technically yes, at the lowest levels (polled interrupts anybody) but there's a material difference (or not, as this blog argues) depending on how they're processed. At one end of the spectrum you have bank records being reconciled at the end of the day. At the other extreme, reading individual chunks of video data off disk, not saving it, and chucking it into the Internet via udp as fast as the client can handle, but could be dropped on the floor as necessary; that doesn't really require the same kind of assurances as a day's worth of bank records.