Barnes & Noble (BKS) said Tuesday that it will invest heavily on boosting production of its nook e-reader and that move will hurt future earnings.

Barnes & Noble cut its outlook for the fiscal year ending April 30, 2010. The bookseller said that retail traffic “will remain challenged during the holiday season.” But we knew that already. The big reason for Barnes & Noble’s new outlook is investment in the nook, which is sold out.

Here’s a tale of two PC titans: HP (HPQ) and Dell (DELL). One executes well every quarter. The other doesn’t. Both see big PC upgrade cycles ahead. Both are looking to ride a bump in enterprise spending courtesy of Windows 7.

Place your bets.

EBay (EBAY) is kicking off this key holiday shopping week with credits for sellers affected by a search outage over the weekend.

The company on Saturday suffered a search outage “due to errors in some of our backend systems.” A search on products would lead to an error message or blank page. Six hours later service was restored mostly and the company said “we will be issuing full credits for all affected items for this title search outage.”

Microsoft (MSFT) and News Corp. (NWS) are reportedly discussing a deal where Rupert Murdoch would take his properties and delist them from Google (GOOG). These sites would presumably wind up on Bing.

The Financial Times reported that Microsoft and News Corp. have talked about de-indexing its news Web sites from Google. In addition:

The Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

Dell chief Michael Dell is projecting a Windows 7 upgrade cycle that could put PC growth “well into the teens.” What’s unclear is whether Dell will be able to grab a bigger share of the revenue pie or be outmaneuvered by rivals like HP (HPQ) and Acer.

Following the company’s disappointing quarter, Dell executives said the timing of the Windows 7 launch hurt revenue and earnings. That’s why Dell’s third quarter results fell short of expectations.

Dell’s (DELL) fiscal third quarter financials fell well short of estimates across the board.

The company on Thursday reported third quarter net income of $337 million, or 17 cents a share. That tally is down 54 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 28 cents a share. Dell’s earnings included pre-tax expenses and other moving parts that knocked 6 cents a share off of the earnings sum. But even excluding those items, Dell fell short.

Google (GOOG) on Thursday revealed a bevy of noteworthy developments for its Chrome OS. The company released the Chrome OS to the open source community, laid out its security vision and promised to deliver a simple operating system. However, the success or failure of the Chrome OS will ride on whether users will give up desktop applications.

Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, outlined the Chrome OS, noted that “there’s a paradigm shift in computing” presumably to netbooks and noted:

IBM said Wednesday that it is making progress toward cooking up a computer system that emulates the human brain and simulates abilities for sensation, perception, interaction and cognition. The end goal: Create a computing system that thinks like the human brain.

In addition, IBM announced that this “large-scale cortical simulation” and the algorithm behind it rivals the brain’s power, energy consumption and size.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to grab market share from Yahoo in a perverse dance before these two companies partner in an attempt to conquer Google.

The latest comScore stats tell the tale. Simply put, Microsoft (MSFT) has nearly garnered 10 percent market share as Yahoo (YHOO) gives ground monthly. Google (GOOG) continues to gain share.

IBM researchers have cooked up a quick medical diagnostic testing system based on a silicon chip that can get by on small sample and test for multiple diseases.

The breakthrough to be announced Tuesday means that physicians can test a patient immediately following a heart attack to improve survival rates. The test checks for disease markers, proteins that can be detected in blood using “capillary action force.” In a nutshell, capillary forces refer to the tendency of a liquid to rise in narrow tubes or be drawn into a small opening. The IBM Research-Zurich findings will be detailed in the December issue of the Royal Society of Chemistry (see reprint PDF).

Adobe (ADBE) on Tuesday released the beta versions of its AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 software and the company includes multi-touch support to “bring innovations and optimizations from mobile devices to the desktop.”

Most of the multi-touch talk around Adobe revolves around future mobile support (statement). However, multi-touch has a role on the desktop too. For instance, HP (HPQ) on Monday announced a software development program for its TouchSmart PCs and digital signage displays. HP launched a developer portal and development kit to create things like touch enabled Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu.

Can the best-selling category of the PC market really be just a fad? A junky joke? A stunt to prop up the PC market created by Intel (INTC)?

Jason Hiner at TechRepublic seems to think so. He proclaims:

AT&T (T) on Monday rolled out a cloud computing system that mimics the approach of Amazon Web Services.

Dubbed the AT&T Synaptic Computer Service, the telecom giant is offering on-demand computing via self-service. AT&T said its service will allow corporate customers to scale up computer requirements quickly. As corporate customers increasingly ponder Amazon Web Services, hosting providers and major enterprise IT players are racing to offer similar services. Simply put, many traditional enterprise IT players are likely to emulate Amazon’s on-demand computing cloud model.

Dell (DELL) officially hatched its grand smartphone plan and it’s focused on emerging markets and the Android operating system. The company confirmed its plans to launch smartphones in China and Brazil.

In a statement Friday, Dell said it will distribute its Mini 3 smartphones through China Mobile, the wireless behemoth in China. In Brazil, Dell has inked a deal with Claro, which has more than 42 million customers.

Intel (INTC) and AMD on Thursday said they will settle all legal disputes, including antitrust litigation, for $1.25 billion. AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said the settlement ushers in a “new era” in the chip industry.

Under the terms of the settlement, Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion. Among other key items (statement):

Garmin (GRMN) is planning an Android-powered phone in 2010.

The company laid out the plans on a presentation that went with its third quarter earnings call. The find, noted by GSM Arena earlier this week, highlights that Garmin is serious about the Nuvifone, which has questionable prospects and decidedly mixed reviews. Neowin notes that the Nuvifone has Windows Mobile and Linux versions, but little traction thus far.

Clearwire (CLWR) has a larger war chest, but still lacks a significant subscriber base for its WiMax, or 4G, wireless services. However, the company maintains that it is in the right place at the right time to become a powerhouse.

Those were some of the takeaways as Clearwire CEO William Morrow put on a confident front on the company’s third quarter earnings call on Tuesday. Morrow addressed why Google (GOOG) sat out the latest $1.56 billion funding round and how the wholesale business—Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast (CMCSA) reselling WiMax service—will be huge.

Google (GOOG) is evil. It’s not evil. Perhaps it’s the George Washington of the Internet. Or maybe it’s just one huge dominant company trying to stay out of antitrust trouble.

Ask a person about Google and you’re going to get a bunch of opinions. Why? People love Google and hate it at the same time.

Sprint Nextel (S) and other Clearwire (CLWR) investors are reportedly going to pump another $1.5 billion into the WiMax provider.

According to the Wall Street Journal (Techmeme):

The most recent quarterly reports from McAfee (MFE) and Symantec (SYMC) highlight some trench warfare in both the enterprise and consumer markets.

Both companies reported solid quarters, but Symantec was the one that really knocked the cover off the ball. Symantec reported fiscal second quarter net income of $150 million, or 18 cents a share, on revenue of $1.47 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were 36 cents a share, three cents ahead of Wall Street estimates.