Sorry, but coming from an embedded world the use of Real-time here seems borderline offensive to me. Anyone care to explain what it means in this context? From the dawn of computer science it has been about strict time guarantees - and I highly doubt this is what's being referred to here.
AFAIK, soft-real time has been a well known term since the 80s. It means that the quality of service degrades the longer it takes for a response to be returned, and eventually a response is worthless if enough time passes.
