Thanks to Joe for letting me know - Haight-Ashbury Music in Sunnyvale seems to be the latest victim of the music industry fallout, closing today. That's funny in a twisted kind of way. It was almost exactly two years ago that I shut down Sonica Music for good. You can't run a viable business when you've got no customers. It's easy to say that both of these businesses failed to compete and deserved to die; but what you're seeing isn't isolated. It's more an indictment of the industry behind it; with their arrogant licensing terms - which had as much involvement in the death of these institutions as the changing tastes of the customers. 

Lots has happened in those two years, but the guys at Sunnyvale Music World (what Haight-Ashbury used to be called) were all friends, even if we were competitors for several years. Sad to see them go. It's only a matter of time before it all hits here in Australia. You can see the local music stores slowly dying, both of them. It's the same story all over again. There's just nothing anybody can do about it. One guy who had a NSW music shop almost begged me - you ran a music store? Please buy my store from me. You know you want to. I'll give you good terms.

Funny thing though, I don't want to. Watching a music store die is not enjoyable for anybody concerned.

Coincidentally, Intel also closed down its last Silicon Valley fab plant.

Unless you've been watching closely, this announcement was easy to miss. Sun Microsystems is acquiring MySQL. This has ramifications both good and bad.

This will likely affect a huge number of people who are currently using open source web applications; a majority of which are being stored on MySQL databases. Their future viability is now questionable. It all depends on the license and revenue models Sun chooses to adopt.

I would also try to steer clear of the pending 6.0 release as it is likely to involve significant re-structuring of the code to suit Sun's business requirements. It may be a year or three before it stabilises again. Sun is legendary for introducing layers of bureaucracy into development projects.  

While Sun may make public announcements of their intent to continue to provide the product for free [and it should be noted that there was no such announcement in the press release], it is difficult to imagine the corporate bean counters not making a recommendation to derive as much revenue stream as possible from the acquisition.

You can read the announcement here. 

Also of potential interest is this (dated) history of MySQL 

Some rough weather over in California...

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Fierce winds toppled trucks on a major Bay Area bridge and knocked out power to more than 100,000 people in Sacramento as wicked winter weather moved into California on Friday.

Tsering Gyurmey snapped this image of an overturned truck on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge Friday.

Forecasters said the Pacific storms could dump more than 10 feet of snow on California mountains by Sunday.

Winds in the mountains could gust to 145 mph, forecasters said, the strength of a Category 4 hurricane. A Category 4 can inflict extreme damage.

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Yowza! 10 feet of snow! 145mph! That's a serious storm. Hope you folks make it through OK.

Let me put this into perspective. I was in 100mph winds once in Colorado. There were full trash dumpsters rolling down the street, and I could barely stand up. Walking was a process of planting one foot ahead of you, wait and regain your balance, then plant the other foot. Several folks lost the roof of their house, which just blew right off.  And what they're predicting is half again more powerful than that.