Slashdot Mirror
Metcalfe's Law Refuted
pdp0x14 writes "Cnet News reports on a powerful refutation of Metcalfe's Law (that the value of a network goes up with n^2 in the number of members). The academic paper is available at Southwest Missouri State University. Basically, the thesis is that not all the links in a network are equally valuable, so Metcalfe's argument that everyone can connect to everyone (n(n-1)/2 links, roughly n^2) is irrelevant. The authors propose nlog(n) instead, a much smaller increase."
Anything that can be refuted...will.
Everyone knows that having a low Erdos-Bacon number is more valuable than having a high one, so the proof of this is trivial. Oh, wait, computer networks? Never mind.
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
More like (n-k)log(n-k) where k is the frequency coefficient of That Big Dumb Guy Who Has Nothing Useful to Say.
You can read this law like this:
"hello, I'm Robert Metcalfe. I state that the value of a network grows exponentially to the number of nodes present in it. So the more nodes you have, the better your network. Oh, and incidentally, I'm the CEO of 3Com, a company that sells network cards..."
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Number of members: Millions
Value: Debatable
suso.org website/email hosting, no disk space quotas and personalized support.
For every link to Goatse, the value of the network has an absolute drop of 225.2.
Powerful refutation of Murphy's Law! It has been determined that not everything thing that *can* go wrong *does* go wrong. Using the Apollo 13 mission as a case study, it has indeed been shown that only a small fraction of the things that could have gone wrong indeed did go wrong.
NASA Scientists have now recast murphy law as, "There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Some of them might happen." Which, of course, shows that far fewer things go wrong than previously thought.
Scientists predict that this will have no effect on the size or scope of any government project or agency.
Will we see Moore's law reduced to a log-based function as well? Will Brooks' Law be shown to be fallacious, leading to a large upsurge of temporary IT jobs? And how about Godwin's Law. Will we no longer have to fear the inevitability of Nazis or Hitler?
What will this all lead to... nothing but anarchy. Anarchy, I tell you!
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
I was happily working on a project when my manager assigned two more people to the team, making us three in number. I'm John, I've got it all figurted out and would have finished the product. I now work with Bob. Bob talks too much. Always coming to me with silly questions and he never seems to quite "get it". I also now work with Tom. Tom is never available, he never answers his phone, and I swear he's cutting out at three on Fridays. I know you've been in this situation as well. We're a network, which I'd hardly refer to as peer-ro-peer. Our bandwidth may not be comparable to the study, but the general theorem is the same.
but i don't think it takes a genious to apply a little logic to it and realise that it has very little application in real life.
Met any Token Ring salesmen lately?
But MS says I can increase my ROI on my network infrastructure by using their software.
And Sun tells me that the Network is the computer!
Which says: You Make HULK AnnnnnGRRyyyyyy!!!!!! ARRRRRRRRGGGGG!!!!!