Erik Malund said:
how wonderful, crap has a name.
It is important that crap has a name otherwise we would not be able to tell others about it.
The internet is a soft real time system. Packets can arrive in any order and be delayed or sometime not occur at all. Although slow loading pages can be an annoyance I would not call the whole system crap even though it is only soft real time.

I agree that, in some instances, a "wait" is unavoidable although there is not much, if any, associated with the internet other than transfer speed (physics, hardware).

HOWEVER, have you noted how many things take longer on a modern multigigahertz PC with multimagabytes of memory than it took when running on the old 10MHz second generation PC. That was without "real time" but faster than what today run in "real time" albeit "soft real time". Now, I know there is more involved in Windoes than in DOS, but do not tell me that it is not possible, even with the added features, to get better performance from a machine that is 200+ times faster than the one I compare it to.

Thus the existence of "soft real time" however valid in some respects, has been grossly abused as an excuse for inefficient programming.

Erik