Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> As I understand it, the main use for RTOS is stuff like industrial 
> robotics, where guaranteed timing is crucial. 

Yep. And video games. And media decoding. And a whole bunch of other stuff 
that interacts with physics including the time dimension.

> It's not really for "personal computers", as such.

I disagree. As I've said before, cell phones are extremely real-time 
devices, to the point of needing to know the temperature so they can adjust 
for how much that makes their quartz crystal drift.

You're not going to want a GC cycle to interrupt your playback of your CD, 
either. Etc.

When your machine has 5x the power it would need to do the job with 
dedicated software from the ground up, it's easy to load a 3x overhead 
factor in the form of a general purpose OS and still get it working OK.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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