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?