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Robert Heath wondered <<The engineer who wrote the feature specs for an
application I'm documenting used the word "granularity" in a sense I'm not
familiar with... When I searched on "granularity" at britannica.com, among
the references to rocks and photography I found an article from InfoWorld
magazine in which this sentence appeared: "Network management vendors have
heard the cries of administrators who want more granularity in their traffic
monitoring and analysis solutions" Is this term accepted in computer science
or elsewhere in the technology industry, or is it just jargon that is being
used in place of a more precise term?>>
It's "good" jargon, and not just in the computer community. If you think of
what the word "granular" means, you'll see how it's being used in this
sense. A rock isn't granular (it's monolithic), but if you pound it for long
enough with a sledgehammer, it becomes granular (i.e., it crumbles into
sand). So in your context, what it means is that the network folk are tired
of being restricted to dealing with rocks (e.g., all users and messages
lumped together) and want to be able to start dealing with individual grain
of sand (e.g., individual users or messages). In short, they want more
granularity.
Hofstadter's Law: The time and effort required to complete a project are
always more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's
Law.
