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Last month the employees of the Arlington plant were announced that they will be receiving 30-gigabyte video iPods as a reward for all their effort they put for this company. This was a big surprise for everyone especially because they worth about $300. But a bigger surprise came last week when the company, after gaining a lot of publicity for their kindness, laid-off 35 employees and were asked to give back their 30-gigabyte video iPods.

The employees are saying that they were under the impression that the iPods were theirs to keep so some had sold them or given them as gifts and that nothing was ever said about ever having to give back the 30-gigabyte video iPods. Company spokeswoman LuAnn Jenkins said that the digital music player were not a gift and that she didn’t know whether the company ever intended for the workers to keep the iPods.

According to GameSpot, Apple is looking for C/C++ programmers that have previously worked as game developers. This move comes right after the transition from PowerPC to Intel, which made the Mac even more powerful, allowing it to run better games.

The developers are supposed to work on better OpenGL support in MAC OS X so the new hardware to be better optimized for gaming. Recently Apple hired programmers to work on a game engine for with ARM7 RISC processor, which is found in the iPod. With this Apple is trying to make the iPod more than a music and video player.

After finding out that Creative sued Apple over the iPods and iPod nanos importation and sale after importation into the United States, in the same day that Creative did this, Apple sued iPod rival, Creative Technology claiming that Creative Labs, the U.S. division of Creative Technology, infringes four patents in its hand-held digital players.

Phil O’Shaughnessy, a spokesman for Creative, said that Creative proactively held discussions with Apple in their efforts to explore amicable solutions and that ‘at no time during these discussions or at any other time did Apple mention to they the patents it raised in its lawsuit’. Anyway, the Apple’s iPod holds more the 75 per cent of the U.S. market while Creative controls less then 10 per cent.

It seems like Apple has violated Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 because of the iPods and iPod nanos importation and sale after importation into the United States, that infringe U.S. Patent 6,928,433, which Creative refers to as the ‘Zen Patent’. This is what it’s all about! Creative filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission against Apple to stop sales, marketing, importation or sale after importation into the United States for iPod and iPod Nano products. This is not the only complaint that Creative filed against Apple. The second complaint is about injunction and increased damages for Apple Computer Inc.’s willful infringement of the Zen Patent.

Most of the MP3 player owners like Apple’s iPods. After finding out that the low price points and broad availability of legal music files will have as a consequence the growth of MP3 players’s market to nearly double by 2010, according to In-Stat research company, now we find out that Apple has about 49 per cent of the MP3 players market with its iPod digital player, almost half of MP3 player owners has an iPod.

The Apple iPod crazy ness is almost all over the world but in Japan is different. The iPod mania is alive holding 51.3% of the digital-music player market at the end of 2005 - about 4.2 million units - up from about 32% in 2004, according to research firm BCN.