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I always find it hard to take things seriously when they are written in poor english. "Will coming soon" makes me worry about the quality of the rest of the project, maybe more than I should.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally in the "maker" community open hardware is based on layout and software level openeness. So board layouts are shared even if the internals are not. This is what allows adruino to be open as they share layout files and software, but the Atmel AVR micro-controller they use does not have an open design. It does get confusing since there are open hardware projects that go down to silicon, but for the most part t…
Well, my beef with it is that the proprietary blobs should be interchangeable, and that requires an open ISA, the silicone can be as proprietary as it wants, as long as the interface is open.
The ISA is just a small part of what's required. All the other interfaces are just as important such as pinouts, memory mappings, memory interface, bus support and so on.
There's very few SoCs from different vendors that are interchangeable even among the ones that uses an open ISA. This requires you to either build everyhing from scratch including the CPU, or to use more generic and perhaps interchangeable CPU or microcontrollers and rather push the special components to other chips instead of having those components on a SoC - which gains you nothing.
Meaning the value of using an open ISA is miniscule as long as the code is available and easily translated to another ISA by a compiler.
I always find it hard to take things seriously when they are written in poor english. "Will coming soon" makes me worry about the quality of the rest of the project, maybe more than I should.
Some manager who probably doesn't speak much English has tasked a random person on their staff who went to college in the US or UK with writing their English copy, without realizing the difference between "this person can communicate effectively 1:1 in English" and "this person can write formal English like a native speaker".
In other words, a task is being supervised by someone who doesn't understand the task. Just like every other company we deal with. As native (or at least highly fluent) speakers, we just happen to be competent to critique it.
But a few niggles:
- Quoting RAM and flash in Mbits? Whilst that may be the norm for buying components, I'd argue most people familiar with OpenWrt and the Raspberry-Pi generation are going to miss this detail and think "Oh wow, 512MB RAM and 128MB flash!", when in fact it's 1/8th of that.
- There's some mention of a standard shield, but no information on what it includes or when it will be available.
- Like others have said, that scrolling on the website is extremely annoying.
Regardless, I will definitely be buying one anyway.
I always find it hard to take things seriously when they are written in poor english. "Will coming soon" makes me worry about the quality of the rest of the project, maybe more than I should.
Thanks for pointing out, we corrected it. :)
Here i've cleaned up some of the copy from your sales page:
"WRTnode is a high performance, low power, small, inexpensive development board intended to run OpenWRT OS. It also easily ports open source software based on Linux.
Today, more and more devices are connecting to The Internet of Things. The WRTnode is a small node which can connect to the internet all by itself and perform complex tasks, like detecting a cat running by, or identifying your speech and twittering it, or checking your email and speaking it to you, or learning how your room is laid out and finding garbage to sweep while streaming video to you over the internet. [..] Open Source hardware for OpenWrt [..] [remove the line "smart machines' heart"] complete set of high performance I/O [..] Local dns uses i.wrtno.de, wrtnode.lan, and openwrt.lan [..] default WRTnode ip 192.168.8.1 [..] WRTnode additional features (source at github.com/WRTnode):"
I hope this trend of really annoying scroll-skipping goes away like flashing "under construction" .gifs and framed pages.
I always find it hard to take things seriously when they are written in poor english. "Will coming soon" makes me worry about the quality of the rest of the project, maybe more than I should.
I bet if we could read their Chinese website, the copy would be perfect. Some manager who probably doesn't speak much English has tasked a random person on their staff who went to college in the US or UK with writing their English copy, without realizing the difference between "this person can communicate effectively 1:1 in English" and "this person can write formal English like a native speaker". In other words, a t…
However, I would not immediately characterise the copy as written by a US/UK college grad though - it feels like it is written by someone who learnt English on the mainland.
I don't really know why companies in various parts of East Asia don't hire/outsource to someone who actually is highly fluent in English to write/edit their copy. Sometimes I suspect it is simply due to cost, other times I suspect they just don't realise that their fluency is not quite.. 'international English' level
(No offence to anyone who runs/writes for East Asian company websites.)