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Between 2006 and 2010, demand for processing cycles (MIPS, servers and the like) has slowly approached an 18 erpcent annual growth rate in the big banks. Storage, by the way, has hit 45 percent per year -- the advent of Big Data is here -- and although the unit cost of storage is still dropping, storage cost pools around the financial industry are expanding out of control. The growth phenomenon is now exacerbated by market conditions, and Moore's Law just isn't enough.

Taking a step back, you will likely ask, "How can this be true?" The answer involves yet another "law" -- actually, a paradox observed in the late 1800s -- "Jevons paradox," which states:Technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. William Stanley Jevons developed this hypothesis in 1865, based on his observations of coal consumption vis-à-vis the technology advances designed to improve the efficiency of coal usage. It was his argument that these improvements alone could not be relied on to reduce consumption; rather, they would lead to increased consumption -- and he was right. Today we talk about elastic computing; in 1865 Jevons focused on "elastic coal" – well, at least the demand was elastic.

So the aforementioned growth in demand (passing the 20 percent mark per year) is actually fueled in part by the inherent efficiencies created by Moore's Law. Through 2010 we were in the Moore's Law zone of managing IT costs downward. Now we are a new world governed by the effects noted by Jevons.

With OSI, each layer is encapsulated from the others, allowing new technologies to replace older ones without disrupting the system as a whole. In this exercise, humans operated layer 1, the physical layer, where the bits are physically moved from one system to another. To the two computers communicating, however, it made no difference that people were conveying the bits back and forth with their xylophones. "With a properly configured network interface and operating system, an application does not know -- and does not need to know -- the logistics of what is known as the physical layer,"

Typically, it takes about 15 minutes to transmit a single packet at this rate -- if the volunteer is patient enough to complete a whole packet, and doesn't hit any wrong notes in the process. Such dedication and proficiency has turned out to be a rarity in trials, however. "Humans are really terrible interfaces,"

As an LED lights up, the human participant strikes the corresponding key on the xylophone. Piezo sensors are attached to each xylophone, so that they are able to sense when a note is played on the other xylophone. The Arduino for the receiving computer senses the note and then converts it back into hexadecimal code. And when the second computer sends a return packet, the order of operations is reversed.