easy

Restaurant front end

A few questions, if we may. Have you ever worked in a restaurant? Have you ever started your own business? Have you ever used a point-of-sale system? How about all three at once? Welcome to the world of the restaurant entrepreneur, a high-stress, low-overhead, labor-intensive undertaking similar to other challenging occupations such as barkeeper or cafe owner. For them, Sani Technologies offers Easy Restaurant POS, a point-of-sale system optimized for restaurants, bars, grills, pizzerias, and similar small businesses. It supports dine-in, take-out, and delivery services; multiple users; separate Kitchen Display like large chains; and bars and beverage services. It tracks … Read more

Problematic POS

A good point-of-sale system can be the difference between happy employees and frustrated ones, and between speedy transactions and those that drag on forever, often requiring manager intervention. Intuitiveness is the name of the game when it comes to POS software. Based on that criterion, we can't say that we're particularly impressed by Easy POS-Gold Point of Sale. Its interface is neither attractive nor easy to navigate, and it doesn't have much to recommend it over other POS programs.

When we first launched Easy POS we were a bit taken aback by the interface; its garish colors, … Read more

Clickfree C6 review: Excellent for the uninitiated

Announced just month ago, Clickfree's C6 portable drive is an upgrade to the company's C2N. The new drive now adds the ability to back up the entire system (imaging) and restore it, in case of a crash or virus infection.

Supporting USB 3.0, the C6 is very fast, topping the charts of portable drives. The drive can also be used to boot the computer, a standard way to restore the computer back to its original working state or move the system to a new hard drive.

On the downsize, the C6 stores backups in a proprietary format, … Read more

Windows XP market share dips below 50 percent

After a healthy 10-year run, Windows XP may finally be losing its overwhelming grip on computer users.

Though it's still the most heavily used version of the Windows operating system, XP's market share among all operating systems finally dipped just below the 50 percent mark last month, according to stats out today from Net Applications.

The aging OS has gradually been shedding market share a bit each month over the past few years, touching 62 percent a year ago and 51 percent in June before its latest dip in July, according to Net Applications.

At the same time, … Read more

LaCie unveils Windows Server-based 5-bay NAS

It's been a while since I last had opportunity to take on a Windows Server-based NAS server, such as the Acer Aspire EasyStore or HP's MediaSmart series. And now when Microsoft fanboys are starting to worry that the company has abandoned the NAS server market, LaCie has announced its first network storage server that's based on an NAS-specific operating system (OS) from the software giant, the 5big Storage Server.

The new NAS server is powered by Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Standard operating system, which was introduced in October 2010 and is based on Windows … Read more

EA free-to-play exec: $60 games are 'exploitative'

All the consumers who complain about paying $60 for a video game have an important ally in their corner.

Ben Cousins, general manager of Electronic Arts' Easy Studios, told Rock, Paper, Shotgun it's simply awful that consumers must shell out $60 for a game they may or may not like.

"I can't think of anything more exploitative than gating all of your content behind having to pay someone $60," Cousins told the U.K.-based gaming blog in an interview posted yesterday. "That's a really harsh business model if you think about it objectively.&… Read more

Chop like a ninja!

Fruit Ninja HD is a faithful iPad adaptation of the popular iPhone and iPod Touch game of the same name. This HD version adds same-device multiplayer and sharper graphics to the original's unique gameplay.

The interface hasn't changed, but the game's goofy and addictive premise--slashing through fast-flying fruit with swiping strokes of a virtual sword--works especially well on the iPad's bigger screen. You can even "go Wolverine" with up to eight-finger multitouch.

The game gives you several options for solo and multiplayer: In single-player, you can play Classic (the game ends when you hit … Read more

Instant hash

Hash functions have a variety of cryptographic uses, such as providing digital signatures, checking the contents of downloaded files and programs for corrupted or changed files, and time-stamping secure documents without revealing their content. Easy Hash is a freeware hash value calculator from odzysk.info. It supports more than 130 file and text hash functions, and it can crack CRC-32 passwords. It can also reset passwords in a variety of dynamic content management and e-commerce platforms, including Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, Magento, Drupal, and Prestashop.

Easy Hash's compact interface is easy to manage, with a plain window that displays the … Read more

Who can afford the carbon-friendly skies?

Directflights.com is now offering a search engine for finding the cheapest carbon-friendly flights between two destinations, the company announced today.

The tool was developed in conjunction with The Carbon Consultancy, a British company that offers reports on emissions data and offset procurement information for travel industry companies.

It offers to show international flights, as well as those contained within the U.K. and Europe, or contained within the U.S., among other places. Flights can be viewed by cheapest only, or by most carbon-friendly with a choice to see flights in different currency options.

The tool ranks flights on … Read more

Apple savvy in focus: The iPhone 4 camera

Apple's iPhone 4 camera packs a technology that a lot of buyers of the phone may have missed: a new image sensor tech that is coming into focus--pardon the pun--as camera makers like Kodak adopt the technology in higher-end cameras.

The technology, called backside illumination, or BSI, was highlighted by Steve Jobs when he took the stage to roll out the new iPhone, as Joshua Goldman of CNET Reviews wrote here.

Apple's savviness shines through here. The company had to do its homework to get out in front of this trend, particularly in smartphones, which are not necessarily … Read more