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.

[glossary]