Metcalfe's Law Refuted 225
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."
misattribution (Score:5, Informative)
No need to go that far. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Refuted"? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:These are just cutsey laws with no meaning (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:metacalfs law? never heard of it..... (Score:3, Informative)