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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

#331

Post by CoolGuySteve »

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…

Even more strange is that when the file failed to parse after uploading, they just threw out the files instead of keeping them to analyze later.

If they still had the uploads they could go back and convert them properly and apologize for the delay.

It's just bad engineering all around. Even if there was a less glaringly obvious bug that caused parsing to fail, how would they debug that parsing bug without a sample file?

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

#332

Post by noisem4ker »

guptaneil wrote: post #33
ungzd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When containing images and image sequences encoded in a particular format (e.g. HEVC or AVC) its use becomes subject to the licensing of patents on the coding format.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with that quote? As I mentioned, HEVC is subject to licensing costs. If you try to wrap your HEVC video content in an HEIC container, you don't suddenly get to skip paying the original licensing costs.

He's trying to remark the fact that HEIC = HEIF(HEVC) => non-free. See my other reply to your first comment. Note that HEVC doesn't necessarily mean video. It can be used to compress still images, as it's the case of Apple devices.

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

#333

Post by alasdair_ »

mfarris wrote: post #166
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F... under “licensing”)

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

#334

Post by gkoberger »

userbinator wrote: post #278
gkoberger wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel like Apple adopting a new format inherently means they're moving fast and breaking things. The work on HEIF started in 2012, and Apple has used it since 2017. 8 years isn't exactly a breakneck speed. First off, they do a good job of converting it to a JPG when necessary. They've thought about backwards compatibility. Secondly, if we didn't move forward, we'd never see any innovation. HEIF is smaller and…

JPEG2000 is... 20 years old and almost no one outside of specialized applications uses it either. "Innovation" is about the last thing you want in an interchange format. Old and boring works every time. (Opinion of someone who maintains legacy software and has suffered from far too many breaking changes.)

Someone needs to be the first to push it. In this case, Apple is probably the #1 or #2 generator of photographs on the planet, and it's a lot easier to make something happen quickly when the format is supported in that way.

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

#335

Post by APtemp9372 »

I took an English AP test yesterday. They give you three options for submitting your essay: Upload a picture, upload a text document (.doc, .pdf and a couple others) or paste your essay into a text field. Strangely, there was no option to type directly into the webpage.

I struggle with writing quickly, so I made the (rather poor) decision to continue writing up until about 20 seconds remained. I pasted my response and clicked submit with about 10 seconds left. The timer continued to count down and I was panicked because the submission was still loading. It finally went through with only 3 seconds remaining.

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

#336

Post by gkoberger »

snorkel wrote: post #279
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…

I fault Apple for being too heavy-handed with making HEIC the default photo file format when even in recent versions of MacOS like Sierra, the Finder app doesn't know what the heck a HEIC file is! Apple hasn't released an update patch to fix either, unless you consider upgrading MacOS to Mojave an update patch!

Yeah, that is weird that OSX can't deal with HEIC well.

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

#337

Post by derefr »

dragontamer wrote: post #81
oefrha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 JPEG. Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering. Edit: Like a sibling comment said, the accept attribute actually isn't necessary; even PNG images (e.g. screenshots) from Photos are converted to JPEG automatically.…

> Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering. Why is it a failure of the college board to put "accept="image/jpeg"", instead of iOS which failed to default to the more standardized jpeg format when HEIC was not specified? HEIC is a newer format which fewer systems support. iOS / Safari should default to JPEG in this case.

Because a lack of an accept attribute on the file-input element has a defined meaning in HTML, and that meaning is accept="⋆/⋆".

Which, in turn, means that the form isn't putting any constraint on what's being uploaded at all, and so there's no reason to think that the form is asking for an image in the first place. At that point, it's asking for a file. Any file. And so it has the semantics of taking whatever file you provide it as-is, with no transformation necessary. Just like when a client requests `Cache-Control: no-transform` from a server. It wants the thing on the other side sent to it as-is.

And, it's important to support those semantics (and that particular implicit meaning for leaving out the `accept` attribute), because such "as-is" uploads have many use-cases. The form might be e.g. a computer-forensics or antivirus-signature portal, that wants an evidence file; or the interface to a hex editor or decompiler, that expects a raw binary with arbitrary extension in unknown format; or the SCP component of an old web SSH terminal emulator. All these existed on the web, and used , before the `accept` attribute was introduced. So "not using the `accept` attribute" has to retain semantics that are backward-compatible with that legacy.

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

#338

Post by joezydeco »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #139
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…

These tests take a not insignificant amount of time and stress to do, especially on top of this SiP situation. Not to mention they cost the students money. Communicating these issues only over twitter is also not at all acceptable. Plenty of people don't use or rarely use twitter, such that it should not be considered the primary communication channel. So while yes, College Board is allowing students to retake the te…

This isn't just the College Board. You wouldn't believe how many schools and educators out there now just assume you have a Twitter and Facebook feed and check it regularly. Email and phone calls are completely out of the picture now.

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

#339

Post by derefr »

bjtitus wrote: post #90
dragontamer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering. Why is it a failure of the college board to put "accept="image/jpeg"", instead of iOS which failed to default to the more standardized jpeg format when HEIC was not specified? HEIC is a newer format which fewer systems support. iOS / Safari should default to JPEG in this case.

The comment was edited to show that iOS does in fact do this. But even if it did send HEIC, if you're going to fail to handle "any" format, then you better specify the one you can handle. By the same token, why shouldn't my computer convert every .docx to PDF, or some other "more universal" format? Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their time sending out tweets and writing help docs.

> Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their time sending out tweets and writing help docs.

Point of order: separate people, with separate/independent/concurrent job responsibilities. It very likely wasn't the programmers tweeting and writing docs. (Heck, I expect that the College Board doesn't even retain any full-time programmers, only contracts with firms for projects.)

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

#340

Post by liveoneggs »

karatestomp wrote: post #264
ativzzz wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

yes it's easier at home to have this stuff on the fridge for reference (also she can just ask me to login for her) but at actual school it was a real problem
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