It was a production bug where a customer's birthday was rejected as invalid. This was in Germany, which is relevant because it turned out to depend on the machine's timezone. You see, when Java parses a date, it computes all fields of a Calendar object and then does a sanity check on them. Some smartass had decided in Java 1.4 to have that reject daylight savings time offsets greater than 1 hour. Unfortunately, Berlin and the Soviet-occupied part of Germany had a 2 hour daylight savings time offset in the summer of 1945, because that corresponded to Moscow time.
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I'd love to answer that question, so I will:
It was a production bug where a customer's birthday was rejected as invalid. This was in Germany, which is relevant because it turned out to depend on the machine's timezone. You see, when Java parses a date, it computes all fields of a Calendar object and then does a sanity check on them. Some smartass had decided in Java 1.4 to have that reject daylight savings time offsets greater than 1 hour. Unfortunately, Berlin and the Soviet-occupied part of Germany had a 2 hour daylight savings time offset in the summer of 1945, because that corresponded to Moscow time.