tourist information

tourist | = T = | touristic

tourist information n.

Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The `bytes free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS or Windows `dir` display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a Unix `ps(1)` display.

tourist | = T = | touristic