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I don’t see why you had to call him out. “REAL TIME” is also an engineering term with a strict definition. If You paid me for a real time stock ticker and you later found out it had a delay of a second or two you would want a refund.


Asking for a real time stock ticker is also not using "real time" as a term of art, having a 2 second delay in stock data might be a failure to deliver on application requirements, but it is not necessarily a failure to deliver a "real time" system if the 2 second delay is strictly reliable.

The non strict usage is far more common then the term of art. One would be well advised not to assume "real time" is being used as a term of art unless specifically called out, or clear from the context.

I'd say common usage of the phrase "real time," means with respect to human perception, and that is how its being used here.


> I'd say common usage of the phrase "real time," means with respect to human perception, and that is how its being used here.

So do you consider YouTube a real-time system? After all, images are moving on your screen "in real-time" from the user's perspective.

It seems to me that these are all streaming systems, and when the data is "live", then it's "live streaming".

Even colloquially, I hazard that "real-time" has some implication that there's some correspondance between your temporal reference frame and the original temporal reference frame. I think the engineering definition just made that correspondance precise.


I'm not speaking to what I consider "real time," I'm speaking to how it is commonly used as a phrase . But given that...

Yes people do say "real time playback" with respect to video. Generally, however, that is only noteworthy to call out when its unusual. Such as "real time 16k playback."


You're not wrong that the distinction isn't terribly important for this story, however that term absolutely has meaning in the world of fintech and places reporting on financial news - near/soft real-time are very distinct from real-time.

It's been 5 years since I've worked in that industry, but I still view the use of "real-time" the same way and can understand some people's issue with the term in this case.




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