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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

#571

Post by Thorrez »

lightgreen wrote: post #539
Thorrez wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a medium option: have an alert popup saying Convert the image to a format the site accepts (jpg)? [ ] Don't show this message again [OK] [Cancel]

Anecdotally, yesterday I accidentally learned that my relative clicks OK in any dialog window within 200ms without even attempt to read the message. So the alert you suggest would slightly help 1% of geeks and will annoy 99% of the users.

Compared to the option of not converting, it would help everyone, reducing annoyance.

Also I'm not sure if you can generalize from your one relative to 99% of users.

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

#572

Post by thaumasiotes »

root_axis wrote: post #565
thaumasiotes wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your model, what's happening to the data in the file system?

In the scenario I'm describing nothing is ever written to disk. The uploaded image data is streamed into memory directly from the socket and is processed in situ, when an exception occurs the stack unwinds and deallocates the memory storing the image data. Writing extra code to delete a file in a catch block doesn't seem like something someone trying to account for failure scenarios would do, it's much more likely th…

But it is incredibly unlikely that web uploads are piped directly into custom software rather than just being written as files which are processed later. That would be an extreme amount of extra work for no benefit at all.

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

#573

Post by LordDragonfang »

Thorrez wrote: post #571
lightgreen wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, yesterday I accidentally learned that my relative clicks OK in any dialog window within 200ms without even attempt to read the message. So the alert you suggest would slightly help 1% of geeks and will annoy 99% of the users.

Compared to the option of not converting, it would help everyone, reducing annoyance. Also I'm not sure if you can generalize from your one relative to 99% of users.

While it may not be 99%, /r/talesfromtechsupport on reddit has enough instances of this to suggest it is extremely common user behavior.

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

#574

Post by imtringued »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #555
root_axis wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, the file data was likely popped off the stack automatically, no need to write any extra code.

In your model, what's happening to the data in the file system?

It was never on the file system (kept in RAM) or it was in some temporary folder where files get deleted when an upload request has finished processing the file to prevent DOS attacks. Automatically keeping uploaded files sounds like a really really bad idea.

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

#575

Post by imtringued »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #572
root_axis wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the scenario I'm describing nothing is ever written to disk. The uploaded image data is streamed into memory directly from the socket and is processed in situ, when an exception occurs the stack unwinds and deallocates the memory storing the image data. Writing extra code to delete a file in a catch block doesn't seem like something someone trying to account for failure scenarios would do, it's much more likely th…

But it is incredibly unlikely that web uploads are piped directly into custom software rather than just being written as files which are processed later. That would be an extreme amount of extra work for no benefit at all.

Tomcat gives you a http request object where you can just grab the input stream object and pass it to pretty much every library that processes files because opening a file just gives you a fileinputstream so adding general support for inputstreams is much easier than actually adding support that only works on files.

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

#576

Post by root_axis »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #572
root_axis wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the scenario I'm describing nothing is ever written to disk. The uploaded image data is streamed into memory directly from the socket and is processed in situ, when an exception occurs the stack unwinds and deallocates the memory storing the image data. Writing extra code to delete a file in a catch block doesn't seem like something someone trying to account for failure scenarios would do, it's much more likely th…

But it is incredibly unlikely that web uploads are piped directly into custom software rather than just being written as files which are processed later. That would be an extreme amount of extra work for no benefit at all.

It's not at all unlikely, this is the default behavior for various setups, e.g. nodejs with express which is primarily a streams based system where you'd have to do extra work to write to disk.

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

#577

Post by ipsocannibal »

This whole situation boils down to a lack of understanding of who the software's users are and a lack of simulation of their use cases. This problem becomes glaringly obvious if you perform user studies with a sample of test takers with simulated tests. The College Board cheaped out by not doing their do diligence to ensure that the system they vended worked as advertised. I'd like to see if this was developed in house or outsourced. If outsourced I think the College Board should sue. If not there should soon be several new vacancies on their webdev team.
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