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The long-standing rivalry between Dish Network and TiVo may have come to a close. After dealing with numerous court battles that ended up in a nasty injunction, it seems Dish has finally agreed to shell out a sizable $104 million in damages over to TiVo.

The issue, which started with a patent infringement claim TiVo made about a DVR system that Dish pushed out, worried many customers that owned EchoStar-built DVRs. The concern was that Dish Network would recall them, which would be bad news all around. For the customers’ sake, Dish found a workaround and was able to implement it in time.

Earlier this year, the folks over at Mozilla took some time to show off a video with the latest developments in the mobile version of the popular Firefox browser. While a final version won’t be ready for handsets worldwide perhaps until sometime in 2009, an alpha testing build may come much sooner.

In fact, speaking to the San Jose Mercury News, Mozilla CEO John Lilly was quoted saying that we'll see the first Firefox Mobile alpha releases “in a few weeks.” Sadly, no specific details were offered but I’m certainly looking forward to an alternative for Opera Mobile and the iPhone’s superb mobile Safari browser. Check out the complete interview here, where Lilly also discusses other topics including how an open source company such as Mozilla works and Google’s new Chrome browser.

Crysis Warhead has been out for little over a couple of weeks now, and those of you who’ve picked it up also got the chance to play its multiplayer component. For the rest of you interested in getting some free Crysis Wars multiplayer action, EA and Crytek are offering the full standalone multiplayer client as a free download at the MyCrysis.com site.

Users will be able to play the game over LAN connections starting today, without any time limitation, and play online for free during the entire weekend starting October 10. Crysis Wars includes three multiplayer modes – Instant Action, Team Instant Action and Power Struggle – as well as 21 maps of varying sizes and access to all the weapons and vehicles in the Crysis Universe.

This is certainly great news and might be enough to convince many to try the game – just be sure to check the official minimum system requirements after the jump.

AMD's recent success with the Radeon series has been largely at Nvidia’s expense. After both financial and technological setbacks, many have wondered what Nvidia’s plan going forward is to recover. A recent interview has revealed much about what they are up to, in which Jen Hsun Huang spoke about the company’s future, CUDA, GPUs and chipsets.

It's pretty short, but to the point. Nvidia still sees the standard processor as something that is giving diminishing returns, and will wane faced with specialty processors like current GPUs using CUDA technology. They also don't see their chipset business as suffering – quite the opposite, they see themselves as “years” ahead of AMD. It's a short but interesting read on what Nvidia feels is really going on today.

Amid growing concerns, Google and Yahoo have announced their planned advertising alliance will be “briefly” delayed. While Google recently said they expected to move ahead with the deal, with or without the approval of government regulators, apparently Yahoo had no such plans.

Both companies released similar statements over the weekend, saying they have now agreed to a brief delay in order to continue their ongoing discussions with the Department of Justice – though they didn’t specify how long they intend to wait. Google and Yahoo’s combined search market share would be a staggering 83%, a number that most parties are not comfortable with, including Google rival and former Yahoo suitor Microsoft.

One of the biggest gripes in online movie distribution today is that most often releases are significantly delayed compared to DVDs. Not only is that annoying to those who subscribe to streaming movie services, but it is a huge incentive for pirates to rip movies and start distributing them online before an official release.

Warner Bros. apparently understands and wants to amend this, with some recent plans to start releasing movies online before the DVD itself hits the market. This sudden change in behavior won't be worldwide, initially deploying only in South Korea due to its high levels of piracy.

The company hopes to turn piracy around by offering movies in digital form before optical discs are available. Depending on what else they try to buddy-up on with the releases – such as DRM – this could be a huge success.

Although XP is now officially off sale in retail, customers can still get their hands on the operating system by buying a Vista machine that comes with an XP downgrade option. That lifeline was originally intended to be withdrawn on January 31 next year, but apparently Microsoft has decided to move the downgrade cut-off date a full six months to July 31 – sending some rather confusing signals about Windows Vista.

With Microsoft’s upcoming operating system rumored to be launching around that time, it appears the goal is to transition businesses over to Windows 7 while bypassing Vista altogether. Microsoft has been desperately to kill off Windows XP with hopes of boosting Vista sales, but it seems the aging system just won’t go away.

Anyone who enjoyed the original Deus Ex will be thrilled at the following. Eidos Montreal has announced that Deus Ex 3 is being developed and is due for a release sometime in 2009. The story has been confirmed to be a Prequel, one that the creators of the series apparently have given the green light to. The project will initially be deployed on the PC, with rumors that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are also planned to get a release.

Small details about what we can expect in terms of gameplay have been shared as well, and it seems that many elements from the first game have returned. It'll be a long road before development is finished, but I look forward to seeing it progress.

Independent Games Take Flight @ PC World
Worst Windows flaws of the past decade @ InfoWorld
3D Imaging Spreads to Fashion and Beyond @ BusinessWeek
GMail's Achilles Heel: Terrible Customer Service @ Consumerist
See more articles and reviews.

Five years ago in TechSpot:
Nintendo reports first-ever H1 loss

The Eee is doing very well for Asustek, with a massive 700,000 units shipped last month alone. That was a new record for the company, and they expect it to help carry their total units shipped for the quarter to 1.7 million. Increased competition from companies like MSI, Acer and others hasn't seemed to stop the Eee PC's explosive growth.

Some data that might be interesting isn't mentioned. For instance, how many of that 700,000 are part of the “lower-end” models of the Eee versus the “higher-end,” and how many are an Eee desktop versus an Eee netbook. If Asustek sees a large number of the Eees in the “high-end” being sold, it may be even more reason for them to continue to adapt the Eee to a wide market. It has already left the realm of being “entry-level” or being just a netbook, though it's too early to tell if the Eee will fare well when faced up against run of the mill laptops.

Internet auction site eBay has announced a pair of major acquisitions today, in an effort to bolster its position in the marketplace. The company is buying the online payments business Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash and 125 million dollars in employee options, along with a Danish online classifieds site and classified car sales site for a total of around $390 million.

Bill Me Later will be combined with eBay’s PayPal unit and is expected to generate $150 million in revenue in 2009. The company also said it is looking to become a “nimbler and more efficient organization,” which unfortunately means that about 1,000 employees and several hundred temporary workers will be receiving pinks lips.

After being predictably sued by a bunch of Hollywood movie studios last week, RealNetworks has been forced to halt sales of its new DVD ripping and archiving product, RealDVD. The shutdown is a temporary one, though, with the judge expected to review all the paperwork related to the case by tomorrow and decide whether or not to continue the order.

The MPAA is alleging a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and breach of contract. Real, on the other hand, claims the application does not actually break CSS, as it merely copies the disc, including CSS, bit for bit with the decryption residing in the player. While DVD ripping tools have existed almost as long as DVD discs, this is one of the first efforts by a mainstream company to try to make such software legal. In the end, all this is probably just doing what RealNetworks wanted to achieve in the first place: generate controversy and free publicity for its product.

If you are a Linux user and have been wanting to run Google's photo organizing and editing software Picasa on that OS, your wait is now over. Google has released a
Linux port of the software based on its latest available version. The software reportedly utilizes portions of Wine to function, so it wouldn't be accurate to call it an actual “port”. As a result, there are a few features missing in this release due to Picasa relying on certain Windows components.

Picasa 3 Beta is also available for Windows now, which is no surprise, but not for the Mac. We wonder if this is some sort of trend setting at Google, let's remember that the company's month-old Chrome browser remains at large a Windows-only application.

Don't forget to voice in our weekend open forum feature.
This week's topic: Are netbooks here to stay?

Google News gets a facelift Still looking plain and googley, but you heard it here first. Apparently went live as we were gathering the weekend news. Google News.

Bank robber hires decoys on Craigslist, fools cops In an elaborate robbery scheme that's one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities. News.com.

Microsoft gives users six months longer to flee from Vista OEMs have been given an additional six months to sell PCs running Windows Vista with the ability to downgrade to Windows XP using an accompanying recovery disc. The Register.

Court Temporarily Shuts Down RealDVD A court has ordered RealNetworks to temporarily suspend distribution of its controversial RealDVD product until Tuesday so that the judge can review all of the papers filed in the case. NewTeeVee.

Amazon Kindle 2 pics leaked You’re looking at the first shots of Amazon’s Kindle 2. The unit didn’t go down too much in size which is unfortunate, but then again, you want something pretty large so it’s comfortable to read on. Boy Genius Report.

After struggling to become mainstream in the late 90s, the netbook market has seen somewhat of an unforeseen revival in 2008. While most PC literates would have agreed years before that a smallish, low-cost and straightforward laptop could easily carve its place in the PC market, a number of significant constraints like manufacturing costs and watt-heavy processors made it unfeasible for the netbook to arise, until now.

Widely available products like the Sony Vaio TX/TZ and the IBM Thinkpad X series used to provide ultra-portable accommodations to those who needed them and could afford them, but then late last year PC manufacturing giant Asus took the world by surprise by announcing its inexpensive Eee subnotebook line starting at just $300. You probably know the rest of the story. Asus reportedly sold 300,000+ Eee units in 2007 and expects to sell several millions more worldwide this year. Furthermore, support from Intel was almost immediate and now the Intel Atom processor is expected to compete in this segment with the likes of VIA and AMD.

Other PC manufacturers have been jumping aboard incessantly during this year, so while the Asus Eee line has been diversified, now there are several other players in the netbook market, to name a few: the Acer Aspire One, MSI Wind PC, Dell Inspiron Mini 9, OLPC XO-1, HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, Everex CloudBook, Intel Classmate PC, LG X110, and Lenovo IdeaPad.

So, are you a netbook owner now, or do you plan to buy one later this year? Would you consider this netbook movement pure novelty that will fade away in a matter of years or is the form factor here to stay? What do you think is cool about the format and/or what is it currently lacking to make it perfect?

Discuss.