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.
Godfrey
