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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."
The link that the submission attributes to Southwest Missouri State University is actually at the University of Minnesota... (Not terribly surprising, given that Odlyzko is at the University of Minnesota!) Please correct the article accordingly.
Slashdot itself is a good counter-example.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The article is misquoting. Metcalfe said something like "usefulness" of a network. The squared term is because there are two endpoints to each connection, so it makes sense that the usefulness goes up as the number of possible connections.
For example, Moore's law means almost nothing now. Processor clock speed is only one aspect of the speed of a computer. It's still useful to gauge this as over all computer process speed, but soon that won't matter as much either. Even still, can you measure to the exact mhz that processing speed has exactly doubled in the past 18 months?
You're right to say that "Moore's law means almost nothing now." Especially since Moore's law is about transistor density in semi-conductors, not clock speed. The semi-conductor fabs have maintained Moore's law, even though they haven't really been able to get more cycles out of a processor in the last few years. This "clock-speed" version of Moore's law is a bastard meme.
After all, I am strangely colored.
A 'law' is not stronger than a 'theory'. A 'law' is a 'theory' which can be briefy stated. It's a common misperception.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.