itorial staff that hours would be shorter and parties more frequent, and corporate bosses that expenses would decrease.
How many lies can I pack into 650 words? On second thought, maybe I should concentrate on the real business of BYTE, bringing you the future of information techno
logy today.
This last year has seen a gradual increase in the readership of BYTE, as well as continued high renewals from subscribers. Apparently, most of you are finding the magazine more interesting and useful. This has not led us to complacency, however; we have aggressive plans to improve BYTE.
Chief among them is a reinvigoration of BYTE's test lab. In the recent past, we've had modest facilities buttressed by partnerships with other labs. Since moving our headquarters from Peterborough, New Hampshire, to Lexington, Massachusetts, a year ago, we've been quietly preparing the BYTE Lab, an advanced testing facility.
First and foremost, we want to give you more sophisticated and in-depth product testing. Other publications do a good job testing a few aspects of a large number of products. We aim to go deeper into a more manageable group of products, including important product categories that are not widely tested. We'll test different kinds of servers, DBMSes, and some of the other compl
ex technologies at the heart of modern networked systems with the thoroughness and platform independence you expect from us.
We've gotten the message loud and clear that you want our opinions, but you also want to know how we arrived at them. We'll publish the data that goes into our ratings on our Web site, so you'll be able to draw your own conclusions.
As part of our dedication to finding answers to hard questions about computer technology, we'll be using our Lab as an investigative arm. In the past year, we've discovered interesting flaws in the major compilers and (since fixed) incompatibilities between Windows NT 4.0 and certain microprocessors.
As the leaders of this effort, reviews director David Essex and technical manager Al Gallant have been hard at work putting together a networked environment that simulates what a progressive company might have: multiprocessing servers, 100-Mbps Ethernet, and a mix of NT, Unix, NetWare, Mac OS, and Windows 95 capabilities.
As readers, you
can be part of the Lab. On our Web site, you can read our editorial calendar at
http://www.byte.com/admin/edit98.htm
and see what product categories future Lab Reports will cover. Longtime readers are familiar with our willingness to publish source code and methodologies for tests, so that you can use them in your environment.
State of BYTE
