Analog pictures are really easy to keep in good shape. I have a family album that is more than 100 years old now, those pictures are still fine. The first color pictures from the 60s got a weird tint though. But nobody knows how good the colors were in the first place.
I think I have some bitrot in my photo collection, there are a few pictures that seem to be broken, but it's far less than 1%. I'm fine with it. I could probably restore most of those images if I tried.
After I got my server going I transferred all my photos over and ran a utility overnight to check them for corruption, the name escapes me but it was an open source cli program. A small number of images were corrupted and the majority were replaced with thankfully pristine backup copies. The rest were restored with minor visual glitches.
The digital photos are not my issue. Especially in the early 2000s the files were really small, super easy to copy. I've always moved them to a new laptop, I guess I have at least 8 copies lying around in different places.
More problematic are the first analog videos from the 80s, the magnetic tape now starts to rot, and it's not that easy to copy those.
I also have film from the 60s and 70s, this is slowly becoming an issue too. But honestly I don't care that much about those past memories from my parents and grandparents.
Last time I tried to use it for an appliance, we weren't able to buy licenses. Microsoft gave us the contact to the only reseller in our country, and they couldn't find anyone in the company who knew how to sell Windows IoT licenses.
Edit: We only wanted to buy around 20 licenses, so their motivation was also not that big to figure it out.
I don't think regular Windows 11 is that useful in those cases. You probably either want an intranet connected Windows client, that gets activated and updated via a local server. Probably also a LTSC release, that doesn't get feature updates all the time.
Or a Windows 11 IoT image, that only enables some specific features, and is stripped down for a specific purpose.
For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
>For individual use I guess the solution is to set it up once with internet connectivity and air gap afterwards.
That's simply not good enough for some purposes. Once a computer is connected to the internet, at all for any amount of time, the system could be considered to be less secure.
I like this idea a lot. Currently the biggest issue for adoption seems to be the missing packages for most programming languages, and for homebrew/etc.
It should even be possible to compile the dotnet library to a C-compatible shared library and provide packages for many other languages.
I guess there are some Python workloads on Azure, Microsoft provides a lot of data analysis and LLM tools as a service (not paid by CPU minutes). Saving CPU cycles there directly translates to financial savings.
Microsoft is huge, it's many companies inside one company.
.NET seems to be somewhere close to Azure, but now far away from Windows or the business applications (Office/Teams, Dynamics, Power Platform). Things like GitHub, LinkedIn or Xbox seem to be de facto separate companies.
Edit: .NET used to be tied closely to Windows, which gave it the horrible reputation. The dark age of .NET ;)
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