Metcalfe's Law Refuted

from above:

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

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slight topic drift ...

in the early 80s, somebody from corporate hdqtrs came out and stated that the internal network couldn't exist

because such a large "peer-to-peer" network (standard corporate orientation at the time was that "network" met a large number of communication lines connecting terminals to a mainframe host ... so "peer-to-peer" label was needed to indicate the difference) would involve a huge design and programming implementation effort requiring really significant dollars and people resources.

no such significant dollar and people resource items had ever showed up at the corporate level ... and all significant resources were accounted for ... it was therefor impossible for the internal network to exist.

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