Both terms have varying definitions, depending on who you ask. Realtime, to me, means that there are deadlines and that those deadlines can realistically be bro

Both terms have varying definitions, depending on who you ask. Realtime, to me, means that there are deadlines and that those deadlines can realistically be broken. Soft realtime means that given some conditions, the deadlines will be met, at least x% of the time. Hard realtime means that the deadlines will be met, unless there's a grave hardware malfunction. Then there's the hardness of deadlines, which is proportional to the consequence of missing them. A hard deadline means that a computational result is worthless if it's late.