Hardware will always incur a cost to produce because it's a physical good made of physical raw materials. Each unit still requires the raw materials, and the processing of them, coupled with the cost of transporting those goods and the final product around. Add to that, the heavy competition among hardware makers that keeps prices down and margins low, no charging $500 for something costing $5 to make. Software and other media can easily be reproduced at no cost, so the natural progression of a competitive market will result in software and media being given away free, possibly as a sweetener to sell hardware.
It certainly does come with directx, i believe 2003 even comes with a newer version than XP did... You can try by starting the dxdiag tool on a default 2003 install.
And your right, 5gig for a base install is pathetic. Even worse on your VMs, because that's 5gig multiplied by the number of VMs you have.
As for redundant copies of DLLs, this was microsoft's hyped "self repair" feature from windows 2000... As sun pointed out at the time, it's better for your system to prevent itself from being corrupted than to try and clean up the mess after the fact. I don't think any unix systems keep backup copies of everything, but then unix users typically don't run masses of software as root unnecessarily. Besides, keeping a backup copy and copying it back has many flaws, if your installing something malicious you just need to corrupt the backup aswell, and it now becomes harder to remove your malware because windows will keep copying it back. It also becomes harder to remove unwanted windows components for the same reason, if you delete ie or outlook express it just gets copied back. And ofcourse if the program that does the copying gets corrupted, or part of the boot process leading up to that, your screwed anyway.
// If more people were aware of these things, then vendors would be forced to make their license agreements less onerous.// That doesn't necessarily follow.
It does, if people were unwilling to accept onerous agreements, vendors would be forced to change them.
Also, even if an agreement is unenforceable, it's still used to scare people into thinking it is. Such tactics need to stop, agreements should be clearly written and users should be educated not to accept an agreement they don't understand.
These agreements won't be changed without user education. Users need to realise if an agreement is unenforceable, not scared into following them. And users need to reject onerous agreements which are enforceable, forcing vendors to make them more reasonable.
You don't, your gambling that one of the people or organisations that looked at the code would have found and disclosed any malicious code located there.
The difference is:
With proprietary code, only one organisation has seen the code and they have no incentive to disclose any malicious code because it's them who put it there.
With open code, many organisations and individuals could have seen the code, and the vast majority of them have no incentive to keep any malicious code under wraps, in fact many will be users who would be very angry about finding such malicious code and would be highly vocal about it.
And in terms of someone writing malicious code, they are less likely to add such code to a program where the source is given out, as there is a much greater chance of it being found, which would result in a complete loss of credibility for the author.
You don't know and trust anyone capable of auditing code? That's a pity.
With proprietary software there is only one entity that can verify the code, with open source there are many. There's no guarantee that either of them will, but 50000 chances are better odds than 1 chance.
As for security updates, this is an unfair comparison. Open source development, including finding and patching of security holes is done in the open, so any security issue becomes known about. Proprietary vendors on the other hand, typically do not disclose any vulnerabilities which are discovered internally, instead preferring to silently patch them, or not as the case may be. Several such issues have been found by reverse engineering mystery patches. The article as well points out another. The macrovision issue was found and fixed in vista, but they didn't patch it in xp or 2003 because then they would have to explain why the secdrv.sys file was being modified, and someone would have reverse engineered the patch to make an exploit. Instead, they leave it unfixed and gamble it wouldn't be discovered, that gamble didn't pay off in this case but how many other issues have they silently fixed which haven't been discovered and disclosed yet?
That's why the large number of Linux distributions, often cited as a problem, is so good. You can customise to your hearts content, and remove what you don't need, or better yet never install it. And any half decent package manager will pull in extra dependencies if they start being required. All my linux machines are built to spec, only what's required is installed and nothing else.
Windows "server" is a joke anyway, your forced to have a gui, browser, mail client, media player, gaming support libs (directx) etc, which is a complete hassle to remove and often needs to be patched. A server should always have the bare minimum software installed, less to go wrong, less to have security problems, less overhead, and you don't have the hassle of patching anything that's not installed.
Your forced to have a full install of directx too, including the joystick/gamepad support, directplay (for network gaming) and all the sound/video stuff... Why would you need all this on a corporate desktop, let alone a supposed "server". None of my unix servers have anything that's not relevant to whatever the server is hosting, the only server i have which has *ANY* gaming or graphics related software on it is a quake server!
And that's their own fault. Would you sign an employment contract without reading it first? How about a contract for the transfer of a house or other property? If your willing to agree to things without reading them, i have a few contracts for you to sign!
People need to be educated as to what they're agreeing to, and perhaps get legal advice before agreeing to anything like this. If more people were aware of these things, then vendors would be forced to make their license agreements less onerous.
It is completely unreasonable to have this macrovision driver on every windows system, even those that will never be used to run games. Windows 2003 is supposed to be a server OS, and yet it ships with drivers for copy protection schemes in games? How ridiculous is this?
DRM does not, and is not intended to, stop piracy. DRM is fundamentally flawed due to it's very nature of having to give out the keys in order to play DRM'd media. The major cracking groups have some very skilled people, and any DRM scheme will be cracked fairly quickly. Pirates will then simply obtain copies of media which has had the DRM stripped. Legitimate buyers on the other hand, will receive DRM encumbered versions and have to buy multiple copies for use on different devices, or replacements for damaged/lost media etc. This is what DRM is for, to extract more money from the people who are willing to part with it. Look at systems like the region encoding on DVDs or console games, they don't even pretend to do anything to stop copying, they are simply used to gouge different markets.
DRM ensures that paying customers suffer, and get shafted even more. Pirates are better off, having a more usable product.
I would quite happily pay more for the pirated versions of many things.
Not only is it illegal in business, but taking a bribe often results in you being professionally incompetent.
If you worked for me, and i gave you the task of "Book me the best value business-class flight to australia"... Let's say the best value would be Qantas, and they would fly me direct to australia business class for $4000... But you received a bribe from United, who paid you $1000 to buy a ticket from them instead... Their ticket costs $6000 and has a stopover half way, and thus takes longer.
You would benefit from the $1000 bribe, United would benefit from a sale. I would lose out on my time and $2000, because you used my money to buy me an inferior (slower) service that costs more. You didn't do your job properly. You wasted my money for your own personal benefit, you effectively stole from me and gave it to United, in exchange for a cut of it back.
Taking a bribe to spend someone else's money is fraud, and should be prosecuted accordingly. Also whoever actually took the bribe is not doing their job properly regardless of the law, and should be fired.
Bribery is when you offer a personal incentive to someone who is buying on behalf of someone else (ie, with money that doesnt belong to them). If you offer a free dinner to someone who uses your auto-window service for their own car, then your just sweetening the deal. And someone is free to spend their own money as they see fit, and because its their own money they're more likely to do the research and take the best deal, and it's only them who suffers if they dont. If someone is in charge of purchasing for a company or even worse, a taxpayer funded entity, they are spending SOMEONE ELSE's money on their behalf. Whoever's money it is wants to get the best deal, and they're paying and trusting someone to get them the best deal. If that person takes a bribe in order to spend more of their employer's money than they needed to, or to obtain an inferior product without a substantial discount, then they are defrauding their employer. Any sweeteners attached to such a deal should go to the entity that is fronting up the cash, not an employee who's simply doing his job by organising the deal.
Forgot to mention wrt keeping available... Releasing a copyrighted work into the public domain early (ie before copyright expires) should satisfy the requirement to keep something available, and remove the burden of doing so from the original publisher.
Copyright terms are too long, especially for things like software. While for example a piece of music may be listened to (and have commercial value) for many years, software very rapidly loses value. Do you think anyone would have much use for windows 3.1 short of a curious enthusiast or a collector/museum? Copyright terms in all cases should be shortened severely, most of the profit is made in the first couple of years after release anyway, and it's wrong to let someone carry on milking something they produced years ago. Would you continue to subscribe to slashdot if there were no new stories being posted?
Fair use needs to be extended to ensure people aren't forced to buy multiple copies of the same media to play in a car etc, and DRM needs to be clamped down on for the same reason. People also need to be able to make copies for use (this used to be considered reasonable and standard behaviour, copy the original and play the copy, if the copy gets damaged make another), especially important when kids are involved, and made worse by things like games that require you to keep the original media in the drive (even if theyre not actually reading from it).
Similarly, when copyright expires a work falls into the public domain, DRM prevents that. There needs to be a facility in place to ensure that work will be available freely once it's copyright has expired. Software for which it's copyright expires should be required to be released with source code too.
Abandonware, companies should be required to keep their old products available on a non discriminatory basis, it is unacceptable for something to be "no longer produced" in this digital age. If there is no longer mass market appeal for something, it can be made available in a much cheaper form (ie free or low cost download) and without support. The restriction should be that older media is still available for not more than it's previous cost plus standard inflation, but it's free to become cheaper, and availability should not be artificially limited (ie you should always be able to call and order it, or order online, they cant make the process overly convoluted to put you off). As an example of why this is important, i have an Amiga here that i would like to play with for nostalgic reasons. I had one years ago, so i still have a pile of floppies containing media in various formats some of which proprietary, but i cannot obtain the program that opens them (and potentially can convert to other formats), the company that made it wont sell or provide me a copy at all. I also can't buy a TCP stack for the amiga or much of the networking apps because the places selling them no longer exist, and the downloadable versions are time-limited demos (disconnect after 30 minutes, useless).
What i'd like is a tiny power efficient motherboard, such that i can put lots of them in a rackmount case... Coupled with a single PSU to power several baords (i figure a regular server psu should easily handle a stack of these small boards) and some high speed server fans to cool all of them at once (single boards shouldnt need much cooling, but a stack of them in a confined space would)... And maybe a small unmanaged switch in the case too, running off the same PSU. Like a blade server but on the cheap. Blade servers cost a packet for the empty chassis, and tend to be very power hungry.
Can this be done? Has anyone done this? I've seen craziness like places that host a stack of mac minis as servers, but surely the approach i mentioned would be more efficient... People want really cheap non-virtual hosting.
Unfortunately, most people don't realise what DRM is or why it's bad... They believe the marketing hype, designed to make people think it's a good thing. The people need to be educated about the dangers of DRM, and stories like this are good examples. People won't believe you without hard evidence, they're more likely to believe mass market propaganda.
People who *play* any given sport will often watch old games. If your coaching someone in a sport, showing the players your coaching an old game is a very good way to show and explain examples.
I believe linux does have facilities in the kernel to detect if a file has been modified... But i imagine you'd need a daemon to monitor this and store the list of changed files. I wonder how long before linux does have something similar to time machine tho?
It it possible to get time machine to back up over the network, to a non apple server... I like the idea of automatic backups, but all my macs are laptops so having an external disk permanently attached is a nuisance. I would like backups to be performed whenever i'm attached to my home network, and stored on a linux server that has a stack of large drives.
At the very least, they should prevent more businesses setting up shop or expanding in already overcrowded areas. Problems are getting worse not better, look at london... The transport system is totally overstretched, at peak hours trains and busses are so packed you often can't squeeze onto them at all, and the conditions are utterly terrible. And what are they doing?
Making it more expensive to drive, so the congestion and conditions on the trains/busses becomes even worse, but the rich people can drive around freely. Knocking down old offices and apartments and building new bigger office blocks, resulting in even more people crammed into the overcrowded trains.
World of warcraft makes it's money from the subscription model.. What i dislike about it tho, is that your expected to buy the game up front, but then can't actually play the game you bought without paying extra for a subscription. I much prefer the eve-online method, where you obtain the game for free and get a trial for free, but if you want to play properly you need to buy a paid subscription.
Incidentally, I used to buy games for the Amiga many years ago. They often had annoying copy protection schemes, such as disks you couldn't copy (not without special hardware anyway), codewheels or the requirement to enter specific data from the manual. I was constantly losing manuals and codewheels, and occasionally a disk would get corrupted (floppies!), which caused me no ends of trouble. My friends at school tho, had pirate copies of most games. So while i had to screw around looking for codewheels, manuals etc, and avoiding damaging the original media, my friends were just playing the games. After a while i made pirate copies of the games i had already bought from people at school, and my enjoyment from gaming went up because i no longer had to deal with all the irritating copy protection schemes. The next stage was to simply cut out the purchasing stage, and directly obtain a pirated copy. In one or two cases i found a game really enjoyable (and free from copy protection schemes which reduced the enjoyment) that i actually bought a legit copy afterwards, but not generally.
So long as the legitimate versions are more burdensome than pirate copies, people will pirate. If you reduce prices (make it up on volume), remove the ridiculous copy protection schemes, and sell downloadable copies of games, then piracy will hugely decrease because you'd be taking away most people's need for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardware will always incur a cost to produce because it's a physical good made of physical raw materials. Each unit still requires the raw materials, and the processing of them, coupled with the cost of transporting those goods and the final product around. Add to that, the heavy competition among hardware makers that keeps prices down and margins low, no charging $500 for something costing $5 to make.
Software and other media can easily be reproduced at no cost, so the natural progression of a competitive market will result in software and media being given away free, possibly as a sweetener to sell hardware.
It certainly does come with directx, i believe 2003 even comes with a newer version than XP did... You can try by starting the dxdiag tool on a default 2003 install.
And your right, 5gig for a base install is pathetic. Even worse on your VMs, because that's 5gig multiplied by the number of VMs you have.
As for redundant copies of DLLs, this was microsoft's hyped "self repair" feature from windows 2000... As sun pointed out at the time, it's better for your system to prevent itself from being corrupted than to try and clean up the mess after the fact. I don't think any unix systems keep backup copies of everything, but then unix users typically don't run masses of software as root unnecessarily.
Besides, keeping a backup copy and copying it back has many flaws, if your installing something malicious you just need to corrupt the backup aswell, and it now becomes harder to remove your malware because windows will keep copying it back. It also becomes harder to remove unwanted windows components for the same reason, if you delete ie or outlook express it just gets copied back. And ofcourse if the program that does the copying gets corrupted, or part of the boot process leading up to that, your screwed anyway.
What was the model number of these boards? I'd like to read up on them...
Well, a lot of customers don't want a virtual server, but they still want cheap...
I tried that... Getting hold of Amiga games through warez circles is easy, but for non gaming apps it's considerably harder.
// If more people were aware of these things, then vendors would be forced to make their license agreements less onerous. // That doesn't necessarily follow.
It does, if people were unwilling to accept onerous agreements, vendors would be forced to change them.
Also, even if an agreement is unenforceable, it's still used to scare people into thinking it is. Such tactics need to stop, agreements should be clearly written and users should be educated not to accept an agreement they don't understand.
These agreements won't be changed without user education. Users need to realise if an agreement is unenforceable, not scared into following them. And users need to reject onerous agreements which are enforceable, forcing vendors to make them more reasonable.
You don't, your gambling that one of the people or organisations that looked at the code would have found and disclosed any malicious code located there.
The difference is:
With proprietary code, only one organisation has seen the code and they have no incentive to disclose any malicious code because it's them who put it there.
With open code, many organisations and individuals could have seen the code, and the vast majority of them have no incentive to keep any malicious code under wraps, in fact many will be users who would be very angry about finding such malicious code and would be highly vocal about it.
And in terms of someone writing malicious code, they are less likely to add such code to a program where the source is given out, as there is a much greater chance of it being found, which would result in a complete loss of credibility for the author.
You don't know and trust anyone capable of auditing code? That's a pity.
With proprietary software there is only one entity that can verify the code, with open source there are many. There's no guarantee that either of them will, but 50000 chances are better odds than 1 chance.
As for security updates, this is an unfair comparison. Open source development, including finding and patching of security holes is done in the open, so any security issue becomes known about. Proprietary vendors on the other hand, typically do not disclose any vulnerabilities which are discovered internally, instead preferring to silently patch them, or not as the case may be. Several such issues have been found by reverse engineering mystery patches. The article as well points out another. The macrovision issue was found and fixed in vista, but they didn't patch it in xp or 2003 because then they would have to explain why the secdrv.sys file was being modified, and someone would have reverse engineered the patch to make an exploit. Instead, they leave it unfixed and gamble it wouldn't be discovered, that gamble didn't pay off in this case but how many other issues have they silently fixed which haven't been discovered and disclosed yet?
That's why the large number of Linux distributions, often cited as a problem, is so good. You can customise to your hearts content, and remove what you don't need, or better yet never install it.
And any half decent package manager will pull in extra dependencies if they start being required.
All my linux machines are built to spec, only what's required is installed and nothing else.
Windows "server" is a joke anyway, your forced to have a gui, browser, mail client, media player, gaming support libs (directx) etc, which is a complete hassle to remove and often needs to be patched.
A server should always have the bare minimum software installed, less to go wrong, less to have security problems, less overhead, and you don't have the hassle of patching anything that's not installed.
Your forced to have a full install of directx too, including the joystick/gamepad support, directplay (for network gaming) and all the sound/video stuff...
Why would you need all this on a corporate desktop, let alone a supposed "server".
None of my unix servers have anything that's not relevant to whatever the server is hosting, the only server i have which has *ANY* gaming or graphics related software on it is a quake server!
And that's their own fault.
Would you sign an employment contract without reading it first? How about a contract for the transfer of a house or other property?
If your willing to agree to things without reading them, i have a few contracts for you to sign!
People need to be educated as to what they're agreeing to, and perhaps get legal advice before agreeing to anything like this. If more people were aware of these things, then vendors would be forced to make their license agreements less onerous.
It is completely unreasonable to have this macrovision driver on every windows system, even those that will never be used to run games.
Windows 2003 is supposed to be a server OS, and yet it ships with drivers for copy protection schemes in games? How ridiculous is this?
DRM does not, and is not intended to, stop piracy. DRM is fundamentally flawed due to it's very nature of having to give out the keys in order to play DRM'd media. The major cracking groups have some very skilled people, and any DRM scheme will be cracked fairly quickly. Pirates will then simply obtain copies of media which has had the DRM stripped.
Legitimate buyers on the other hand, will receive DRM encumbered versions and have to buy multiple copies for use on different devices, or replacements for damaged/lost media etc. This is what DRM is for, to extract more money from the people who are willing to part with it. Look at systems like the region encoding on DVDs or console games, they don't even pretend to do anything to stop copying, they are simply used to gouge different markets.
DRM ensures that paying customers suffer, and get shafted even more. Pirates are better off, having a more usable product.
I would quite happily pay more for the pirated versions of many things.
Not only is it illegal in business, but taking a bribe often results in you being professionally incompetent.
If you worked for me, and i gave you the task of "Book me the best value business-class flight to australia"...
Let's say the best value would be Qantas, and they would fly me direct to australia business class for $4000...
But you received a bribe from United, who paid you $1000 to buy a ticket from them instead...
Their ticket costs $6000 and has a stopover half way, and thus takes longer.
You would benefit from the $1000 bribe, United would benefit from a sale. I would lose out on my time and $2000, because you used my money to buy me an inferior (slower) service that costs more.
You didn't do your job properly.
You wasted my money for your own personal benefit, you effectively stole from me and gave it to United, in exchange for a cut of it back.
Taking a bribe to spend someone else's money is fraud, and should be prosecuted accordingly. Also whoever actually took the bribe is not doing their job properly regardless of the law, and should be fired.
Bribery is when you offer a personal incentive to someone who is buying on behalf of someone else (ie, with money that doesnt belong to them).
If you offer a free dinner to someone who uses your auto-window service for their own car, then your just sweetening the deal. And someone is free to spend their own money as they see fit, and because its their own money they're more likely to do the research and take the best deal, and it's only them who suffers if they dont.
If someone is in charge of purchasing for a company or even worse, a taxpayer funded entity, they are spending SOMEONE ELSE's money on their behalf. Whoever's money it is wants to get the best deal, and they're paying and trusting someone to get them the best deal. If that person takes a bribe in order to spend more of their employer's money than they needed to, or to obtain an inferior product without a substantial discount, then they are defrauding their employer.
Any sweeteners attached to such a deal should go to the entity that is fronting up the cash, not an employee who's simply doing his job by organising the deal.
Forgot to mention wrt keeping available...
Releasing a copyrighted work into the public domain early (ie before copyright expires) should satisfy the requirement to keep something available, and remove the burden of doing so from the original publisher.
Copyright law certainly does need reform...
Copyright terms are too long, especially for things like software. While for example a piece of music may be listened to (and have commercial value) for many years, software very rapidly loses value. Do you think anyone would have much use for windows 3.1 short of a curious enthusiast or a collector/museum? Copyright terms in all cases should be shortened severely, most of the profit is made in the first couple of years after release anyway, and it's wrong to let someone carry on milking something they produced years ago. Would you continue to subscribe to slashdot if there were no new stories being posted?
Fair use needs to be extended to ensure people aren't forced to buy multiple copies of the same media to play in a car etc, and DRM needs to be clamped down on for the same reason. People also need to be able to make copies for use (this used to be considered reasonable and standard behaviour, copy the original and play the copy, if the copy gets damaged make another), especially important when kids are involved, and made worse by things like games that require you to keep the original media in the drive (even if theyre not actually reading from it).
Similarly, when copyright expires a work falls into the public domain, DRM prevents that. There needs to be a facility in place to ensure that work will be available freely once it's copyright has expired. Software for which it's copyright expires should be required to be released with source code too.
Abandonware, companies should be required to keep their old products available on a non discriminatory basis, it is unacceptable for something to be "no longer produced" in this digital age. If there is no longer mass market appeal for something, it can be made available in a much cheaper form (ie free or low cost download) and without support. The restriction should be that older media is still available for not more than it's previous cost plus standard inflation, but it's free to become cheaper, and availability should not be artificially limited (ie you should always be able to call and order it, or order online, they cant make the process overly convoluted to put you off).
As an example of why this is important, i have an Amiga here that i would like to play with for nostalgic reasons. I had one years ago, so i still have a pile of floppies containing media in various formats some of which proprietary, but i cannot obtain the program that opens them (and potentially can convert to other formats), the company that made it wont sell or provide me a copy at all. I also can't buy a TCP stack for the amiga or much of the networking apps because the places selling them no longer exist, and the downloadable versions are time-limited demos (disconnect after 30 minutes, useless).
What i'd like is a tiny power efficient motherboard, such that i can put lots of them in a rackmount case...
Coupled with a single PSU to power several baords (i figure a regular server psu should easily handle a stack of these small boards) and some high speed server fans to cool all of them at once (single boards shouldnt need much cooling, but a stack of them in a confined space would)...
And maybe a small unmanaged switch in the case too, running off the same PSU.
Like a blade server but on the cheap. Blade servers cost a packet for the empty chassis, and tend to be very power hungry.
Can this be done? Has anyone done this? I've seen craziness like places that host a stack of mac minis as servers, but surely the approach i mentioned would be more efficient... People want really cheap non-virtual hosting.
Unfortunately, most people don't realise what DRM is or why it's bad...
They believe the marketing hype, designed to make people think it's a good thing. The people need to be educated about the dangers of DRM, and stories like this are good examples. People won't believe you without hard evidence, they're more likely to believe mass market propaganda.
In any case, those people who obtained pirate copies often have a superior experience to legit buyers. All this does is encourage more piracy.
People who *play* any given sport will often watch old games. If your coaching someone in a sport, showing the players your coaching an old game is a very good way to show and explain examples.
I believe linux does have facilities in the kernel to detect if a file has been modified... But i imagine you'd need a daemon to monitor this and store the list of changed files.
I wonder how long before linux does have something similar to time machine tho?
It it possible to get time machine to back up over the network, to a non apple server...
I like the idea of automatic backups, but all my macs are laptops so having an external disk permanently attached is a nuisance. I would like backups to be performed whenever i'm attached to my home network, and stored on a linux server that has a stack of large drives.
At the very least, they should prevent more businesses setting up shop or expanding in already overcrowded areas.
Problems are getting worse not better, look at london... The transport system is totally overstretched, at peak hours trains and busses are so packed you often can't squeeze onto them at all, and the conditions are utterly terrible.
And what are they doing?
Making it more expensive to drive, so the congestion and conditions on the trains/busses becomes even worse, but the rich people can drive around freely.
Knocking down old offices and apartments and building new bigger office blocks, resulting in even more people crammed into the overcrowded trains.
World of warcraft makes it's money from the subscription model..
What i dislike about it tho, is that your expected to buy the game up front, but then can't actually play the game you bought without paying extra for a subscription. I much prefer the eve-online method, where you obtain the game for free and get a trial for free, but if you want to play properly you need to buy a paid subscription.
Incidentally, I used to buy games for the Amiga many years ago. They often had annoying copy protection schemes, such as disks you couldn't copy (not without special hardware anyway), codewheels or the requirement to enter specific data from the manual. I was constantly losing manuals and codewheels, and occasionally a disk would get corrupted (floppies!), which caused me no ends of trouble. My friends at school tho, had pirate copies of most games. So while i had to screw around looking for codewheels, manuals etc, and avoiding damaging the original media, my friends were just playing the games.
After a while i made pirate copies of the games i had already bought from people at school, and my enjoyment from gaming went up because i no longer had to deal with all the irritating copy protection schemes.
The next stage was to simply cut out the purchasing stage, and directly obtain a pirated copy. In one or two cases i found a game really enjoyable (and free from copy protection schemes which reduced the enjoyment) that i actually bought a legit copy afterwards, but not generally.
So long as the legitimate versions are more burdensome than pirate copies, people will pirate.
If you reduce prices (make it up on volume), remove the ridiculous copy protection schemes, and sell downloadable copies of games, then piracy will hugely decrease because you'd be taking away most people's need for it.