Josh Ong for AppleInsider:

A British Employment Tribunal has upheld Apple’s decision to dismiss a retail store employee who violated company policy by posting derogatory comments about his employer on the Facebook social networking site.

You can’t break the rules and then complain the rules are unfair. Well, you can, but…

Testament, Megadeth, Arch Enemy, Exodus, Killswitch Engage and Devildriver all call the same man to lay the final hand on their albums: Britain’s Andy Sneap. This highly in-demand producer/engineer has worked on numerous Grammy Award-nominated albums, is known worldwide for having produced some of the heaviest releases this last decade and has had an instrumental role in shaping the sound of metal music as we know it in the new millennium. Now Toontrack is proud to present the first ever drum sample library to bear his unmistakable seal; Metal Machine EZX.

This is what I love about Toontrack. They go out and get the best engineers and drummers and work with them for their drum packages. As users, we end up getting the best sounding drums that Toontrack can provide. That’s commitment to its customers.

John Gruber responding to criticism about how Microsoft wasted time publishing concept videos:

Putting this “Future Visions” video in public squanders attention that Microsoft could otherwise have focused on its current and imminent new products — like Windows Phone. Take a new iPhone 4S and a Windows Phone 7.5 device back in time 20 years and they might seem equally impressive to a pair of 1991 eyes. But one of them sold more in a weekend than the other does in an entire financial quarter.

It’s hard to argue with that.

Whether you stood in early-morning lines, pre-ordered far in advance, or are still waiting for that package to arrive at your doorstep, let the editors at Macworld help you get to know Apple’s new smartphone with our free iPhone 4S Starter Guide, now available for download from the iBookstore.

Ben Brooks:

Wouldn’t it just be far more convenient if there was a global search, that when used, returned a result that said: Apocalypse Now is available on both iTunes and your Netflix account, there are also 43 results on YouTube. Perhaps it even states whether buying from iTunes would be a higher resolution or not, but let’s not get greedy here.Wouldn’t that be a far better user experience, and potentially more lucrative for Apple?

Yes, Yes, YES!

Google changed the look of Gmail this afternoon. Just log into your Gmail account and look at the bottom right corner — click the switch button and you’re done.

WSJ:

But the low-key Mr. Cook has already put his operational mark on Apple in ways that suggest the company won’t be entirely the same as under its intense and tempestuous co-founder.

Things had to change. Tim is not Steve and he won’t manage the company the same way — and he shouldn’t.

Universal Audio (UA) is proud to release UAD Software v6.1, featuring the new MXR Flanger/Doubler Plug-In, the Little Labs Voice of God (VOG) Bass Resonance Tool, plus enhancements to Pro Tools workflow and the Ampex ATR-102 Mastering Tape Recorder Plug-In.

My favorite audio company has another great round of plug-in releases. Anything from UA is worth checking out.

I will join Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and author Walter Isaacson as speakers at the 2012 Apple Investor Summit in Los Angeles, Calif. The event will be held March 15-16 2012 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Summit organizers are offering a “friends, family & followers” discount until November 4, so if you want to sign-up, you can get can a discount until Friday.

Woz will give attendees some early Apple stories and personal stories about Steve Jobs. There will be a book signing with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson and he will talk about the Jobs interview tapes.

I will be talking about the blogosphere and how it has changed the way we look at Apple and technology. There will be many other speakers too, like Horace Dediu and Jim Goldman.

Of course, there will be lots of investor talk as well. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Wow, this is incredible.

Apple said it would launch the service by the end of October. Clearly they missed that.

Marco Arment on magazines that charge for digital versions and have ads:

It’s no wonder ad-free traditional-style magazines are so difficult to fund. But that doesn’t change my dissatisfaction with flipping past ads every few pages as I’m trying to read the articles I paid $4.99 for.

The more I think about, the more I like the suggestion from Shadoe Huard that magazines should make sections available for purchase. Like Marco, I often skip through sections of magazines, but I may buy sports or music if given the opportunity.

A nice look at the built-in image editing features in iOS 5 from Dave Caolo.

It’s available from iTunes. Go get it.

AP:

The Who’s Pete Townshend on Monday branded Apple Inc.’s iTunes a “digital vampire” that profits from music without supporting the artists who create it.Townshend said that faced with the Internet’s demolition of established copyright protections, iTunes should offer some of the services to artists that record labels and music publishers used to provide.

Come on Pete. Apple is giving bands the chance to sell their music. Many of these artists wouldn’t have that chance without iTunes. Apple isn’t responsible for the demolition of copyrights, they are the company that is helping people to legally purchase music. iTunes is helping artists.

Billboard:

“Like John Lennon, the man I love deeply, Steve Jobs was a dreamer who changed the world,” Ono is expected to say during the online awards ceremony that begins Oct. 31 at 8:30 p.m. PT at www.omusicawards.com. “But of course when we lose a genius of that caliber, they are never really gone. They live on all around us, through our memories, their words, and their work. Their spirit grows in us forever to the end of the days.”

John Gruber:

Apple is only going to get serious about TV if they find a way to get past that paradigm.

Exactly. The paradigm is traditional TV as we know it. Turn on the TV and watch whatever is there. Apple feels that model is broken and until that changes, the company won’t enter the market in a big way. However, if Apple has figured out a way around that model, look out.

Mitch Kapor’s Posterous:

Being meritocratic is a really worthy aspiration, but will require active mitigation of individual and organizational bias. The operation of hidden bias in our cognitive apparatus is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience. We may think we are acting rationally and objectively, but our brains deceive us.

Lotus Development Corp. and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder Mitch Kapor is responding to a new installment of “Black in America” airing on CNN in which TechCrunch founder and high tech investor Michael Arrington is quoted as saying that he didn’t know any black entrepreneurs. Kapor posits that while overt 1950’s-era racism against blacks isn’t apparent in Silicon Valley, there does appear to be a bias in investors that makes them favor people like themselves:

If “young, white, geeky, and Stanford/Harvard/MIT dropout”, then “invest”, is a kind of mental shortcut that is anything but objective. This is mirror-tocracy not meritocracy.

Jared Newman reported on this gem for Technologizer where he shows how students were given the pros and cons of using the Internet in 1996. I love this con:

Speed — Some Internet activities can take a long time, especially when a lot of other people are using the Internet at the same time.

Elements 2.1 allows the user to sync their settings, appearance preferences and scratchpad contents between multiple devices using Apple’s new iCloud platform. Now if you set a specific theme, font style or default file extension on your iPhone, iCloud will remember that preference and copy it to your other devices as well.Elements 2.1 also adds an oft-requested feature to copy the Markdown generated HTML preview to the clipboard. If you’re a writer who uses WordPress or some other third-party CMS that Elements doesn’t yet support, this is a great way to write your article, preview it and then get the generated HTML into your CMS of choice.

Love this app. The new version requires iOS 5.

ChronoSync is the easy way to synchronize, backup, and create bootable backups. Synchronize between folders on your Mac, other Macs, PCs, external drives or anything you can mount on your Mac. Set up a Synchronizer document to schedule and automatically mount volumes so your syncs and backups are never missed. Archive your data and go back in time to restore and view older files. With ChronoSync, you can do a lot more than just copy data, you can manage data, too. Exclude files and folders, check the current sync status of files, even run trial synchronizations to see what will happen before it happens.

ChronoAgent for Mac is a utility that runs on a destination Mac and communicates directly with ChronoSync. Normally, when you connect to another Mac you mount it using file sharing. ChronoAgent bypasses file sharing, giving you full access to the destination Mac and eliminating the need to mount via AFP, SMB or other protocols. With the combination of ChronoSync and ChronoAgent, you can automatically backup a Mac when it joins on a network, maintain bootable backups over a network, encrypt data over a network, gain full root access to destination Mac, and more. ChronoAgent only communicates with ChronoSync, meaning you need to have ChronoSync 4 in order to communicate with ChronoAgent.

Neil Hughes for AppleInsider:

IT directors who spoke with Piper Jaffray indicated that within the next five years, they expect to have more tablets per student than they currently have computers. And since the iPad represents 100 percent of tablets seen in schools, Munster said the word “tablet” might as well be synonymous with “iPad.”

It’s going to be a whole new way of teaching and learning.

Some classic stuff in there.