Part of the reason was that WinRT was aimed at tablets and other low power devices, where unrestricted Win32 API use could drain the battery too quickly. They were trying to put the genie back in the bottle to have more control in this new ecosystem, like Apple enjoyed on iPad, etc. Much of the weird signing and app store evaluation was to make sure your app used only the blessed APIs and wouldn't, for example, stay awake in the background listening on an arbitrary port and drain the little tablet battery.
Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.
Yes, this was needed for civil engineering and city permits to replace a retaining wall that holds my driveway up and (hopefully!) keeps it from sliding onto my neighbors fancy expensive house. All licensed and by the book. Quotes from other surveyors were 2x and more.
That's cool to discover entire roads you didn't know about. I would be hoping to discover an ancient city, like they did in central and South America with lidar. Are you sure there aren't any? Look again!
Not only that, if 2 people talk at once they can cancel each other out and neither can be heard by anyone else.
Much of aviation is still based on pre WWII tech and practices like this and people underestimate how slow and difficult it is to change. Many piston aircraft still run on leaded gas, for example, the last existing market for it in the US.
I got a survey of my residential property, 1/2 acre on a rugged hillside, from a guy who used a drone equipped with lidar. It was $4,000, less than traditional methods, but it would be cool if a drone could just be dispatched from a nearby power pole instead.
For anything more complex than a shower head, a made in USA label often implies some trickery with final assembly of imported components, like the crossfire example above. Researching the supply chain for every single purchase is too tedious and exhausting for many of us otherwise willing to vote with our wallets.
I learned on here that this has been happening to a degree with maps. Several big companies have been cooperating to improve open street map data, a rare example of a beneficial commons. This is probably some unique accident of incentives and timing and history but maybe it could happen in other domains.
The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus