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The number of people in the United States who use the Internet increased steadily from 2000 until 2012, when the percentage of offline adults fell to 15 percent. Since then, despite efforts by the government and social service organizations to encourage Americans to get online, that number hasn't budged, according to Pew.
Why are some Americans so reluctant to sign on? A third of those surveyed who aren't online (34 percent) said they don't think the Internet is relevant to their lives, or that they're simply not interested in what the Web has to offer. Another 32 percent of people who don't use the Internet said the technology required to access the Internet is just too tough to get the hang of, and 8 percent said they were "too old to learn."
But some people said they don't use the Internet because they cannot afford to do so, according to Pew. The survey data showed that 19 percent of those not online cited the expense of Internet service or owning a computer as their reason for staying offline.
Facebook and Google have been in the news recently because they want to get everyone online. What if those people don't want to?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @11:27PM
He gets a computer and an internet connection. The computer gets infected with crap. He gives up.
Months later I fix his computer and add anti-virus and other stuff. He gets back online and eventually clicks on the wrong link. The computer gets loaded with crap the anti-virus can't fix. He gives up again.
I fix it again and everything's ok for a while. Then some software updates come in and nothing works anymore. He gives up.
Eventually, he realizes reading books or watching TV is less painful (and less expensive).
(Score: 5, Informative) by krishnoid on Monday August 03 2015, @11:32PM
For everything else, there's the Chromebook :-)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @12:25AM
Your brother needs a better tech support guy.
One who knows there is an OS that doesn't require anti-virus would be a good start.
-- gewg_
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @12:34AM
If you've never seen a Linux virus, you're either 12 years old or you're a goddamn idiot.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:03AM
Well, I have never seen a Linux box that was pwned by a drive-by infection.
Haven't see one mentioned in any of the several Linux forums I visit either.
A proper permissions paradigm averts most of the nonsense that afflicts Windoze.
Closing the holes QUICKLY takes care of the rest.
As an example, Heartbleed (which isn't technically even a "Linux" vulnerability nor is it a "virus") was reported to its developers April 1 and patches were available April 7.
The MICROS~1 method of putting layers of 3rd-party band-aids on **known** serious wounds is a poor approach to security.
Software vendors: PATCH your damned holes YOURSELF and do that QUICKLY.
Making users wait for the 2nd Tuesday of next month to get fixes is just moronic.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @12:41PM
I always thought being an idiot increases your chance to see a virus.
BTW, I've never seen a Linux virus, and I'm not 12 years old. But how much of that experience comes from using Linux, how much comes from not installing every shit I come across on the net, how much comes from not opening every spam mail I get (let alone their attachments), and how much comes from using NoScript, is of course hard to say.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:51AM
I use Linux on three machines and I would never wish it on a person without considerable computing skills. It's a pain to set up and a greater pain to manage.
Nerds may love Linux, but normal people don't. There's a good reason it's virtually non-existent on the desktops of the world - it's the least user-friendly OS in existence.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 04 2015, @04:09AM
I don't think it's the least user friendly UI by a long shot. There are things I like better than OSX, though Yosemite makes it easy to like something else. For about two years ending 1.5 years ago, I had to use Windows for a while -- Win 7 to be exact and after more than a decade away, it was a total pain till I got the hang of it again. Compared to what's out there, the Linux UI compares quite favorably.
More of an issue though, is the way things get installed and what people can install. I think most people who use a computer could learn to navigate a linux desktop, at least the Gnome or KDE varieties without much difficulty. But people like to just download and install crap, and their experience falls down there a lot when using linux (and yeah, life would be better if they didn't download and install crap, but they want to do it). Synapitc or Yum would seem like such an ideal alternative but the concept is sort of foreign. Of course, if they want to watch Netflix or play most games, things get even more difficult than they're used to. Then there are the occasional unresolvable (without heroics) dependency issues. Honestly, HD space is so copious currently, I wish programs would just come with their own dependency libraries.
Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this and I've sort of lost my thread. I like Linux and find it generally easier to use than the other big 2 OSs, but that is basically just experience. If Apple's App Store becomes a more widely understood standard way to get software, I think people will be more accepting of the Linux method of using repositories from relatively trusted sources as the main method to install software, and _then_ people will find Linux easier to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:36AM
It's not the user interface that's a problem - that's pretty much like any other. It's the fact that if anything goes wrong, it is very difficult for the average person to fix. Any help online starts with "open a terminal and type...", which is a kind of archaic, DOS-like approach to solving problems. Few useful GUI tools exist to solve most problems and, if they do, they are not referred to by the online experts.
Other issues exist. If you want to change the mouse cursor size, for example, you need to do it in two places - one for windows and one for the desktop. That's not intuitive by any stretch. Many people would get frustrated quickly by these things. If you like things out of the box, that's fine, but any customization (like for visual impairments) are a PITA. Try changing the vertical bar text cursor size in editors, for example (not the mouse cursor) - it's next to impossible in most distributions.
BTW that earlier post is not a troll, except to *nix nerds that can't take criticism of a flawed OS. Linux kernel is fine, but the varied assortment of inconsistent UIs out there are nothing but a mess.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:23PM
If it says "open a terminal and type …" then you can usually replace that by "open a terminal and copy/paste this to it". I cannot simply copy/paste a description of how to do it with a GUI.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:14AM
I remember my days in Windoze forums. RegEdit [google.com]
Clearly, that OS is too difficult for Joe Average.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:46AM
My wife has been asking for a full Windows computer, but when I finally gave her one two years ago, she never even turned it on. Why? The Android smartphone I gave her before that has been good enough for nearly all of the things she needs to do that would have otherwise needed a full computer. The phone also doesn't get so easily infected with viruses. Yes, I know this is theoretically possible, but it doesn't seem to anywhere near as trivial as it seems to be on Windows: she occasionally gets prompts to download APKs from some dodgy sites but obviously she can't run them the way she might have when made to download an EXE on Windows. As far as I know there are also no drive-by exploits for Android like those that exist for Windows.
Modern smartphones and tablets are generally good enough for the majority of the home computing needs of the majority of ordinary people, and they also in general have less of a malware problem than Windows does. If she needed to do word processing I have her do Google Docs or the LibreOffice Android port with the tablet with one of a few Bluetooth keyboards we have lying around. If she wants a bigger screen while doing that there's a wireless HDMI dongle to cast the screen of the phone or tablet to one of our televisions. We don't even have a printer at home any more, as we need to print so seldom these days that going to a business centre or Internet café at the local mall suffices during the rare times a hard copy of a document is actually needed. Why then bother with a full Windows machine and the headaches of keeping it clean while connected to the Internet?
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.