Quote Originally Posted by James View Post
Or the website. Like I said, I learned the hard way. Seems the backend can handle the long passwords just fine (from the fact that XBL never had an issue logging me in with the 30-char password), but the various interfaces (namely xbox.com and GFWL) only send whatever they consider the maximum # of characters to be. So sure, the backend is storing a 30 char. password, but you can't authenticate to it from xbox.com, because the web login is only sending 16 characters.

It's extremely poor coding, and it irks me.
This is what happens to large companies with multiple programming teams. EA is the same way. The making of Origin has been a constant struggle. People that are banned on the BF3 forums end up being totally banned from Origin because of the way the back end works. They've been trying to fix that for months.

There was a book that I still haven't finished that tackled this problem and it was written in 1975 titled "The Mythical Man Month." He notes that adding man power to a programming job does not add to productivity like it does in traditional jobs.

The highlight for this case is, of course, communication. Having the message boards, EA store, Origin, security, and other program departments all try to come together and cobble their systems into a main front-end is almost impossible without rewriting the entire thing from scratch.

I'm actually surprised how well some of these large platform amalgams run to be honest.