It kind of sounded to me like the author was pointing out that, though O'Reilly sucks, the editors (including the acquisitions editor) were good. The author didn't seem to get personal in a bad way.
They should have done the upgrade like Apple. Everyone gets the upgrade, but not everyone gets all of the features of the upgrade (e.g. I got iOS 5, but not Siri).
It sounds like they're doing just this in spirit by backporting some features to Windows 7, but calling it Windows 7.8 instead of Windows 8. Marketing mistake?
Thank you for the suggestion and recommendation. Right now the application is broken up into decoupled modules pretty well (though it could certainly be improved).
I think I gave a pretty poor example in the question, not explaining exactly what I was confused about. Say I have an Auth module with a full suite of methods (login, logout, etc.). Supposed I had a client request a customization that not only requires a username/password for login, but also (as a contrived example) the user's employee number. I'm not sure how to setup the application architecture to (1) easily allow modification of the Users table to include an "employee_number" field (2) update the Auth module to check for employee number in the login function and (3) modify, say, the Login module to update the form that displays the username/password/employee number fields.
My ultimate goal is to work some system where the Auth module/Login module/database tables did not have to be directly changed, so software can still easily be updated.
Thanks for the suggestion. The system is already mostly module-ized with a few glaring exceptions that need to be fixed.
My big problem is how do I let customers modify the modules themselves, without actually modifying the module? E.g. I'd like to some how give them the ability to, say, add company specific fields to the pre-existing User module and database, without actually modifying the User module source. I'm not sure how to handle the database.
This is the goal for me so future updates can be seamless, no matter how extensively customized their actual version of the application is.
According to the readme, it's based on an open source engine called Voxlap, created by Ken Silverman (the guy that wrote the Duke3d engine). Here's a link:
Very true. My answer was a bit tounge-in-cheek, I just didn't get it across properly. While losing GPS would be a problem, it certainly wouldn't bring down our military.
This specific problem definitely wouldn't affect our aircraft simply because they would be at such a high altitude. Even if it was a problem, the military also has a some pretty impressive anti-jamming capability.
Yeah, I was joking a little. Most aircraft would still work pretty well off of inertial data. However there are quite a few weapons systems that just plain won't work without GPS.
BTW, I'm not a pilot, but I work for a government aerospace contractor, so I have some experience in this.