Crave

Here at Crave, we occasionally like to crowd-source our humor.

Thursday, we learned that Jerry Seinfeld, one of the funniest men on the planet, will be the new spokesman in an ad campaign for Microsoft's Vista operating system. Can Seinfeld steal some of the marketing thunder from Apple's hipster Macintosh dude and the poor, shlubby Windows fella who clearly needs to get his suit tailored?

Well, as our readers have noted, there's a bit of irony to this, since many of us recall that Seinfeld was always using a Mac on his '90s sitcom. That got us thinking: Should Microsoft hire someone not so clearly playing both sides of the fence? Thankfully, our readers had some terrific ideas.

• Our first commenter, "J-Hawaii," had a good suggestion, a Borg drone from Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, I'm not sure this is the best representative of Microsoft's business-first attitude. While we often think of the Borg as joyless automatons of a conformist culture, the best-known Borg, Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager, added new femininity to cyber-kinetic life forms. Even the creepy Borg Queen in the movie Star Trek: First Contact had a certain je ne sais quoi about her.

Could a Borg offer the first sex appeal to a Microsoft ad campaign since the Rolling Stones were singing Start Me Up for Windows 95?

• Commentator "Dirk VanNerden," along with many others, suggests Steve Carell and the rest of the cast of The Office. Makes sense; you've got vaguely unhappy office folk stuck in workplace purgatory in Scranton, Penn. (I grew up about 20 miles from Scranton, so trust me: "purgatory" is a nice way to put it.) Total Microsoft stereotype. Nails it.

However, a Microsoft fan might point out that the cast of a Carell movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin could work just as well for Apple. You know, gadget heads stuck forever in some sort of adolescent, video-game-playing, pot-smoking purgatory.

Here at Crave, we also like to be platform neutral with our insults.… Read more

Star Trek is coming to the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. By most accounts for fans of the science fiction series and gaming, this is exciting news.

But the real question for Trekkies is sure to be: which Star Trek?

First the news: At a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas over the weekend, Cryptic Studios revealed the first details and a trailer for Star Trek Online, an MMORPG based on the franchise. Leonard Nimoy was even onstage to unveil the game (a company spokeswoman said they're not saying what the price or release date will be quite yet).

I asked the spokeswoman which Star Trek the game will be based on and she said cryptically that Cryptic is "definitely looking at the movies and TV shows as canon but also looking to comics and novels for additional ideas." Unfortunately, I didn't see the trailer, but the screen shots Cryptic sent me look an awful lot like a Star Trek: The Next Generation fight with one of those smaller, circular Borg ships. I assume the new game will create its own Star Trek universe, inspired by everything from the original series to all of the movies.

But let's set aside the movies for a minute and run down which Star Trek would be best, assuming that shows that were heavy on action and light on handwringing would make for good MMORPG gaming (full disclosure: Star Trek and CNET Networks now share the same parent company, CBS, which we at Crave happen to think is terribly cool):

• The original, swashbuckling Star Trek, which featured a svelte William Shatner; Leonard Nimoy; three seasons of Klingons who looked like swarthy, sweaty humans; green alien dancers; and occasionally brilliant writing. Lots of good fist fights and Shatner's faux kung fu (and who can forget Sulu thoroughly enjoying the sword play in "Day of the Dove"?), but the show's best moments were ultimately nice pieces of science fiction, like the famous "City on the Edge of Forever" episode, when Shatner has to sacrifice the comely Joan Collins to save the future.

Gaming factor: 7 out of 10

• Star Trek: The Next Generation, my personal favorite with Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, the android Commander Data, and an erudite flavor of benign imperialism doing its best to bring peace to the cosmos. There was some terrific writing on this show over the years, but a tad too cerebral for a video game?

That's not to put down games, but I'm not sure how you can role play Next Generation's brilliant final episode, which forced viewers to expand how they think about time. On the upside, it introduced the seriously bad-ass Borg, who did very, very bad things to Picard.

Gaming factor: 8 out of 10

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which a highly macho Avery Brooks (he of Spenser: For Hire and A Man Called Hawk) commanded a frontier space station in a war-torn area terrorized by the Cardassians and other menaces. Who can forget the epic battles between invaders from the Dominion and combined Star Fleet and Klingon fleets? Major kick-butt action, though it was disappointing that Brooks never once growled, "Spenssssserrrr."

Gaming factor: 9 out of 10… Read more

Here at Crave, we don't normally think of ourselves as sociologists, psychologists, or anything else that claims to be particularly insightful about the human psyche. We write about gadgets, games, and things that are more likely to lighten your wallet than elevate your soul.

But after a day's worth of poll-taking, we can offer a little insight about our readers: they still prefer women to gadgets, even the wicked big expensive ones.

We posted an item Monday on a new Playboy reality TV show that even the great Chuck Barris, he of The Dating Game, The Gong Show, … Read more

That online music market must be awfully tempting catnip to Michael Dell.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Dell for the last few months has been testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September. The story (which will surely serve as a nice trial balloon for Dell's marketers) says the music player could sell for less than $100. It will use Wi-Fi to connect to third-party music services.

If that's deja vu you're feeling, you're not the only one. In 2003, Dell jumped into music biz with its own … Read more

Correction, 1:20 p.m. PDT: This blog initially had an incorrect first name for the former CEO of Dell. He is Kevin Rollins.

Tech pundit Nicholas Carr predicted Dell's current predicament more than three years ago.

Carr, in a guest column for BusinessWeek Online, wrote that he worried Dell didn't understand how the computer market and consumer tastes where changing. (Full disclosure: I was the editor on that column, but Carr's spotless writing made my job pretty easy.) In fact, he found then-CEO Kevin Rollins' dismissal of the iPod as a "fad" and a &… Read more

When it comes to writing about Apple, deciding what you should and should not cover can be tricky.

You can take the machine gun approach: Anything said, written, rumored, or signaled via smoke should be dutifully blogged with a hint of snark and just enough insight to make readers think, "Heeeeeeey, that fella must know the inside dope." This, unfortunately, is what most of the tech press (mea culpa: sometimes including CNET) following Apple does these days. If you don't give readers their Apple fix, the other guys will.

Then there's the high-end approach: you have … Read more

Offering financing services to customers is nothing new for big computer hardware makers. Unfortunately, running into trouble because of those vendor financing programs is almost as common.

Tucked into a piece on Apple and patents on Barron's Online is an interesting tidbit about Dell. No, Dell hasn't been handing out loans for houses in suburban Las Vegas or some other distressed real estate market. This appears to be an indirect deal. It seems the Texas computer maker, thanks to its partnership with troubled lender CIT Group, could surprisingly find itself stung by the subprime loan mess. At one … Read more

Friday morning, I walked past a colleague's desk and--I swear--saw a basketball game on her computer screen. When I got closer, however, all I could see were a bunch of very official-looking bars and charts.

She was working hard. Real hard. Then she laughed, hit a key, and flipped back to the basketball game in a clear indication that I'm either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn't exactly strike fear into the rank and file. Or both.

The "boss button" and silly office decorum strike again. For those of … Read more

On a day when we learn an iPod apparently threw off sparks in Japan, generating nervous memories of exploding Dell laptops, let's take time to report the obvious: The people who run the recording industry are very often not very bright.

Blender.com has published an entertaining list of the record industry's 20 biggest, dumbest, and stunningly dense moments. Topping that list, not surprisingly, is the industry's jihad against Napster. To refresh your memories: Shawn Fanning's dandy innovation allowed people to share millions of songs over the Internet. But there was a problem: They weren't … Read more