Love all the comments !! And despite popular belief I did not get my 2 year old son to write the review.
Reading through them it seems to me there is definitely a few misconceptions that need to be cleared up, so hopefully this may sort a few things out. Then again it may not!:-)
Before we begin down this path I appreciate your patience in getting through this abnormally large post, but it is better to deal with the comments on a whole rather than one by one.
1. We are the RMIT Test Lab, based in Australia, we are a totally separate organization from the magazine who is one of our clients, they contract us to perform three independent technology reviews every month on products that they invite the vendors to submit. The RMIT Test Lab will have been performing independent magazine reviews for 16 years in January 2005. We have certainly produced a hell of a lot of words over that time. For more information on the RMIT Test Lab hit www.testlab.rmit.edu.au The vendors don't pay the Lab one cent to have their products tested for the magazine reviews.
2. For all you Open Source buffs out there, you know who you are! The magazine creates a list of what technologies will be tested approx. six months in advance, one and a half months before going to press the magazine issues invites to various product vendors to submit product(s) to us at the lab for testing, this is generally accompanied by a "scenario" which is set by the magazine to ensure that the vendors stick to certain criteria and submit products of a certain caliber/type and not all eight products that they may have in their inventory which fits into that review category. Therefore it is the magazine who invites the vendors, not the Test Lab nor the reviewer. Basically we have no control over which vendors are invited to submit and at the end of the day every single vendor could not possibly be reviewed, there will always be some who cant submit, wont submit, have not been invited or don't have Australia as a target market. So don't blame us for not including Spam Assassin or any of the other 100's of commercial and open source Anti-Spam solutions that are out there. Also note that a review we have recently completed and submitted "E-Mail Clients" for the next edition of the magazine contained several Open Source products, and a review we have just commenced "Internet Browsers" also contains several Open Source products too. So before pulling out the "Paid for Results" and "Advertising Driven" and "Open Source Bashing" comments think again and take a look at a few of the other reviews we have performed.
3. We are fundamentally IT engineers who design and execute testing frameworks, methodologies and create reports, we just happen to have a very very small modicum of writing ability, we are by no means trained journalists "out for the scoop" or trying to generate traditional "media hype" around varying technologies. We report things as we see them. We are also very experienced in testing these technologies; in fact the majority of the work the lab is contracted to perform is private testing for corporate clients and vendors/manufacturers/developers. Therefore we will not "test" where others try unless the test will provide valid worthwhile results that we will stand behind happily. The fact that we are not journalists means that the Magazine's editorial staff have their work cut out editing our reviews while still maintaining our individual writing styles and the basic concepts of what we are trying to deliver, sometimes it is successful sometimes less so. An example for you is that the review we submitted on Spam was 7,049 words long (25 A4 pages in Word, or Writer, with screen shots and images). And that does not even include the features table or the overview table. The space available for that edition of the magazine was less than 3000 words. Therefore 4000 words had to be lost. We don't get to see the finished product until it is published. Overall I personally feel that the review turned out
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Hi All,
:-)
Love all the comments !! And despite popular belief I did not get my 2 year old son to write the review.
Reading through them it seems to me there is definitely a few misconceptions that need to be cleared up, so hopefully this may sort a few things out. Then again it may not!
Before we begin down this path I appreciate your patience in getting through this abnormally large post, but it is better to deal with the comments on a whole rather than one by one.
1. We are the RMIT Test Lab, based in Australia, we are a totally separate organization from the magazine who is one of our clients, they contract us to perform three independent technology reviews every month on products that they invite the vendors to submit. The RMIT Test Lab will have been performing independent magazine reviews for 16 years in January 2005. We have certainly produced a hell of a lot of words over that time. For more information on the RMIT Test Lab hit www.testlab.rmit.edu.au The vendors don't pay the Lab one cent to have their products tested for the magazine reviews.
2. For all you Open Source buffs out there, you know who you are! The magazine creates a list of what technologies will be tested approx. six months in advance, one and a half months before going to press the magazine issues invites to various product vendors to submit product(s) to us at the lab for testing, this is generally accompanied by a "scenario" which is set by the magazine to ensure that the vendors stick to certain criteria and submit products of a certain caliber/type and not all eight products that they may have in their inventory which fits into that review category. Therefore it is the magazine who invites the vendors, not the Test Lab nor the reviewer. Basically we have no control over which vendors are invited to submit and at the end of the day every single vendor could not possibly be reviewed, there will always be some who cant submit, wont submit, have not been invited or don't have Australia as a target market. So don't blame us for not including Spam Assassin or any of the other 100's of commercial and open source Anti-Spam solutions that are out there. Also note that a review we have recently completed and submitted "E-Mail Clients" for the next edition of the magazine contained several Open Source products, and a review we have just commenced "Internet Browsers" also contains several Open Source products too. So before pulling out the "Paid for Results" and "Advertising Driven" and "Open Source Bashing" comments think again and take a look at a few of the other reviews we have performed.
3. We are fundamentally IT engineers who design and execute testing frameworks, methodologies and create reports, we just happen to have a very very small modicum of writing ability, we are by no means trained journalists "out for the scoop" or trying to generate traditional "media hype" around varying technologies. We report things as we see them. We are also very experienced in testing these technologies; in fact the majority of the work the lab is contracted to perform is private testing for corporate clients and vendors/manufacturers/developers. Therefore we will not "test" where others try unless the test will provide valid worthwhile results that we will stand behind happily. The fact that we are not journalists means that the Magazine's editorial staff have their work cut out editing our reviews while still maintaining our individual writing styles and the basic concepts of what we are trying to deliver, sometimes it is successful sometimes less so. An example for you is that the review we submitted on Spam was 7,049 words long (25 A4 pages in Word, or Writer, with screen shots and images). And that does not even include the features table or the overview table. The space available for that edition of the magazine was less than 3000 words. Therefore 4000 words had to be lost. We don't get to see the finished product until it is published. Overall I personally feel that the review turned out