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Print media hasn't fared super well in the face of digital distribution. Turns out, a lot of people prefer live pixels to dead trees. So what's a company like Barnes & Noble -- with serious cash invested in both brick-and-mortar stores and the digital Nook ecosystem -- supposed to do in this new era of reading? The answer, apparently, lies in spinning off the Nook into an entirely new subsidiary company -- and giving Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake in the fresh venture. B&N did just that this morning.
Whatever Nvidia plans on announcing at the GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Gaming Festival in Shanghai tomorrow, it's going to be hard-pressed to live up to the hype leading up to its unveiling. The PC gaming community has been a-flutter since the first ominous "IT'S COMING" message hit Nvidia's Facebook page over a week ago. Nvidia's just sent a kick-ass custom crowbar and some cryptic confirmations to the Maximum PC offices in anticipation of tomorrow's big news.
Few things in life are as frustrating as losing a Starcraft match to a Zerg Rush. Falling to a teeming wave of cheap, quickly produced Zerglings flat-out sucks. No matter how many cannons you fire, the fodder just keeps coming. A new Google easter egg brings the doomed gameplay of fending off an unending Zerg Rush to your Google Search results -- but unlike in Starcraft, it's actually surprisingly fun. (You're still screwed in the end, though.)
If you're a Ubuntu Linux user, there's a new entry on your to-do list for today: downloading Ubuntu 12.04 (aka "Precise Pangolin"), the just-dropped long-term support release for the operating system. That means it gets five full years of bug fixes and updates, and it brings a host of improvements and fresh features to the OS -- including upgrades to its divisive Unity interface.
Getting to know your neighbors better used to involve a lot of legwork: heading next door for dinner, chatting over the fence, signing up for the Neighborhood watch, et cetera. The times, they are a-changin', though, and a new study commissioned by Britain's Information Commissioner's Office suggests that these days, all you have to do to understand your fellow man is buy a used hard drive. Almost half of all used hard drives tested by the organization still contained information from their previous owners.
The new SkyDrive features added late last week were, apparently, just the tip of the iceberg; today, Microsoft unleashed a new and improved preview version of its cloud-storage service that adds local SkyDrive clients, default Live Mesh-like functionality, the ability to pay for extra storage and more. Heads-up for existing users, though; your SkyDrive allotment could shrink from its current 25GB down to just 7GB if you don't act fast.
Last week, Nvidia teased us with a vague picture of a black cooler shroud with the words "It's coming" emblazoned underneath the Nvidia logo. We still may not know what "it" is, but now we know when it's coming: this Saturday, April 28th at 7:30 P.M. Pacific time. In a new article up on the Nvidia website, the company says it "will be making a special announcement at GeForce LAN / NVIDIA Gaming Festival (NGF) 2012 in Shanghai, China."
Good news for the griefers, modders, trolls and all-around jerks that have been making life less pleasant for other gamers using EA's Origin gaming service: you can still pull your shenanigans on Steam! Kidding, kidding. But thanks to a change in policy from EA, you'll be able to get your single-player on in the games you purchase through Origin even if you've been banned from the service.
Things are looking up for PC users! And by that, we mean bigger and sharper. A couple of months back, we told you that the average monitor size had increased 3 inches in just 4 years and that multi-display setups were becoming more popular. Now comes word that resolutions are starting to catch up: today, StatCounter reported more people rock 1366x768 than any other resolution, the first time that a widescreen format has taken the top of the charts.







