> What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.
Is that true though?
Windows might have gotten more efficient but I think overall most software has gotten worse from a performance perspective. With the prevalence of Electron everywhere, performance doesn't even seem to be a priority anymore. And "native" apps using WPF, etc. aren't as optimized as old school WinForms, MFC style apps (though there are other benefits to be had).
I use Bvckup 2 (https://bvckup2.com/) to backup on to a 4 TB external drive. I also have Duplicati (https://www.duplicati.com/) running to backup those backups onto OneDrive and Backblaze.
F# got mentioned already but I would like to add another vote to it. C# is the first choice for most people when building desktop apps for Windows but F# works exceptionally well too. There is a small but robust community and there are a ton of libraries/tools that you can hook into via .NET.
Netflix actually had a feature on the original Xbox that allowed you to create a group with your friends and watch videos together. Unfortunately, they removed this feature a while ago.
There isn't a single link to a commit, file or repo that shows the similarities between the two code bases, let alone alleged plagiarism. It is conceivable that they truly are two different projects that happen to be developed around the same time. It's not the first time that has happened.
I wish the author actually substantiated his claims a bit better.
Flickr doesn't really do videos though. Yea, you can upload them but playback is limited to just 3 minutes and it doesn't really have tools to work with videos.
I looked a while ago to find alternatives when some of these issues came up a while ago but I haven't found any other viable alternatives. I thought PeaZip might be a good option until finding out that it is also based on 7-Zip.
Apparently in Win10, Microsoft introduced a compact.exe commandline tool that transparently compresses files/folders. The above tool is a GUI for it. It's not a replacement for a proper archiver but it's a nice tool to compress things like games and other large programs that need to stay in place.
I stuck with WP as long as I could and I still miss it. The polycarbonate Nokia were tough as hell and felt solid in your hands.
IMO the OS was really solid. If they just stuck with it and kept building, albeit targeting the people that didn't use a lot of apps, I think they could've found a niche. They had close to 25% share already in countries like Italy and Brazil and were popular in India, Africa, etc.