Of course understanding that this is Canada:
I don't recommend this kind of approach. It might solve the immediate problem but, does not address the cause. Having police visibility during "peak" times will resolve the issue of crime in a specific area and time but, will not solve the crime from not happening somewhere else. Also, I don't know who is working on these reports and whether or not they apply their own biases. The US already has an issue with over policing. This would definitely exacerbate it.
I'm in complete agreement here. Their response is appropriate given the challenges that they face. No team ever thinks they are going to get that kind of migration to their platform the way zoom has received. Good for them.
We are all always learning. I am all over the place from java, shell, awk, python, and now I'm playing with Go and I kind of like it but can't find the time to actually make something useful so I can learn from it.
I remember writing one of my first parsers was for a pdf and I had to employ a similar methodology where I had to rely on regex and "positionally-aware fixed-length" formatting rules. I would literally chunk specific groups by the number of spaces they contained lol. I had to do very little manual intervention but, damn it all, it worked :D .
I can cosign on this methodology. I used to work in an organization that used to build pdfs for accounting and licensing documentation. I used a proprietary tool (Planetpress :( ) to generate the documents using metadata from a separate input file (csv or xml) to determine what column maps to what field.
Good thing about this was as you have already outlined: It allowed for some flexibility in what was acceptable input data. For specific address formats or names we could accept multiple formats as long as they were consistent and in the proper position in the input file.
Regarding renegotiating: We didn't get that far. However, if a customer within our organization was enlisting our expertise and could not produce an acceptable input file, then we would go back to them and explain the format that we require in order to generate the necessary documents. Of course, creating our document through our data pipelines is obviously the better choice, but this was not an option in some cases at the time.
As far as doing the work of creating these documents in a tool like Planetpress is concerned, well, don't use Planetpress. You are better of doing it in your favorite language of choice's libraries tbh. Nothing worse than having to use proprietary code (Presstalk/Postscript.) that you have to learn and never be able to use anywhere.
By re-negotiating I mean in terms of quoting billable hours. A rule of thumb for a typical Postscript scraper was around 20 hours end to end (dev, testing, and integration into our workflow system).
The problem we have with a lot of client files is that they look fine but printers don't care about "look fine", they crash hard when they run out of virtual memory due to poor structure. And usually without a helpful error message, so that's more billable hours to diagnose. The most common culprit is workflows that develop single document PDFs then merge them resulting in thousands of similar and highly redundant subset fonts.
I understand why they pulled their products from this service.
However, the problem I see with this is if they use the same pricing scheme as Google Stadia, most people will have to pay full retail for games that are fairly old that they already own. At least offer those games at a discounted price by verifying ownership.
> if they use the same pricing scheme as Google Stadia,
GeForce now uses no pricing scheme at all for the games, because GeForce Now doesn't sell games. The GeForce Now service is essentially just a rental of a specialized virtual machine connected to a hardware GPU, with network-optimized display/input handling and Steam, UPlay, etc preinstalled. You have to log into each service with your own account and your own purchases.
I agree with your post. I had the same problem where match was harder for me to comprehend. It wasn't until I started programming that I started to understand the concept you cite (Functions.).
