading and deceptive. It's like having an order form with some item you probably don't want stuck on the form with an empty "Quantity" blank. If you don't explicitly put 0 in the blank, you're billed for the unwanted product.
Google offers a number of services that don't make money. Why should they put more effort into them?
Even ads on the "Google Content Network" aren't worth much to actual advertisers. There's a class action lawsuit against Google over this. AdWords customers are complaining that it's hard to opt out of running, and paying for, ads on the "Google Content Network". Ads on search result pages are valuable, but there's a growing opinion, backed up by ROI measurements, that putting vaguely relevant ads on random sites is just a money drain on advertisers.
Here's a step by step guide to what you have to do, as an AdWords customer, to turn off the running of your ads on the "Google Content Network". (After you've finished the setup phase, during which you're not offered an opportunity to opt out, click on "Edit Campaign Settings" and un-check the "Content Network" box).
For Google, Blogger is just a way to generate cheap pages for the "Google Content Network".
I can make a strong case that negative integers are invented.
In fact, in Boyer-Moore theory, negative numbers are defined by creating a type that has a nonnegative number and a sign. Then "Add" and "Sub" are defined for that type, in forms that have conditionals. Then the usual theorems are proved about the new type, with the prover doing the case analysis. It's kind of ugly looking from the perspective of traditional mathematics, and this used to bother some people. You get to the usual statements about the integers in a few seconds of prover time. But they're theorems, not axioms.
Integers were discovered. Beyond that, it's human invention.
I used to do work on mechanical theorem proving, and spent quite a bit of time using the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. When you try to mechanize the process, it's clearer what is discovered (and can be found by search algorithms) and what is made up. Boyer-Moore theory builds up mathematics from something close to the Peano axioms. But it's a purely constructive system. There are no quantifiers, only recursive functions. It's possible to start with a minimal set of definitions and build up number theory and set theory. The system is initialized with a few definitions, and, one at a time, theorems are fed in. Each theorem, once proved, can be used in other theorems. After a few hundred theorems, most of number theory is defined.
But you never get real numbers that way. Integer, yes. Fractions, yes. Floating point numbers, representation limits and all, yes. But no reals. Reals require additional axioms.
There's a relevant quirk of Stanford University employee policy. For Stanford academic employees, software usually is considered "work for hire" and an "institutional work", with Stanford holding the copyright. But books and papers are considered to be the property of the author. (Policy on this changed in the late 1990s; there's a long history here, primarily involving the founding of Sun and Cisco.) However, Stanford permits the creator to place a work in the public domain, unless external funding prohibits this.
Knuth's code is open source. But his books are not.