Intel Readies Atom Platform for Tablets

Posted on by ccsretail

Excerpted from Computerworld.

Intel plans to release a new version of its Atom processor that’s designed for ultra-thin netbooks and tablet computers.

The upcoming chip package is a variant of the Atom chip released in May. The two products both include the low-power version of the Atom processor. The difference is that the new chip includes support for various input-output types used in PCs.

It’s taking the power optimization of the previous chip – which was targeted at pocket devices including phones – and leveraging it by adding "port of choice" capabilities so that it can support various operating systems such as Windows, Meego, Google and other PC Linux operating systems.

The main focus of this new chip is to reduce power consumption and enable thinner forms for netbooks and tablets.

While Intel will be talking about this new chip – called Oak Trail – at various computer shows and forums around the country, it won’t be on display at this time.

Intel has scheduled the release for early 2011.

Another Form of Hacking

Posted on by ccsretail

Do you lease a digital copier in your retail business?  If so, here is some startling information that you should know, according to Joe Larocca, Senior Asset Protection Advisor for the National Retail Foundation.  He sites a recent CBS investigation which revealed a new form of hacking now being used by thieves to steal confidential information from businesses.

Every digital copier built from the year 2002 to the present contains a hard drive much like the one in your computer.  Images from every document copied, scanned, or emailed from the machine are stored on this hard drive.  This could include such things as payroll records, Social Security Numbers, credit card numbers, customer lists, and a host of other confidential records.

As long as the machine is in your possession, all may be well.  But what happens when the lease expires and the machine is returned to the vendor?  What happens if you purchase the machine and then later sell it when you need a bigger or better machine?  If the information on the drive is not encrypted or erased, your records are vulnerable.  They could be downloaded and stolen by use of software available on the Internet.

Most copiers have an option available for encryption or erasure of the data on the hard drive.  Utilizing this option is imperative for loss prevention.

At CCS, we keep abreast of situations that could compromise the safety of your confidential information. Call us with your questions.  We have the answers!  The number is 800-672-4806 or email us.

Updating Your CounterPoint Software

Posted on by ccsretail

Have you updated your CounterPoint software lately?  If you have not, you should to get the latest security updates and new feature that have been added.

Before updating your system you should read the release notes and the documentation to see what is going to change and what the recommended steps are.  You may need to do backups, file conversions, add files, and set new configuration fields,  as well as loading software. Depending on the version you are updating, there may be a lot that is changing.  These are most often security updates, new features, corrections, or moving functions and menu options to different places.  Most things will work as before and look the same, they may have expanded functions that give you more of the information that you are looking for.

I recently updated a customer that was about 6 versions back of the the latest version.  CCS never minds being asked questions, helping to find moved options.  However this customer called numerous times about what’s changed, does it now have this feature, where can I find a report that gives me  this information, etc.  It is good advice to remind you that support calls and emails can be expensive.  In this case almost every question that was asked was covered in the new documentation.  They may have avoided some cost by looking through this first.

As with just about all of our customers, we setup a practice or training company for you to see exactly what will happen if an option is turned on or off.  You can decide if the outcome of the change is what you expected, to ensure you want to enable it in your Live company data.  We encourage you to experiment with data that is close to your planned transactions to avoid problems in your live database.

Support time is a valuable resource to your company..  It would be more prudent to use support time on those tough problems that the documentation does not cover clearly.  At the end of the month, would you rather see support time spent on "Where can I find report ABCD" or "Helping implementing a feature" that you have wanted to use when it its properly setup?  Reading documentation is not fun, I know, but saving support time for critical issues will benefit your company in the long run.

In summary, updating your software is important, reviewing documentation is important, as is having a practice/training company.  To update your software, create or update your training company, or ask some system questions, give the CCS Support Department a call @ 800-672-4806 or send us an email.

-Bryan alt
 

Five Bizarre Ways That You Might Be Susceptible To Hackers

Posted on by ccsretail

Five Bizarre Ways That You Might Be Susceptible To Hackers.

1.  Hackers could use a wireless data sniping rifle, or other "sniffing" device to access your phone calls.

Recommendations:  Use only Bluetooth devices that require a passcode and turn off the "discoverable" mode, and then turn off the device when it isn’t in use.

2.  They can intercept your display.

Using a device called  a "Tempest receiver", it’s possible to capture transmissions between your PC and monitor and display it on a second monitor.

Recommendations:  Other than a visual inspection for this device, which looks like a piece of high-end audio equipment, there’s no bulletproof precaution against this type of attack.

3.  They can walk in the front door.

Some businesses and most home owners, run a wide-open wireless network without any security protection.  Hackers routinely "war-drive" in business parks and residential neighborhoods looking for these open networks, then install "zombie" software tools that send out spam or distribute porn. 

Even if you don’t use the wireless functions of your router, this may be ON by default.

Recommendations:  Lock down your wireless router with a strong encryption, such as AES.  Also, disabling the Wireless feature altogether may be merited.
 
4.  They can pull the plug.

The US government has announced funding for creating a nationwide Smart Grid.  This gives companies and home owners the ability to see their power usage in real-time, and disable some power usage during specific times of the day

Leading experts have indicated that this will open up another door for hackers to infiltrate your network.  Hackers could the turn off your power remotely, and then demand payment to turn it back on.

Recommendations:  These systems should have higher levels of security and critical endpoints should not be Internet connected.

5.  They can Google your Car – and then steal it.

Using GPS tracking services and/or social networking tools that broadcasts your whereabouts to your friends or the world at large could open you up to hacking.  If hackers intercepted this feed, they could track your whereabouts during the day.  Knowing that you took a shuttle service on your trip out of town, they could look-up your address and then break into your house and garage to steal your car.

If you would like to schedule a site security review, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department.

About Return Fraud in Your Retail Business

Posted on by ccsretail

Return fraud is nothing new in the business world.  For years, thieves have been apprehended for such acts as stealing goods and then returning the items to the store for credit.  Buying an expensive item, then switching tags with an inexpensive "knock off" item and returning it as the original is another type of return theft.  A third example involves using receipts found in parking lots or trash bins.  The thief collects items in the store that are shown on the discarded receipt, and then uses the receipt to obtain credit for merchandise "returned."

In a recent article by Sharon Tay for CBS, another legal but troublesome shopping movement was reported –
"returnaholics" who constantly buy numerous products, try them out at home, and then return them.  Not out to break the law, they argue that they just want to get the most for their money.

Return fraud of any kind is detrimental to sales, gross margins, inventory management and profitability.  Losses include such things as time and money spent on processing the return itself, restocking, and disposition of the returned item.  In addition, merchants have to determine how to deal with the fraud without creating restrictive policies for legitimate customers.

Processing your returns through your CounterPoint Point of Sale Software allows you to automatically tie receipted returns to the original receipt value.  In addition, collected and stored information such as customer name, address, phone number, an driver’s license number, along with return history, helps identify repeat offenders whose purchase/return profile is consistent with return fraud.  Once these offenders are identified, proactive solutions can be implemented to prevent future abuses of the system.

CounterPoint POS Software can help you track return fraud in your business.  Call us for more information at 800-672-4806 or email us.

Want to Print At Home From Your Smartphone? “Smart” Printers Coming Soon

Posted on by ccsretail

Reproduced From Komo News

The rise of smart phones has presented Hewlett-Packard Co. with a problem.

For years, HP has relied on the sale of its printer ink to supply a big piece of the company’s profits. Smart phones are a challenge because they’re by design not connected to printers, and with people reading more of their Internet content on their phones, they’re printing fewer pages.

HP, the world’s No. 1 printer maker, hopes changes it announced Monday will help reverse that trend.

The company is rolling out technology that will give Internet capabilities to all of its new printers that cost $99 and up.

They will each have their own e-mail address, to which smart-phone users can send photos and any other files they want to print. The printers will also be able to connect to an HP website, from which users can tell their printers to do specific things at certain times, such as printing out copies of the day’s top news stories every morning.

Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP’s imaging and printing group, said the changes answer demands from customers to make it easier to print from any Internet-connected device, including phones, small laptops known as netbooks and tablet computers such as Apple Inc.’s iPad.

Analysts from the market research firm IDC called the changes "innovative" but cautioned they’re "not without execution challenges," such as the need to attract enough software developers to build creative applications that use the new functions.

For related system problems or questions, call the CCS Retail Systems Support Department at 800-672-4806 or email_us

-Bryan alt

Creating MS SQL Maintenance Plans.

Posted on by ccsretail

Creating MS SQL Maintenance Plans.

Using the MS SQL Management Studio Maintenance Plan Wizard helps you set up the core maintenance tasks to make sure that your database performs well, is regularly backed up, and is free of inconsistencies.

The Maintenance Plan Wizard creates one or more SQL Server Agent jobs that perform these tasks on local servers or on target servers in a multi-server environment.  Execution can be at scheduled intervals or on demand.

To create or manage maintenance plans, you must be a member of the sysadmin fixed server role. Typically, this is your "sa" user.  Note: The Object Explorer only displays maintenance plans if the user is a member of the sysadmin fixed server role.

If you want to create or manage maintenance plans in a multi-server environment, additional configuration is required. For more information, contact CCS.

Maintenance plans can be created to perform the following tasks:

  • Reorganize the data on the data and index pages by rebuilding indexes with a new fill factor. Rebuilding indexes with a new fill factor makes sure that database pages contain an equally distributed amount of data and free space. It also enables faster growth in the future.  This also has that added benefit of making searches and updates to the database faster, thereby increasing the overall performance of SQL an applications using it.

  • Compress data files by removing empty database pages.

  • Update index statistics to make sure the query optimizer has current information about the distribution of data values in the tables. This enables the query optimizer  to make better judgments about the best way to access data, because it has more information about the data stored in the database. Although index statistics are automatically updated by SQL Server periodically, this option can force the statistics to update immediately.

  • Perform internal consistency checks of the data and data pages within the database to make sure that a system or software problem has not damaged data.  This can be  critical for early detection of problems of database consistency.

  • Back up the database and transaction log files. Database and log backups can be retained for a specified period. This lets you create a history of backups to be used if you have to restore the database to a time earlier than the last database backup. You can also perform differential backups. These can also be set to keep a specific number of backup sets on file.

  • Run SQL Server Agent jobs. This can be used to create jobs that perform a variety of actions, and also the maintenance plans to run the jobs.

  • The results generated by the maintenance tasks can be written as a report to a text file, or written to the maintenance plan tables, sysmaintplan_log and sysmaintplan_logdetail, in the msdb. To view the results in the log file viewer, right-click Maintenance Plans, and then click View History.

  • Shrinking of the database transaction log file.   This option frees-up disk space used by the database transaction log.  This is only available on databases using a "Simple" Recovery Method. 

Maintenance plans only run against databases set to compatibility level 80 or higher. The Maintenance Plan Wizard does not display databases set to compatibility level 70 or lower.  The MS SQL 2005 Express version does support using maintenance plan.

Please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department in order to schedule your new maintenance plan or to review your existing set-up.
 

Power For Rock Bands and Computers.

Posted on by ccsretail

Power For Rock Bands and Computers.

A recent neighborhood experience reminds me of  the need tor re-evaluate ones power needs before a situation turns critical.

Recently, a neighbor built a performance stage in his backyard specifically for a local Rock band to play at his sons high school graduation party. However, no provision was made for the power requirements for the
bands equipment, which initially was all plugged into one 20 AMP household circuit.  At concert time, as soon that the band started into their first set, the power load tripped the circuit breaker stopping the show.

Like this band incident, proper power configuration can be as critical for your gig as well as is was for the band.  Some indications that you may have power issues are:

  • Peripheral Equipment is continually dying at a greater than normal frequency, and needs to be replaced often.

  • When the power fluctuates, computers start behaving erratically, and/or peripheral devices malfunction.

  • As equipment is added, staff is continually daisy-chaining power strips in order to  provide power to the new equipment.

  • Someone plugs-in a high amp item such as a Vacuum Cleaner, Pressure Washer, or appliance in another area of the building, and your equipment crashes.

Ideally, computer equipment should be on a separate power circuit than the lights, or other appliances.  Also, you should have a UPS for each physical computer, and it most critical  components such as Modems, Pole Display, Credit/Debit Card Terminals, etc.

If you are unsure of your power needs, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department to schedule an evaluation.

A New Type of Phishing Attack

Posted on by ccsretail

Traditional "phishing attacks" involve tricking users to click on links on a website that take them to bogus sites that look legitimate, but are not.  Once the user has entered that site, they are vulnerable to theft of personal information.

Aza Raskin of Mozilla is warning about a new type of phishing, called "tabnabbing", that doesn’t require clicking on a link at all.  It’s a browser-based attack, targeting multi-taskers who have multiple tabs open.  If the user is visiting a website infected with malicious tabnabbing code, a tab in the background will change into what appears to be a legitimate site that looks quite familiar.  One you want to be logged into, like Gmail or a banking site.  Clicking on it will not log you in.  But since many sites log you out automatically after a period of time, you may assume that you need to log in again.  If you do log in, however, you are giving your log-in credentials to the tabnabber.

Because the malicious code is running on the website, not on the user’s PC, security programs won’t protect users.  Solutions are being sought, but awareness of the issue may be the best defense at this time. 

At CCS, we know that keeping your Point of Sale System safe is very important.  We’re here to answer your questions.  Call us at 800-672-4806 or email us. 

 

Keyboard Shortcuts Anyone?

Posted on by ccsretail

Keyboard shortcuts are combinations of two or more keys that, when pressed, can be used to perform a task that would typically require a mouse or other pointing device. Keyboard shortcuts can make it easier to interact with your computer, saving you time and effort as you work with Windows and other programs.

Most programs also provide accelerator keys that can make it easier to work with menus and other commands. Check the menus of programs for accelerator keys. If a letter is underlined in a menu, that usually means that pressing the Alt key in combination with the underlined key will have the same effect as clicking that menu item.

Pressing the Alt key in some programs, such as Paint and WordPad, shows commands that are labeled with additional keys that you can press to use them.

An example of a keyboard shortcut would be pressing the "Windows Key" + r.  The will open the "run" dialog box.  The same as using your mouse to click on "start" then "Run" program.  There are many keyboard shortcuts in Windows.  Here is a link to Microsoft’s page that list some of the more common shortcuts along with the full list  windows.microsoft.com/en-US/Windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts although this link is for Windows 7, alot of the shortcuts will also work in other version of Windows. 

If you have any system questions or concerns, contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department at 800-672-4806 or email us.  We are here to help.
 

-Bryan alt