Servers for the Information Age

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!

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Restaurant Hand Held Terminals

The History

The desire for restaurant hand held terminals and wireless restaurant software has been around since the invention of the electronic cash registers in the 1980’s. When restaurateurs saw the power of the electronic cash register; how it stored and recalled orders, how it dispersed orders to various kitchen and preparation printers and how it helped control the flow of the restaurant the desire to have this power in the palm of your hand has been there. It is only recently that technology caught up to the demand.

In the 1990’s a couple of companies introduced hand held terminals to restaurants with limited success. Displays were small and therefore limited menu items. Battery life was short and limited use. But the demand was still there because the tremendous benefits to the restaurant owner.

I distinctly remember a trip to an NFL game where the stadium food provider used Seiko hand held terminals to take orders from customers sitting in their seats. I was about 6 seats from the aisle and placed an order for a drink and a hot dog fixed the way I wanted. The server took the order, told me the total and I passed the money down to her. As I was receiving my change my food arrived from the kitchen! Now THAT is service.

Most recently, restaurant software companies have taken advantage of the PDA craze and their technology and have adapted their software to these devices. Screens have become larger and now can display entire menus. Battery life has been extended and we now have “hot swap” batteries that allow you to swap a battery without loosing the program.

Table service restaurants are now entering orders at the table and having food runners deliver the food. The server/waiter only has to leave the floor when it is time to print the check.

Quick service restaurants are taking orders in the drive through ahead of the speaker box. Others are creating entire sections for curbside ordering where the customer parks and a server with a hand held takes their order and payment then the food is brought out to them.

With hand held terminals restaurants are providing a speed of service only dreamed of before now.

The Need

To be able to take orders at the table or car, receive payment and have the food delivered with amazing speed of service. Thereby increasing table turns and customer throughput.

The hand held unit needs to be reliable, durable (they do get dropped) and easy to operate. The battery needs to be able to swapped during operation without loosing memory.

The network needs to be able to handle several hand held terminals without slowing down the entire system. In some cases, the network needs to extend beyond the walls of the restaurant so additional customer may be served in patios, parks and parking lots.

The Solution

Some point of sale systems have an interface that allows the download of their software to a PDA using Windows Pocket PC technology and Windows Terminal License software. Multiple hand held PDA terminals can be in the wireless network at the same time.

Through the use of wireless routers and wireless access points an entire restaurant can be set up for wireless hand held terminals for every server/waiter/manager. Additional wireless access points may be installed outside the restaurant to give broader coverage and allow for taking orders outside the restaurant.

We have one customer who walks across the street to a park and takes orders. The server collects for the food, even swipes a credit card and the system processes the approval without the server having to go to a terminal. A food runner brings the food to the person who is still sitting/laying in the park.

Servers/waiters are able to enter orders and take payments at the table. Managers are able to authorize voids, check sales and other manager functions from their hand held terminal. Imagine the ability to view reports on a hand held terminal or to approve a void without having to go to a terminal. All these things are possible with restaurant hand held terminals.

The Benefit To You

* Dramatically increased speed of service for your customer. * Greater customer service because your servers/waiters do not have to leave the floor to place orders. * Increased table turns because of faster service. * Increased customer throughput in Quick Service. * Wait on more tables/customers per server/waiter. More time on the floor equals more ability to handle additional tables. * Increase manager efficiency.

The ability in Table Service to turn just 1 additional table per night with a $20 ticket average equals $600 per month in additional revenue.

In Quick Service, if you were able to increase throughput to handle only 4 more customers per lunch rush at $5 per order, you would enjoy a similar $600 per month increase in revenue.

About the author:

Jerry D. Wilson is Director of Internet Sales for DirecTouch Restaurant Point of Sale. With over 25 years of hospitality point of sale experience, he has written several articles explaining the benefits of touch screen point of sale software. Please visit www.directouchpos.com for more information.

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!

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Whatever you do with the following information is solely your responsibility.
#telnet ip:25
That title looks like random letters and symbols, but it is actually the command used to connect to an SMTP server via telnet. The # represents the shell, telnet is the program used to start a connection via telnet, ip is the ip address of the mail/smtp server (an SMTP server comes with XP PRO and is easy to set up), and 25 is the port SMTP daemons run on.
First of all, the newer Windows command shells are not truly DOS, and the telnet command is a little different. Namely, you will replace the colon between the ip and the port with a space. I don t know why this was changed but there is nothing to be done about it so you just have to live with it. The colon is used, however, in almost all other operating systems, such as BSD, Linux, and probably Mac (I don t own a Mac).
When you connect, you will know right away what daemon the server is running. A daemon is a program that deals with all incoming connections and data on a specific port. The most common SMTP daemon is Sendmail (for Linux and maybe cygwin). Don t expect to find this on too many big websites (ie Yahoo, Microsoft.com, etc), I would think they would know better. But on many websites this daemon is still being used.
This tutorial will cover just fake mail sending. You will not learn how to take down any mail servers, because it is generally irresponsible to take down mail servers, and the only practical application is testing the security of your own server (if you really want to know how, use Google). That being said, you could potentially cause havoc with fake mail as well, but the playing field is more even considering everyone is equally at risk (not just those with outdated software on their servers), and unless you are smarter than the average kill-random-computers-with-winnuke person then the most harm you can do is anonymously insult people.

Fake Mail Commands
Generally, the following commands will work fine:
helo
mail from: someguy@random.com
rcpt to: someotherguy@anywhere.com
data
content of email
.
quit
Entering those commands when connected via telnet to a Sendmail daemon will send someotherguy@anywhere.com an email containing content of email from someguy@random.com. In some cases, you might need to type helo random.com at the beginning (random.com being the domain of the return address) to get this to work. The return and to addresses, as well as the content of the e-mail, can be modified as much as you want. If it doesn t work, the daemon might need authentication, or the syntax might be different (try adding <>s on either side of the email addresses). And, backspace does not work, even though it looks like that. If you mess up in typing a command and press backspace, the command is void. In the contents of the e-mail, backspaces will show up as boxes when read by the receiver.
This is an invaluable social engineering technique. Imagine sending an email to an AOL customer, faking the return address as a system administrator, with contents something like We are debugging the system lost all our user data for your area. We require you to send your name, date of birth, address, username, password, credit card number, and credit card expiration date. They would happily comply, thinking you were someone you weren t.
You are not completely anonymous when using this technique. Anyone who is serious about safety should know about email headers, or information included in the email. If you have pop3 enabled with your email (you do if you have gmail) then just open up the mail with Thunderbird (of Outlook, ugg) and tell it to display the headers. I will not go in depth on this, but a search on the internet will show you what you need to know to spot fake mail.

About the Author

eblivion — Mike Vollmer
http://eblivion.sitesled.com

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!

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World is growing with internet. The use of internet has been increased up to more than 1000 times and because of this increment in internet visitors, everybody is coming on online business through search engine optimization and other internet marketing activities or tool that can help increasing his/her organization business and all this is possible with a brand new website. A website making is not a big task but when it comes to a website that really does business through search engines or any other marketing activities, this all depends on number of factors that really helps your online business. I would like to say with the confidence if you are not hosted on a good server you must not think about the marketing of any online business.

Let s talk about couple of important point I choose to discuss

Web Designing & Web hosting Lets say you have chosen one of the best web designing company in your area to design & develop your website with the best of your knowledge and they have completed the website designing in couple of days now your website is ready to host on a server. May be you have already chosen another hosting company or it might be possible that the same company is hosting your website on their own servers. How to decide or how to choose a hosting company when you are ready to market your website over the internet. While choosing a hosting company for your internet marketing , you must be thinking about the prices and features and all other things you can think as a non IT professional. Or simple you will select the designing company server for your hosting because they can offer you discounted prices for the hosting package. And this is very true once you are working with a company and they recommend something that you need along with a discount (You think), you will simply go for this.

But

1 - Do you think that hosting package they are providing is really good for your online marketing ?
2 - Do you think the charges they are asking for hosting are genuine?
3 - Do you think the features they have with in the hosting pack are worth of the cost you paying..?
4 - Do you think this server will be able to run your website for 24 hours everyday..?
5 - Do you think this hosting server would be handling all of your internet visitor queries properly?

A number of other point are there in my mind I would like to discuss but I feel let me talk about the written point in details here only.

Available Internet Marketing are Search engine Optimization (SEO)- PPC, Website advertising, Online Paid marketing, adwords, adsense, and link exchange, CPM and other marketing activities.

I hope this SEO word is not a stranger with all the internet savvy now a days even most of the internet user says yes I can promote your website through search engine optimization over the Google, Yahoo, MSN and all. And I feel this is true because the use of internet has been greater than before and almost everybody knows about the google, yahoo and msn and all other engines. How they rank website and how they decide a website to rank. Anyways we were talking about the hosting. Lets say your site is well optimized and ranking well on all engines BUT when a user tries to open your website, It says page can not be found. The same page most of the site displays everyday, can not find server, or may be another message that server is down for maintenance kindly check back later. Now the point is if you are ranking well, your site is having quality content and everything is very good about your website then why choose a third class hosting package on a bad server. You worked hard in finding the visitor from the internet to come to your website and finally when arrive, all in vain. Simple he/she will try the website or try another webpage. So just because of a bad server all of your efforts go useless.

Not only SEO I am talking about but any of the marketing applied to your website. When a request has been sent to your server, your server must respond with in 3-5 seconds so that that can make sure your visitor to stay because your webpage processing bar is working but if a webpage does not open with in 10-20 seconds generally user close the windows and looks for the another step.

Here I have couple of good point you can read while selecting a hosting for your site.

1 - Try to check the other running website those are hosted on the same server.

2 - If possible send a personal request to the current running website owner to ask about the hosting and experience with the same.

3 - If possible ask your technical expert to involve in the selection of the hosting.

4 Also check what all features & permission you have been given

5 Check out the prices you have been charged and what is the market cost.

6 Don t go for the discounted rates as this might be the another wrong decision while selecting a package.

7 Go for the brand name hosting company or check out the complete plan and then choose a package.

8 - Try to check how many domains are hosted on the same server. This will ensure you the server performance.

9 Go for the best hosting; don t go for the discounted prices.

I hope all these point will help you in a good hosting company selection while marketing a website. You go any marketing for your website but if you have got the best server that can respond to your online clients or visitors immediately.

Market a good website with good content hosted on a good server with qualified internet marketing strategist would be the best solutions for your internet business.

About the Author: Ultimate Web Solutions is a web designing & web hosting company in India helps you in internet marketing activities. Quality web hosting services India, Quality Web designing services from India. http://www.ultimate-websolutions.com http://www.ultimate-websolutions.com/web-hosting.html

Source: www.isnare.com