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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."
That's a lie and you know it!
try { Signature mysig = new CleverAttempt(); } catch(NonCleverSignatureException e) { postanyway(); }
I think that opinion has been refuted.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
It's a shame the summary didn't say who the authors are. Odlyzko is a Very Good Thing - he writes intelligently about everything from cryptographic number theory to making academic papers freely available online. I've long thought that n^2 was too high - though n log(n) sounds a little low...
Xenu loves you!
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
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.
Number of members: Millions
Value: Debatable
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It's common sense, of course, but worth taking note of.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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.
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.
- who said that Linux sucks, and would die years ago
- who predicted the Internet would implode... years ago
- whose ego far outpaces his abilities?
[Check old columns in InfoWorld, c. 2000, for details.]
Granted -- he did some good stuff. But the truly good stuff he's done was so long ago that the only meaning it has in contemporary terms is a resume line item. Now he's just another VC talking head, with ego to match; to find that one of his "laws" doesn't hold water is about the same as saying that SCO's legal team isn't always on the level.
Not only that, but isn't this actually a case of "potential value" (not greater than the total number of possible connections inherent to the network - Metcalfe's Law) versus "typical usaage patterns"?
Networks are just like anything else in life. They have a maximal or optimal value, but most people don't bother trying to get full value out of them.
If Metcalfe were to say "the average mid-sized sedan seats up to five people, for which reason I value it as a five-person car", these guys would reply "yeah, but most people don't fill all five seats in their mid-sized sedans, therefore mid-sized sedans don't really seat five people after all... pwn3d!"
It's stupid. Metcalfe is talking about potential value. These guys are talking about typical utilization.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.