Not quite the same. Simple Finder limits the system so you can't mess with the Dock/System Preferences/whatever, and reduces how much you can do with the file system.
If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a "brick wall" when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
Oh really? As others have pointed out, hard drives usually last much longer than two years (in my case, a notebook hard drive has lasted well over ten years, plus survived sitting in boxes, moving across the country, etc.). Furthermore, they're obviously not going to be backing up on a single drive; they would have some sort of data redundancy/RAID, or even multi-location backup.
And I am skeptical about the DVD rot I keep hearing about. Doesn't a DVD have to undergo so much degradation that a "1" on the disk becomes a "0"? Whereas on analog media, any bit of degradation starts to have an effect on the content of the media. In other words, all the "1" bits on a disk might become ".95", but binary data would still be intact, whereas small color changes would occur on analog media. I realize that even one incorrect bit could damage a compressed piece of data, but why in the world would they archive using a compressed format?
As for the "only transferring once" thing, I didn't see anything in TFA regarding motherboard swapping. For all we know there may be a more intelligent method to determine what a "new device" is.
I'm pretty sure swapping the motherboard... and CPU and memory attached to it... doesn't leave much for the system to check against. It can't check against the hard drive... so it could check against the video card and the optical drive. Except there's a large number of systems without dedicated graphics (or anything, some systems can be all on board). And checking against the DVD drive is a weak protection scheme.
Actually, if everything is integrated on your motherboard, I can't see how it wouldn't detect a transfer.
And that's when it works correctly. One fine day, out of the blue, my XP machine told me I had changed too much hardware when I hadn't touched anything in weeks (no, I didn't have any of that false-postive spewing WGA stuff).
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Not quite the same. Simple Finder limits the system so you can't mess with the Dock/System Preferences/whatever, and reduces how much you can do with the file system.
And I am skeptical about the DVD rot I keep hearing about. Doesn't a DVD have to undergo so much degradation that a "1" on the disk becomes a "0"? Whereas on analog media, any bit of degradation starts to have an effect on the content of the media. In other words, all the "1" bits on a disk might become ".95", but binary data would still be intact, whereas small color changes would occur on analog media. I realize that even one incorrect bit could damage a compressed piece of data, but why in the world would they archive using a compressed format?
I'm pretty sure swapping the motherboard... and CPU and memory attached to it... doesn't leave much for the system to check against. It can't check against the hard drive... so it could check against the video card and the optical drive. Except there's a large number of systems without dedicated graphics (or anything, some systems can be all on board). And checking against the DVD drive is a weak protection scheme.
Actually, if everything is integrated on your motherboard, I can't see how it wouldn't detect a transfer.
And that's when it works correctly. One fine day, out of the blue, my XP machine told me I had changed too much hardware when I hadn't touched anything in weeks (no, I didn't have any of that false-postive spewing WGA stuff).