Define realtime on the web for business

Question

It drives me nuts to hear business proponents using the term realtime for web-based systems. I\'m becoming the crazy in the room, chanting, \"There is no such thing as real

Answer 1

How do you define "real-time" for embedded systems? I would say that a decent definition is "a system which is able to process and respond to inputs faster than the average time between inputs." In other words, a system that will never fall behind in processing compared to the systems which are feeding it data. Using this definition everything on the web is a real-time system, since web servers that fall behind tend to be inaccessable (ie. the slashdot effect).