There has rarely (if ever) been a separate broadcast signal for B&W vs colour. Broadcasts began in B&W, over time upgraded to colour, but there wasn't a need to broadcast Channel <whatever> in B&W and broadcast the same channel in colour on a different frequency.
One single broadcast signal, and different capabilities of receivers.
I guess you _could_ have a modern digital receiver with SCART-out (if such a thing exists) to a B&W TV. This BBC article (2018) claims 7,000 people watching TV with a B&W licence – whether they were actually watching it in B&W is not known :-D
> In Europe, British English is used as a reference point
Anecdotal counterpoint, but… I’m a British English speaker, but many of my colleagues are Continental Europeans, for whom English is their second language. Part of my job involves copy editing and, almost without exception, their output is written in American English.
No, it's due to the ovewhelming exposure to media from the U.S., mere spellcheckers oughtn't interfere with 'underground' vs 'subway', 'film' vs 'movie', 'flat' vs 'apartment', and so on and so forth.
It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases.
For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition!
Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?"
In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries.
Each character is a syllable, with a particular pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually closely related to one another. There are very common combinations of characters that appear together, which one could define as words. However, often, you could just as easily view the individual characters as words, or the combination as a word.
In some cases, the combination of two characters means something totally different from what the characters alone would mean (e.g., 东西, where the characters literally mean "East-West," but the combination means "thing"), so the combination is clearly a word. But sometimes, the meaning of the combination is basically a combination of the words' meanings (e.g., 吃饭, where the characters literally mean "eat-food," and the combination means "to eat, have a meal").
Because written Chinese doesn't use spaces, I guess it doesn't really matter what one defines as a word. The issue just doesn't come up, practically speaking.
I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and as such sometimes has aspects which are much more socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which tends to evolve more freely.
Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as well, even in this same meaning.
The issues I raise are somewhat applicable to English, but to a far lesser extent.
In Chinese, just about every syllable has its own set of meanings. In English, there are compound words, and some words have prefixes or suffixes, but you can't just arbitrarily break a word into its syllables and assign a meaning to every syllable. Imagine if the word "syllable" could be broken down as syl-la-ble, and every person who spoke English could tell you what "syl," "la" and "ble" individually meant. That's the situation in Chinese, for almost every polysyllabic word you can utter. They can almost all be decomposed into syllables that have individual meanings. It's a very different paradigm from English.
Yes, I understand there is a huge difference of the degree to which this applies to the language. I was just pointing out that none of these things should be alien to an English speaker, and even a linguist who only knew English would have had similar struggles to define "word" because of these problems (though of course they could have decided to file them under "exceptions", which doesn't work for Chinese).
I think it's obvious that there might not be one unifying definition that spans all human languages. "Word" is an English word refering to a specific of the English language. A class in JS is not the same as class in C++, big deal? ;)
As for English, I'm happy defining it through written language and spacing. "Can't", "unmarried", and "walkie-talkie" all one word each.
We might as well think of "word" in foreign enough languages as separate concepts. Doesn't seem meaningful to try to fit fundamentally different structures into the same conceptual molds. Which I guess ties back to your original point regarding if it's a useful excercise taxonimizing English as creole.
I don't think that's how containerisation works. It uses the host machine's kernel, so unless Docker has been ported to OS2, there's no way to run OS2 inside Docker.
Yeah, mmap, I think this is the relevant line [1].
Fun fact, very early on, we used to create one mmapped file per serialized object, but that very quickly broke down.
Then we switched to mmapping one large file at the start and storing all of the serialized objects in that file. But then as objects get allocated and deallocated, you need to manage the memory inside of that mmapped file, and we just repurposed a malloc implementation to handle that.
