Real-time things (Score 2)

A real-time system is one that guarantees certain processes a certain amount of computation per unit of time, or that a certain process will finish by a certain time. This can be used to guarantee that a sound gets played without skipping, or that a video gets played without any pauses. People doing embedded stuff can use it to guarentee that their device does what it needs to do at the right time. Bad things can happen if an embedded system doesn't do something fast enough because of processor load. Basically, it is a system that is aware that somethings need to be done in a certain amount of time to be correct.