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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

#321

Post by [deleted] »

sh-run wrote: post #282
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…

ImageMagick supports HEIC to JPG conversion. It would take at most a few hours to hack together an interim solution.

[deleted]

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

#322

Post by jimbokun »

macintux wrote: post #62
_bxg1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New sweat, tears and duct tape solutions are being created every day. Let's start by focusing on the ones coming down the pipe.

Which would still face the same problem: the government would rather pay multiple times for crappy software at a lower price than one big bill for quality software the first time.

Or you can pay one big bill and still get crappy software.

It's difficult to evaluate the quality of software development contractors.

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

#323

Post by KingMachiavelli »

Mirioron wrote: post #168
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.

But no browsers do [1]. For an OS that does its best to hide file types & extensions from the user, it's absurd to not have robust file type conversions when moving/sharing files between apps.

[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=heif

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

#324

Post by jedberg »

RandomGuyDTB wrote: post #315
jedberg wrote: post #271

The irony here is that it is the most privileged students who will suffer this the most. It's the ones with the fanciest phones that will run into this bug. Usually these things go the other way -- usually it's the poorest who have to deal with these kinds of things. Edit: See the reply below about iPhone SEs using HEIC. A point that I missed.

Don't get so ahead of yourself. Even people in relative poverty, in many cases, have new(er) iPhones, and HEIC is default on my SE, the budget iPhone model from 2016. In high schools you're alienated if you don't have the "blue bubbles"* - although it's stupid, if you're in high school in 2020 you probably need an iPhone, and you can get older models for a relatively small price (my SE was [1] - Source: I currently g…

You bring up a really good point that I didn't consider, that iPhone SEs default to HEIC.

Thank you.

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

#325

Post by noisem4ker »

guptaneil wrote: post #24
pdonis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A national testing portal ought to support the default image format taken by the world's most popular phone, period. What if it can't because the format is proprietary and Apple wants to charge for its use? As I understand it, MS and Google have to pay licensing fees to enable support for it in Windows 10 and Android.

You're thinking of HEVC (video encoding, like h.265): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P... HEIC (image encoding) is available without royalties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For... Regardless, in this case, as others noted, iOS would have just converted to jpg if College Board was using a standard image upload form.

>HEIC (image encoding) is available without royalties

As stated by that Wikipedia article, HEIF is the royalty-free container. HEIC means the content is encoded with HEVC, which makes it not free.

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

#326

Post by PascLeRasc »

lisper wrote: post #304
munk-a wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite hard? I mean shame on them for letting this bug through in the first place but I'd be pretty horrified if someone at CB tried to hot-fix this problem out. This isn't a small agile organization, it's enormous and may not have any route to get a patch out in less than a week due to QA requirements. (That isn't to say such slow deployment processes are good, but they do exist and may be contractually required)

Who said anything about a hot fix? They knew about the problem well ahead of time.

Anything less than 2 fiscal quarters is a hot fix for these people.

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

#327

Post by closeparen »

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…

"The state should have protected me from Live Photos" is the weirdest take I've seen in a while.

A regulatory regime for this space would have been focused on protecting the livelihoods of 24-hour photo labs.

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

#328

Post by azinman2 »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #318
azinman2 wrote: post #299

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either sp…

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default. [1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file formats in the tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would simply convert to one of the accepted formats.

It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they could purchase to do that for them. This isn't an open-source endeavor, and they charge each student to take the exam.

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

#329

Post by Jach »

ativzzz wrote: post #285
Jach wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean you essentially need to learn a pseudo language on top of math to be able to do that. The barrier to entry compared to writing pen and paper is much higher, and math is hard enough for a vast number of Americans.

The context here isn't the average American, but a high school student taking an AP test involving writing math -- where scoring well counts for the same credit as having passed the equivalent entry level course(s) in college.

Besides, math is already pseudo language on top of pseudo language. Learning notation is part of math, I'll concede learning to type an expression on a computer is a different notation than writing it with pen, but if you can't learn that, why learn math? Each domain does its own thing too and isn't even necessarily consistent. Guy Steele gave a great talk a few years ago on "Computer Science Metanotation", and that's just one area of math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q (Edit: And to conclude here, learning to read and write with some notation tends to be easy, it's learning what the math actually means that is the hard part.)

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

#330

Post by MikusR »

jchw wrote: post #223

OK, I honestly don’t blame them for not supporting HEIC yet. What I do blame them for is clearly not testing their system against the software and hardware students will be using. There would’ve been no problems at all if the system handled the problem and explained how to resolve it, but it sounds like it failed in a somewhat more silent fashion. Without question, they should be resolving this problem on their end.

They did not anticipate idiots renaming files to "convert" them.
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