Ulrich Schnauss, System 7, Man With No Name, Art of Trance, Dimension 5, Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Astral Projection, Kraftwerk, VNV Nation...
Reasons: "The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:
a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2."
Solutions:
"1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."
3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale."
- potential customers: businesses or consumers? If you're targetting businesses be aware of a large sales cycle; that means you'll need more working capital. Lots of customers or just a few? If there are lots you have more power, but it also means a certain type of business model. If there are few, they will have more power, namely to negotiate prices. The worst situation: you have one customer, government.
- potential suppliers: businesses or consumers (eg user generated content)? These mean different business models. Lots of them or just a few? If there are lots of them you'll have more power (eg. price negotiation). If there are just a few (or worse, just one), you might have problems down the line.
- potential competitors: are there any (if none, perfect!). Are there just a few or lots of them? Just a few might mean that its an available market but it might mean that it's a difficult market to get into, namely in terms of initial investment. Lots of competitors means that its easy to enter that market, competition his big and that means a constant price fight.
Early adoption was due to it being an extension to the IM Away messages. After that, especially after users started to use @x as a form of addressing, it basically became IRC 2.0, without the problems of installing IRC clients, having netsplits, being kicked, etc, etc.
When you use Apache/Nginx/etc, you're using a webserver. Usually you will also use a serverside programming language like Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. The webserver is usually programmed using C/C++ and the serverside language is "bolted" on.
With Node.js you have Javascript as a serverside language (like PHP, Python, etc). But included with it you have a library that allows you to create a webserver.
Instead of having a webserver and couple a serverside language to it, you have a serverside language that is able to spawn its own webserver (although you can choose to use Apache or others).
The biggest advantage though, comes from the fact that JS is a functional language with a focus on event based programming. And so Node.js follows that paradigm: you use JS functions that are binded to certain events and run when one event happens, instead of running continously and doing some kind of loop waiting on I/O,CPU, database, etc. This allows for better performance.
Plus there's the advantage of being able to program websites using the same language both client-side and serverside. But thats another matter.