391–400 of 577 posts
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But that isn’t true about HEIC. There isn’t a license fee.
HEIC is based on H.265, so there is a whole separate organization dedicated licensing and litigating its patents.
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On the other hand, I think there's an argument to be made software should ignore file extensions whenever possible. Is really that hard for the backend to check if the file starts with "\xFF\xD8\xFF\xE0\0\x10JFIF\0\1" or "\x89PNG\r\n\x1A\n"? That would have caught this problem.
Yes, just hardcode what is hopefully the magic bytes for the formats we expect, what could possibly go wrong /s The biggest joke here is that this wouldn't have helped the students either. I don't think any of them will pass the "there is a minute left on the timer and the website tells you your picture isn't JPEG or PNG" challenge.
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Nothing starts common, you have to start somewhere, and it is an ISO standard format.
A file format, used by one company, isn't going to change the world. JPG and PNG are here to stay. Love it or hate it... they are the lowest common denominator for image formats.
New formats are a good thing, and fast adoption of them is good for users.
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...
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…
Ironically the person from the article who attempted converting the HEIC files to JPG by renaming them was taking a Computer Science test.
Apple did a good job abstracting away the file system.
This should really say that changing a file's extension will (almost) never mean that the file is converted.
Anyway, it seems like today's students have missed out on the arcane knowledge of renaming a jpg/mp3/whatever to .docx, submitting it, pretending that it got mysteriously corrupted, and getting an extension until whenever the professor realizes the issue. (I've never done it, but I've heard legend.)
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>"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…
That's an interesting (and slightly misleading) way to present that statistic. Apple has the best selling models, but does not have the majority of the market by operating system, which is what matters here. It's close, but Android is still supposed to have over 51% of the US market.[1] (If the graph itself is occluded, see the summary below it).
> It is on College Board to support its default image format.
It's a minority platform. It's only a slight minority, but it is one. If you want to make a case that they should support any default format for a platform over a certain percentage of usage (or "almost half"), that's fine, but you can't rely on the obvious argument that it's the dominant platform and thus should be supported, because it isn't the dominant platform.
Edit: Whoops, forgot to include citation
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
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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 c…
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HEIC isn’t a proprietary codec, it’s an ISO standard
But it's built on patented codec (H.265). It's illegal to use it without a patent license, regardless whether it's a standard or not. Even if you wrote your own implementation, it would be illegal for you to use your own code. Technically HEIF is a good format — it's half the size of WebP. WebP is based on a much weaker codec that is two generations older. AVIF is a freely-licensed HEIF alternative.
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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.