The future of realtime Linux in doubt

And in this case, that's exactly what happened - the guy used "real time" in a manner I didn't understand, and when I queried it and said "I think you mean "online" ", his reaction was "well, they are the same thing now, who cares".

Sorry, I do care very much because if we define away the meaning of words, we then have no way of expressing that concept, and the meaning of "real time" is life and death! As others have said, real-time is about deadlines, and when you're dealing with industrial plant, that could well be a DEAD line.

And if you're stupid enough to change one word into another, like here using "real time" when there's a perfectly good word "online", then I'm sorry but you damn well shouldn't be a journalist! The grief people have caused me (when I did PC support) because they refused to learn the difference between "memory" and "disk space", or "PC" and "terminal", and probably various other terms as well. If I have to teach them, then fine. If they refuse to learn, well, I'm sorry if I trashed your system by mistake because you didn't want to express yourself clearly ...

Cheers,
Wol