271–280 of 577 posts
Edit: See the reply below about iPhone SEs using HEIC. A point that I missed.
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…
At the very least, a message that appeared at the time that one attempted to upload the image with instructions on how to fix the problem on the spot. How hard could that have possibly been?
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…
I seem to remember that HEIC is quite patent-encumbered. Could this possibly cost them a lot or be more complicated than you seem to imply?
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…
Yeah, no. Absolutely not. All of the testing for their platform would have to be redone, and if a bug is found, then what?
You can argue that they should have done a better job notifying users, but to argue that "of course they had time to push a fix in the week before the most important testing period" is just nonsensical.
I know this is mean of me, but the student who was taking her Computer Science exam and who apparently thought that changing the file’s extension would change format? Yeah... she deserved to fail.
These students are high school students. I'm very doubtful that this course covered material like file types and encoding. First year CS classes are almost exclusively programming basics and architecture. This line of thinking only really makes sense if you presuppose that every person taking a computer science course in high school has an understanding of file types. Many don't have this knowledge. I don't see why s…
Besides, I don’t know what it’s like in the US nowadays, but back in my time (late 1990s, IB) the computer science curriculum took file formats and so forth as granted, and concentrated on the theoretical constructs such as Turing machines, lambda calculus, decidability, computability, and the theory of recursive functions. I remember my exam required proving the identity between a particular integral and the Euler (not Riemann) zeta function and whether it could be evaluated in polynomial time to an arbitrary degree of approximation. We had to sketch out the algorithm that would do this in terms of pseudocode.
Trying to transcode a file by changing the extension... I dunno... it seems kind of meek.
"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…
I see where you're going here, and I want to agree, but you aren't reckoning with the incentives for cheating on the AP.
My kid is taking the "AP World" test today. One of her classmates was asked to sit by a different student to coach them at their computer during the test, because the test is done remotely this year rather than in person.
I'm afraid that if you give N people an option like this, a fraction will exploit it.
> 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 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…
"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.)
> 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…
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.