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Online Population now Half Billion
mattvd writes "According to CNN, the number of people with Web access at home by the end of 2001 was 498 million." Not surprisingly, Asia is growing the fastest. It's amazing
that in only 10 years or so, the net has exploded so far, so fast, and now touches 10% of the earths population.
Let's hope all these new sexy users won't spam my mailbox more than it is already :)
When 600 million Chinese, 100 million japanese, 300 million indians, and 40-50 million africans get online, thats when the real online revolution will take place.
Right now we need to make sure they all have the choice to use Linux, give them some good development tools, graphics tools, and just wait for them to produce information which benifits the world, hopefully they wont be as capitalist as us and patent everything or else we'll be at their mercy.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
But 10% seems like so little. As John "Maddog" Hall says, that just means that 5 billion people haven't choosen their operating system yet.
...And, in related news, half of the Online Population still believe that "the Internet" and "AOL" are synonymous (the same half, incidentally, who thought 'The Net' was a great film).
With news like this comming out it makes me wonder what these people who say that the WWW is going to die are thinking. With a base as large as that it is near imposible to kill it. Im sure there will be new tech that comes along and makes the WWW better faster and friendlier but die? I don't think so.
Now the problem is with all these people fighting over bandwidth when are chaeper faster pipes be available for us to use? When can I say hey there are 1 mill users hitting my site and there is no lag?
I also wonder what these people are looking at. 90% porn and the other 10% refrence material and such.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
I find it amazing that there could be half a billion people online and I still can't find decent content... Slashdot excluded of cource.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
How much of the earth's population has access to TV?
There are 6.2 billion people on the planet now, by the way.
With the current population 5,995,544,836 that makes the percent of the people online only about 8.3%. In reality it's probably even lower when you think about how many millions of those are using AOL connections;)
I stole this Sig
Let's just hope there's no Slashdot-Asia planned for the near future. That would REALLY take the Slashdot effect to a new level....
Most students in the cities have email and access the net quite regularly, if only for gaming or chat through these cyber-cafes and not at home. Also gives privacy
And once the government legalises VoIP there is definitely going to be a huge boom in the use of the cyber-cafes.
I am pretty sure that this must be the case in most developing economies. Of course like this article says it needs to become a productivity tool.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
I dont believe 100 percent of every chinese personn will be connected. But i do believe maybe 70 percent will.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
For a little perspective, check out the brochure from the ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference 2002. A hopeful note, according to that link: "Africa now has more than twice as many main telephone connections as Tokyo and 85 percent of today's world population share 45 percent of all telephone lines (see Figure 1). In comparison, in 1984, 90 percent of the world's people used only ten percent of all telephone lines."
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Here is the PDF from Nielsen. It contains more data than the CNN story.
...that some of these people haven't downloaded the latest version of the Internet. I actually went out the other day to buy a new version of the Internet, and the sales guy looked at me like I was stupid. So I smacked him.
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Saving baby carrots around the globe.
We cannot lose sight of the fact, however, that it is not the only way to work, live and be social. As the article states, 90% of the world is still not online, and it's a safe bet to say that many of those have probably never even heard of the Internet, and perhaps have no interest in it. While the propogation of these types of technologies throughout Asia and Africa would no doubt improve many lives and perhaps even give credibility to the notion that technology can help people transcend constraining economic, social and political barriers, we must still remember that we are living in a mostly offline world in which technology and modernity has just as often been used to oppress, homogenize and destroy.
So yes, the growth of the Internet is amazing, but, as with everything else, we should no be surprised to find unintended consequences from its growth.
sig my booty, check my website
Of course, it'll also mean many more technology jobs, which is exactly what we need right now.. who needs y2k? :)
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Well you see, theres only billions of people left and millions of internet cafes and terminals in 3rd world countries who need an OS thats easy to use and cheap.
Say hello to linux on the desktop.
Not to mention Linux on the desktop would actually help promote innovation through contribution via GNU.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The USA wants the government not to control the Chinese internet, so their our US Capitalist big businesses can take control.
We dont have freedom on the net ourselves, China wont have it either, its about control, the US wants to dominate the internet and China is a big market, by opening them up it opens them up to Capitalism.
China is most likely to use linux than we are, i thought we were all about freedom.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
500 million people certainly is a lot, and the industry as a whole has quite a bit to brag about (that much growth in only 10 years is phenominal.) However, there are a lot of the things the industry should be ashamed of, too. Usability seems to have come a long way in the last few years, but the best thing to ever happen to personal computing in terms of usability, the introduction of the GUI-based PC to the masses, will be the celebrating it's 20th birthday in 2004. 20 years and there is still a market for 400 page manuals on How To Use Microsoft Windows selling in Barnes and Nobles. How many 400 page manuals do you see selling on how to operate your microwave or your alarm clock? Your TV? How about how to send snail mail or take/develop photos? Sure PC's are complicated machines, sure the PC can do a lot more than a microwave... but does Jane Doe Grandma care? Not really, she just wants to see pictures of her grandchildren on that live hundreds miles of away, and she wants them on Christmas morning as they open their gifts. How likely is she to spend hours trying to learn how to buy a computer, plug in the 7 different wires, figure out how to dial up to a service provider, learn how to launch and use her email client, and load up the attached pictures in her photo-editing software. Not likely. It's not that she or the billions of other people on this planet that are not connected aren't capable of learning, it's that it's just not worth it to them. Face it: using a PC takes a time investment of several hours _just_ to do basic tasks, and all these people want to do is send email/pictures/video to their families, maybe read the news, and be done with it. What other home appliance (since that's what the PC is and should be to these people) have you seen that takes 2 minutes to boot up? How about that you have to push 30+ buttons to operate (how many keyboard presses & mouse clicks does it take to do what Jane Doe Grandma wants?). This all sounds pretty trivial to us geeks because we're used to pressing THOUSANDS of buttons a day to get what we want done, but we are a minority. To the 5.5 billion other people on this planet: it just seems too complicated. Have there been attempts at bridging the gap between layman and machine? Of course, but most have failed miserably. Email appliances were clunky, ugly, and still unbelievably hard to use. Windows XP still has the same complicated GUI that has been around for more 7 years (just with bigger, brighter, more obxnoxious buttons). Does it look easier? Sure, I guess. Still takes hundreds of mouse clicks to read email/news. My TV takes three to get CNN.
There's not going to be a revolution. Why should there? Has anyone English been significantly affected by the addition of millions of Japanese pages? Will the addition of billions of Chinese pages make any difference? No.
Even the addition of millions of Chinese surfers will not make a difference to the web. They're going to be off surfing, producing, and supporting mostly Chinese sites, and we will stay in the English ones.
In fact, I would propose that the addition of all those extra people makes the Net less prone to revolution, not more. If they were competing with us for scare resources, that would be one thing. But the Net will expand exponentially to accommodate them and they can all do their own thing. In their own language.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
VoIP is legal from March 1st or something. The only condition is that service providers must state if the call is toll quality or not in their ads.
The cost of long distance was high in order to cross subsidize the rural areas. They are slowly giving up on this, although quite a large portion of the country now has telephony access due to this.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Frankly I want to get an IP addie assigned at birth, and then spawn my devices off as ports on that IP. Like, my machine at work could be first.middle.last.unique:666 and my machine at home could be port 777, and my coffee maker could be port 42, and my refrigeratore could be port 32, and my TV would be whatever...
Then I wouldn't need so many ip addies, since no one is going to end up with more than 65K devices until we start using nanotech and my pants need 3 billion ip addies to administer all of the fibers...>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The correct statistic from your cite is 6.1% of all American households lack telephone service in their home. Also, you can hardly compare these Americans, who likely are at least NEAR a phone due to neighbors, pay phones, etc., to the poor people who live in Chinese and African villages and may not be within MILES of a phone.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
The internet doesn't even exist. 'The internet' as we know it is just a program with lots of computerized characters that act the part of 'netizens' for the purposes of interaction and amusement.
What is possible and helpful is community shared internet/information access. After all isn't the internet abut information?
This is what is happening in the developing countries with cyber-cafes. In Bangladesh, because of the poor phone infrastructure, there are people who operate pay-phones, but with CELL phones because the infrastructure to provide land-lines is simply too expensive but setting up the base stations is cheaper. In India Wireless in Local Loop is picking up as a big concept, due to the low cost of deployment. As one Professor in India said, "The developed nations do not need to reduce the costs any further for the basics, 40$ per phone line is fine for them, but we need to use the latest technology, not to increase the features but to reduce the cost." And this needs to be done by the developing countries as no company in the deveoped world will take this on (low profits).
But till this happens, the developing world will be a part of the digital have-nots, and there will be a digital divide.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
"AOL doesn't seem like such a bad choice for dial-up service"
Till you consider you can't use SLIP, PPP or PPoE to log on. In order to use sockets you need their bloatware installed on your boxen.
Me... I just say no to that kinda crap.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Take note that untill recently, having the internet meant having a piece of copper strung to your house. Because most countries have not had the massive copper build out that is seen in the united states, getting internet was not possible. that is what makes some of the wireless technologies so interesting. For example, Kuwait has phone lines to only 15% of residences. Every one has a mobile phone though. To a person in kuwait, placing a call means calling a person, not a location. Internet cafes are extremely popular, satisfying demand for an internet that has no infrastructure. Which is what makes 802.11b/a and other wireless methods so interesting. I am guessing that there are as many people in the world, with dollars to spend, that the providers of wireless internet access will call customers, as currently use copper to access the internet. However, untill it is cheaper to set up a wireless internet connection than buy a similar length of copper, acceptance will obviously be poor.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
1. Pornography
2. Gambling
3. Trolling for fights without fear of getting punched
4. Pornography
5. Easy chatting and email with friends
6. Endless time-wasting opportunity
7. Pornography
8. Groups for almost any conceivable interest
9. Pornography
What's not to like?
Unless you plan to chop those people up and weigh the total, it is fewer people. Knowing the difference might make you more attractive to chicks.
If you're searching for the most cost-effective form of promotion you can find... Your Search Is Over - you've FOUND it - Investment is MINIMAL and Potential return is INCREDIBLE! Blast your ad to over 500 Million pre-opted-in indivdually targeted Internet users who are JUST WAITING to hear about YOUR product or service!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
There is no culture in the USA besides capitalism
There is no culture in Africa besides cannibalism.
And there is no culture in China besides running people over with tanks.
Hey, looks like broad generalizations _can_ be both false and offensive!
There's a lot of uniquely American elements to US culture. I'm not saying its a better or worse culture than anyone else has, but it does exist. Open your eyes.
--saint
Tish, as bad as AOL users can be, surely the webtv users will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If I was one of these individuals, I would do everything in my power to either destroy or neuter the liberating effects(or as they see it, perverting) of such a worldview.
You mean like trying to destroy its proponents by flying planes into their buildings?
Bush's war on terrorism is defending Western civilization, and the Internet is a product and a symbol of Western civilization, no matter who else has ultimately ended up using it.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Cheers,
-j.
Ive been online for around 8 years now. And now there are many many new people coming online all the time. Many of whom have prolly never heard of usenet/gopher/telnet/IRC etc... makes me feel kinda old, in the online sence. anyone else feel this way?
I read the first piece of Spam on USENET (the Green Card Lawyers' advertisement), thinking "what is this and why did they crosspost it?"
I used WAIS. I remember the Gopher server at wustl. Once, just to show a friend I could do it, I went in and browsed the card catalog at the Widener Library. He didn't believe me, figuring that it had to be an offline program or something.
I thought that Mosaic was a neat trick. I used Yahoo back before they had their own domain name.
An eternity ago, now.
And I'm not even particularly old!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
As much as AOL sucks, here's one upside that I have yet to find in another ISP. Travel to Germany, they've got a local phone number to call, travel to Argentina, they've got a local number, travel to Iceland, they've got a local number, you get the idea. If you are not travelling all over the place then please please please do not use AOL. If you are travelling, it's worth looking at as a "roaming" isp. Here's the link to their International Access Numbers.