Godfrey DiGiorgi mused: > > On Mar 16, 2005, at 3:53 PM, John Francis wrote: > > > Which will be the Created date - it will just have a value of 0. > > The field is always present. > > A numeric value of '0' is not a date/time numeric, and translates > inconsistently.
A numeric value of 0 is every bit as much of a date/time numeric of 5237, or 43702, or any other value you choose to put in that field. > > Who converts dates from the DOS Epoch to the Mac epoch? > > The OS, or the Finder? > > What the fuck is a "DOS Epoch"? or a "Mac epoch"? The epoch is the start date for the numbering scheme. It's different for different operating systems (and the Mac, apparently, chose a different base date from regular Unix; that must create some problems). > There's nothing broken but the fact that it's stupid for this to be an > "optional" field That's an opinion. It might even be true. But the fact remains that the FAT specifications explicitly permit putting zero in this field. > in the FAT format definition, and that Pentax should > populate this optional field properly. No matter how you special case > it, 0 in the Created date cannot mean the same thing as a valid number > in the Modified date. It's a decision as to how to implement the > interpretation of 0 for this field value ... I suspect they simply > chose to interpret it literally as other options are even less > consistent. If they choose to interpret it literally, then it should be the date that would correspond to day zero in the DOS epoch. But it isn't. Instead, we get the date that corresponds to day zero (or day -1?) in the Mac epoch. So for every other numeric value, the dates are correctly offset by the (approximately 76 years) difference between the two epochs. If consistency was the goal, you'd expect zero to be treated the same way, and the files would show up with a date of 31 Dec 1979, or something like that.
