Godfrey DiGiorgi mused:
>
>
> On Mar 17, 2005, at 10:46 AM, John Francis wrote:
>
> > Repeat it as much as you like - it's still a fact that zero is a
> > perfectly well-defined value for the Created date on a FAT filesystem,
> > and that the Mac (viewed as a whole) doesn't handle this case well.
> > Just because you call it stupid doesn't alter the FAT specifications.
> > Either you support FAT, or you don't. The Mac apparently doesn't.
> >
> > Despite what some "experts" might tell you, the Mac isn't just pulling
> > a random value left around ("whatever happens to be at that offset")
> > out of the FAT directory data; it's retrieving a zero value that was
> > explicitly put there, in compliance with the FAT specifications, when
> > the file was created.
>
> And translating it to the constant that it means. Any other translation
> would be a guess. It's not a bug in the Mac, it's a stupid oversight in
> the FAT specification.
It's not an oversight. It's a deliberate decision. It's apparent
that it's a decision you disagree with, but that's irrelevant.
You still fail to grasp the point. If the Mac were just translating zero
as a normal date value, it would show up as the day before day one. But it
doesn't; there's suddenly a gap of 75 years introduced between the two dates.
