faster your program will run. That's why every hacker wants more
cycles: so he can spend less time waiting for the computer to
respond. 2. By extension, a notional unit of *human* thought
power, emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical
hacker's think time. "I refused to get involved with the Rubik's
Cube back when it was big. Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if
I let myself." 3. /vt./ Syn. {bounce} (sense 4), {120 reset};
from the phrase `cycle power'. "Cycle the machine again, that
serial port's still hung."

:cycle crunch: /n./ A situation wherein the number of people
trying to use a computer simultaneously has reached the point where
no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and
the system has probably begun to {thrash}. This scenario is an
inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing.
Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this
has rapidly become easier since the mid-1980s, so much so that the
very term `cycle crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most
hackers now use workstations or personal computers as opposed to
traditional timesharing systems.

:cycle drought: /n./ A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a
{cycle crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the
computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go
around. "The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with
only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle
drought until it's fixed."

:cycle of reincarnation: /n./ [coined in a paper by T. H. Myer
and I.E. Sutherland "On the Design of Display Processors", Comm.