Godfrey DiGiorgi mused:
>
>
> On Mar 16, 2005, at 3:39 PM, John Francis wrote:
>
> > Call it what you will.
>
> Names are important.
>
> > There's something on a Mac that lets you bring up a window
> > on a folder, and which shows you the files in that folder,
> > together with showing you various file attributes (which,
> > in the case we are discussing, include creation dates).
>
> You don't seem to understand how Mac OS X operates. You shouldn't pose
> as an expert on it if you don't care about the names of things or the
> collaboration of independent components.
I'm not posing as an expert. But I can see when they are screwing
up. Anyway, I thought the whole point of the Mac was that you didn't
need to be an expert on the things to use them.
And that still doesn't negate my point you quote below.
> > If it shows a date of 31 Dec 1903 for files on a CF card
> > written in a digital camera, it's broken code, because
> > it isn't implementing FAT correctly.
> >
> > Arguing about what it is called doesn't change the fact
> > that there's a problem somewhere in the Mac software.
> The Finder's list views inconsistent with its Inspector views, but the
> problem is not really in the Finder. It's in the underlying routines
> used to pull the creation date from FAT file systems, which are UNIX
> utility components. However, this "optional" field should be properly
> filled in by the camera in the FAT volume when it writes the data. I
> repeat, it's stupid to make the Created date an "optional" field.
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.
