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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

#261

Post by ngz00 »

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…

Uploading images from my iPhone to Google Drive results in HEIC files that I have to manually convert as well.

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

#262

Post by cozzyd »

Alupis wrote: post #165
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…

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.

You know, I thought that about FAT32. But apparently neither Windows nor Mac OS X can see a FAT32 partition on an SD card if it's not the primary partition (at, least, not in an obvious way).

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

#263

Post by Barracoon »

Spivak wrote: post #158
MattGaiser wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives the appearance of working on Windows. If you change the file extension of a picture, you can still open it, so it may come from that experience.

It works pretty much everywhere. None of the major OS’s trust the extension for images.

I want to caveat this a bit. The OS does trust the extension of any file (at least MacOS/Windows). If you change a .png to a .docx, the OS will launch the handler associated with .docx files. If you change a .png to a .jpg, the OS will launch the handler for .jpg files. Chances are that program is the same for .jpg as it would have been for .png. When that program launches, reads the file, it probably looks at the file signature and then appropriately parses the rest of the image data.

Arguably, the user has been trained to think that renaming between image format converts between the two because of the image processing program correctly parsing and displaying the image, rather than displaying a message that the user opened a .jpg file but it was really a .png.

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

#264

Post by karatestomp »

ativzzz wrote: post #256
liveoneggs wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah my 6 y/o hates remembering passwords. Fear of getting her password wrong almost made her afraid to use computers at all

Time to set up a family 1password, or if you're up for teaching your family, keepass.

Not on school-owned devices :-/

(but for something like school app/site passwords, though best practice it may not be, "written on a sheet of paper, kept in a drawer" is in fact totally fine)

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

#265

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

The parent comment said they sent a tweet a week before, and they had something in their faq but it doesn't say how long before that was done.

Generally, when I've worked at places that were not startups a week to get something pushed in to fix something was not reliably enough time.

I didn't see in the article anything about how long they have been aware of the problem, perhaps they became aware of the problem just before the testing was scheduled to start. I guess that is a problem with their QA system, but at any rate I can think of lots of ways that they could have a problem for a week (or even longer really), not be able to fix it in their particular system, and have to notify people.

Of course I agree they did a lousy job of notifying people.

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

#266

Post by angryrant1727 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #3

This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems, facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL systems underpinning the US gov) h…

It's because the software industry doesn't respect experience. This issue is the kind of thing an experienced engineer with years of building past systems would notice. And they would know how to talk to management so things are done properly.

But how are experienced engineers treated? Like shit. As soon as we get older and have families to support, we get leetcoded out of positions since we can't keep up with months of studying for basically a mental twitch reflex test. That's what it's become, interviewers will consider you a lesser engineer if you fail to vomit out the rote memorized solution a few minutes slower than another candidate. After all, time to write the solution is an "objective" measure right? So the interview process is now "objective", what a joke.

And if an experienced engineer dares to recommend that hey maybe we shouldn't use the latest fad tech that just got announced on a HN post? They will be ridiculed and laughed as lazy, not "keeping up with technology", called a bunch of COBOL dinosaurs holding everyone back. For simply daring to say, hey maybe this latest new technology has tradeoffs that don't fit for us and we should stick to what we have since it has a better balance of tradeoffs. Nope, nobody cares about that, stupid dumb old engineer, stop getting in our way, need to make our resumes look good.

And the industry itself? Encourages constant job hopping, so nobody even gets experience maintaining a system for a long time. All those shitty decisions made? Don't care, off to another company.

And within a company? Constant indirect and direct pressure to go to management. Why aren't you a engineering manager? Oh you want to be a principal? Well here's the ridiculous requirements for that, still want it? What's the difference between a principal and senior anyways? Actually why do we even need seniors, let's just get more juniors. Management doesn't know the value of experience, they just want lower costs. And the engineers themselves seem to be saying experience is worthless, so everyone's in agreement right?

We are failing to build good software systems because it requires experience to know how to do it. And this industry does not value experience.

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

#267

Post by Jach »

Mirioron wrote: post #199
vaidhy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AP stat/ AP Chem/ AP Phys etc are about math formulae and explaining the calculation. I do not want my kids to learn TeX or figure out word formula editor just before the AP exams.

This brings up an interesting point: how come math input is so difficult on a computer? Even TeX seems like an awful solution for this.

It's not though? $x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$. If you have a visualizer hooked up while you're typing, even easier.

And then there's Mathematica.

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

#268

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Slartie wrote: post #254
lostlogin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Further down this thread you’ll see that the board have messed up and they aren’t accepting images they should due to poor implementation. “ oefrha 1 hour ago [–] Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to…

As I understood the article, the problem did not arise when uploading the picture directly from the phone, but in cases in which the picture was first transferred to a computer (via Airdrop was explicitly mentioned, but could probably also have been a cable connection) and then uploaded from the computer. Whatever conversion the browser on the iPhone (or Safari on macOS, because there are other browsers on computers…

My understanding from the article was that both types of problems happened.

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

#269

Post by JohnTHaller »

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…

> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States.

To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.

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

#270

Post by sethammons »

whalesalad wrote: post #107
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…

Okay so JPEG for the rest of eternity then?

I recall the shift from jpeg to png as a web default. Many sites would not accept one or the other. Eventually, png became more and more popular and "won." The same can happen with other formats, but it takes time. Any any site/org/company that deals with these uploads or displaying the images needs to be clear on what they can do and error out early when they can't do it. I recall "sorry, you tried to upload a png file, we only support jpeg" messages with links to details about the difference and how to convert them. And mime inspection worked back then too, so changing the extension was not good enough.
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