Category : Technology Innovation



We think innovation has to be practical. Practical for our clients. Practical for their customers. If we can’t make it work for our clients, it isn’t innovation.

Although our definitions are unique to Master System, they are based on a deep knowledge and understanding of both the IT industry and the wholesale/retail distribution market as a whole, making them relevant and applicable to today’s business leaders.

Today’s modern distribution organizations demand agility. Requirements for ERP applications have changed. Always-on, self-service organizations with flexible and scalable capacity are now the cornerstones. Modernization is both the key to success and the challenge of the decade. Organizations need to ensure that their applications portfolio and infrastructure align to the enterprise, operations and budget needs of a high-performance organization that can respond to change.

Defining a problem can often be the most critical step in finding the solution. Once you understand the bigger issue and its connection to everyday operations, it is easier to clear a path to get there.

Master Systems’ leadership is applying this concept to our work with clients, helping them bridge the gap between conceptual ideas and real-life answers, especially as they relate to wholesale/retail distribution technology. The topics are those we hear most often in conversations with our customers, so our focus is around answers that address their most common questions and concerns.

Our software is a proven source of wholesale/retail distribution technology expertise, answers and results. Master System stands ready to help distributors realize emerging trends in their software and, apply them to our customer’s capabilities. We understand the ramifications of the service-oriented approach and, help guide our customer’s through the transformation needed to become more agile and successful.



Do you feel your lack of confidence when speaking with people stops you from making a good impression in the work place? Do you ever wish you could be more confident at work, express your opinions more clearly and not be intimidated by face to face communication with your superiors or important clients?

If this strikes a chord with you and you are interested in learning how to gain confidence with work place communication to enhance your career then you may benefit from learning how to improve your public speaking skills.

Having confidence when speaking in public doesn’t just apply to people delivering seminars to large groups of people or slick sales people, if you speak with colleagues or clients in any capacity then you too could benefit from learning the skills of a good communicator. Remember the mark of a good communicator is not being exceptionally witty, clever, entertaining or super polished but someone who is able to easily join a conversation, contribute their thoughts and ideas clearly and efficiently and enjoy verbal interaction with people from all walks of life.

With improved communication skills behind you, you will find that your working life is greatly improved. Your ideas and opinions can be evaluated by others more easily, annual reviews will become a less stressful time where you will be confident in actively participating in the process and negotiating salaries, benefits and promotions etc will be subjects you no longer shrink from. Managing a team of people will be less daunting prospect and you new skills will inspire and encourage your team to perform well.

You may also find that improving your communication skills for the work place also has a positive knock on effect in to your personal life, at home with your family and in other situations where you might normally have shied away from contributing. Imagine being asked to deliver a toast at an important family occasion or being asked to be Master of Ceremonies at a friends wedding, events that you would normally have hid in the back row when attending!

So how do you go about improving your communication skills? How does a shy and uneasy speaker acquire the skills of a confident and dynamic speaker?

At the heart of the matter is the process of un-learning your fear response to speaking with others, in both group situations and one on one scenarios. This is not something you can just wish to happen and ‘hey presto’ your fear response has vanished. You need to go through the process of re-educating your mind set to lift away the fear response that makes you uneasy with speaking with others and replace it with a healthy, calm attitude towards speaking in the workplace and in general.

This re-education can take place in the form of a specially designed public speaking confidence self hypnosis program where you will be expertly guided along a journey where your sub-conscious mind, the gate keeper of your fears, will be re-trained to reverse the damage done by negative thoughts and images related to speaking in public.

Self hypnosis will also teach you how to use strong visualisation techniques to become your ideal speaker and how to combat the influence of past negative speaking experiences.

Just imagine if 30 days from now you were able to speak one on one with your boss about your contributions, aspirations and goals in your role at work or chair an important meeting with clients or handle staff recruitment, annual reviews or disciplinary meetings for example – all without the slightest hesitation or twitch of nerves, wouldn’t that be truly amazing?

So if you believe you could improve your status in the work place by becoming a more confident, self assured communicator, self-hypnosis might be the answer you’ve been looking for.

Linux functionality is often found, albeit in a different form in Windows. Inodes, the subject of this article, are an exception to this rule. Because of their practicality, Windows now includes an imitation of this functionality. But if you want to take full advantage of this somewhat complicated concept, you’ll have to go to Linux or Unix.

So what are inodes and why would anyone want to use them? Inodes are the internal description of a file. As we will see below, the specific inode contents for a given file are different in memory and on disk. But the key to the inode is that a single file may have different names. Why would anybody want to do that? One very important reason is that a user may access a shared file by an intuitive name. Accounting department users could give a certain file an accounting-style name, while users from the marketing department could access this same file by a name that makes sense to them. This functionality alone makes inodes worth while.

Furthermore, let’s say that by accident the “accounting” file was deleted. Accounting users could still access that file if they knew the “marketing” name. Remember, we are talking about one single file that has different names. People don’t have to know about these complications to be able to access the file. The extra processing is carried out behind the scenes.

Now let’s examine inodes more closely. The inode on disk contains the following information: file owner identifier, file type, file access permissions, file access information, number of links, list of data addresses, and file size. The file owner identifier specifies the file owner and the group owner as discussed in our article on permissions and groups. The file type indicates whether we are talking about a regular file, a directory, or something else. The file access permissions denote the permissions, also discussed in a previous article. A given file may have different permissions for different users, for example accounting users may have permission to read and modify the file while marketing users only have permission to read it.

File access information specifies when the file was last accessed, last modified, and when the associated inode was last modified. The number of links indicates the number of names that the file has. In our example, the file has two links. If either accounting or marketing delete the file (assuming that they have such permission) the number of links is reduced to 1. But the file is still there and the number of links could be increased.

The inode on disk provides a list of data addresses; the single file may be scattered across the disk. The final value is the size of the file in bytes.

The inode in memory contains all of the above information plus additional information, for example, whether the file is available for processing (someone else may be using it) and whether someone is waiting to process the file. Remember, several people may be using Unix or Linux simultaneously. If there were no file usage control two different people in accounting could pay a bill at the same time. Windows doesn’t have this problem; it’s not a multi-user system.

The ln command is used to create a link to a given file. For example, ln acct1 mark1 links the mark1 file to the acct1 file; it makes the name mark1 available for the acct1 file. It’s the same file, but with a new name. The ls ‘i command provides information about the file including the number of links (the number of names for the file.)

The next article in this series discusses the Linux kernel and processes.