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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

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Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#161

Post by mywittyname »

jp555 wrote: post #82
Hokusai wrote: post #77

> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs. This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depe…

You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? I don't put as much faith in that as you.

I'm not sure where you got that impression. I think the parent was saying that software is extremely crucial now, and technology companies can't continue this trend of randomly breaking traditions for the sake of moving forward.

Software is critical to the function of society. And society can't afford to keep up with the rate of emerging technological trends, it's just not possible. Technology companies have to continue to support interoperability with the lowest common denominator systems.

This is significantly worse than Apple ending Flash support. At least that was announced well ahead of time and was major, major news. This migration to a new default image format is a blindsiding. Three years is not really an appropriate time window for such a transition.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#163

Post by tyrust »

II2II wrote: post #52

While it sounds like the College Board may be at fault for some of the issues, like the test timing out when HEIC images were sent or the initial communication of the issue, I wouldn't be so quick to place all of the blame on them. Part of the problem is how we more-or-less glorify an ignorance of technology. This can be seen in both students trying to change the file type by changing the file extension and JPEG bein…

>After all, this is not the only case where they will run into this issue.

The AP exam is taken by high school kids. This very likely is the first time they have run into this issue. Blaming them for not knowing how to deal with it isn't "elitist", it just lacks empathy.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#164

Post by irrational »

The thing I don't understand in all the news articles I have read about this is the major complaint of the students seems to be that they have to retake the test which will mean they have to study for a few more weeks. Isn't having more time to study a good thing? Having more time to study and prepare should mean less stress, not more.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#165

Post by Alupis »

pwthornton wrote: post #111
xienyc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It…

HEIC isn't supported in a lot of places. It's mainly (only?) Apple that uses it with iOS devices.

Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable.

Bet the same thing would have happened with webp images too.

JPG and PNG are like the FAT32 format of images. Always accepted, everywhere.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#166

Post by mfarris »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #142
pwthornton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It…

While I kind of agree with the sentiment, I'm also totally done with the notion of "Apple decides to have their own unique format every 2 years, and makes the change in a backwards incompatible way, so now the world needs to kowtow to them, despite Apple dragging their feet in many areas of standardization." Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the…

HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard.

Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come.

When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#167

Post by Spivak »

irrational wrote: post #164

The thing I don't understand in all the news articles I have read about this is the major complaint of the students seems to be that they have to retake the test which will mean they have to study for a few more weeks. Isn't having more time to study a good thing? Having more time to study and prepare should mean less stress, not more.

Double edged sword I suppose. If you felt you did poorly you now have another chance to do well. But if you felt like you did well then you'll probably get a lower score.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#168

Post by Mirioron »

IvanK_net wrote: post #71

I am 100% on the side of the school. Unlike with JPEG, everybody who wants to work with HEIC should pay licence fees. Also, HEIC is like 50x more complex than JPEG. I hope the world will never get to a point, where each phone brand stores photos in their own format, and you need a special software from the phone manufacturer to view the photos (that is what we have now with raw photography formats, and what we used t…

Windows, macOS, iOS and Android all support it though.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#169

Post by gamblor956 »

cm2187 wrote: post #93
Hokusai wrote: post #77

> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs. This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depe…

Plus the backend doesn't move fast. The .net framework only got a json serializer recently. I am not holding my breath for system.drawing to handle HEIC!

The .net framework only got a json serializer recently.

If by "recently", you mean more than a decade ago...Unless you are specifically referring to the web portion of .net (i.e., core or asp.net) and not the framework as a whole.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#170

Post by vb6sp6 »

mrlala wrote: post #131
pwthornton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It…

Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.

People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer
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