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Subject:RE: About a word - how busy are you? From:"Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com> To:"McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 May 2013 09:11:17 -0700
McLauchlan, Kevin wrote:
> A developer has called a customer-requested feature a "busyness" counter.
>
> It's reminiscent of the CPU Usage and Memory Usage that you see at the left-
> hand side of the "Performance" tab window in Windows Task Manager... the
> instantaneous indications, not the history graphs. Also, this is command-
> line-only. Numbers are spit out every few seconds. No graphs, unless customer
> makes their own by importing the counter output file into (say) Excel.
>
> Both the developer and PLM dislike "Usage counter" (or just Usage), because of
> the need to distance the measured entity from "performance" - given that
> Microsoft has already embedded the association in so many (Windows users)
> minds.
>
> Performance, in our industry has a real, empirical meaning, and is expressed
> in standardized RESULT terms. That is, the trailing indicator "performance"
> is only vaguely and partially related to leading indicator "busyness" or
> "usage" (or whatever else I could call it).
Kevin, you haven't told us what this "busyness" counter is actually counting. :-)
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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