AaronH

Taskerr wrote:

In my experience real time threads are of limited use outside of machine control and mechanical automation, e.g. CNC lathes.

I would have to disagree Taskerr.  From examples such as QNX I think we can see that not only does real-time have a real benefit for user-interaction latency (essentially the machine never, ever "feels" slow), but it ends up being good for other things like IO, because a given task cannot bind up other tasks if they are prioritized correctly.  True, you may lose throughput, but for an end-user system (and even a server system I would argue) the marginal loss of throughput is well worth the response time.  You can buy more throughput - can you buy more of your own time?

This is pretty cool stuff.  It looks a lot like X11   Although perhaps with the benefit that the widgets/toolkit can be "cooked in" given that it is an all-Microsoft production (although that leaves one to wonder about third-party toolkits...presumably they will have to talk this new messaging protocol to actually work).  Hopefully this will provide a much more robust architecture that will allow transparent remoting and the accompanying world of possibilities.