Solr serves a different purpose to SQL. It is optimised for searching using text indexing with fancy ways of matching, weighting results when finding matches. Solr is actually a separate non-SQL database that you keep in sync with your real database. I've found it fits its purpose very well, and you rarely worry about the XML as library support handles it.
SQL is great if you already know exactly what you're looking for. Solr is great if a human is performing a search.

Well they are just replacing their VM servers, the databases are possibly elsewhere on the network so the writes to the SSD in that scenario should only occur when they update a VM. (Just guessing though).
Still, I take your point of a series of SSDs used for the same purpose are more likely to fail around the same time than ye olde HDDs.

I read articles with Funny adjusted to -5. Makes slashdot slightly more useful.

I've always wondered why they're so expensive, do you have any insight to that?
Taking a completely uneducated look at some of the stuff I would have guessed 1 grand to cover parts and maybe 5 grand to cover R&D per sale, which comes in as 1/10th of what you are unfortunately being charged.
So what does it come down to?

Lack of economies of scale, parts or research cost actually being relative to the price, liability, hope from the manufacturer that they can charge it to insurance companies, or just the manufacturers taking advantage of supply and demand?

Personally I thought the story was about the amount of corruption in businesses who did their best to hide all their dodgy practises.
Granted this isn't a tick for the watchdogs but don't make it out to be about poor business being attacked by greeny loonies.

What it looks like is unfortunately amazingly boring. Most of the game is the player holding the flipper up so the ball stops, releasing, then making a good shot.
The shots take skill, and there's always the trick of using the right amount of tilt etc, but I find it near unwatchable.

That's like saying the horse with the best odds didn't finish first, do the bookies really know what they're doing? There's these things called chance and statistics. Also it's not like Brazil did badly.
A friend and I wrote our own computer based predictor for FIFA, at last count it predicted 33 out of 58 games which I would say is pretty good given that games had 3 possible outcomes in earlier rounds: win/lose/draw (and yes we predicted Brazil I'm afraid).
If anyone's interested in a shameless plug here's our version for quite a few sports for the iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/sports-predictor/id340126905?mt=8# the model of a free download that gives you samples followed by purchases turned out to be extremely unpopular, but that's another discussion.

Get faster disks till your CPU is at 100% if you want a faster build.

What do you mean? The eggs form while still in utero, but they come from the babies cells which contain both maternal & paternal genes.

Yeah, that trade agreement hurt. As I'm sure the parent poster knows, but for others: Prime minister (at the time) Howard had to get us a trade deal with the US basically to show the Australian voting public that the whole joining America on Iraq was worth it as it was an unpopular move.

The trade talks were going badly and at the last minute Howard made the executive decision to give in to a lot of US demands and take the hit. Showing the public that we had a US trade agreement seemed more important than showing the public that we had a GOOD agreement. Ahh politics.

I'm pretty sure even with an early parole this news story will be long forgotten by the time he gets out (though his criminal record wont be).

Here in Australia we get charged 110 Oz for a tier one game, which works out to be 100 US with current exchange rates.
Relative CD, DVD and game prices were set when the Oz dollar was worth about 60 US cents which was a decade ago and margins haven't been adjusted since.

You are neglecting discount rate, but if you want to do this why bother to pump it out & store it? Why not just buy an oil patch & leave it underground?

I'll tell you my theory why people don't often try to write viruses for OSX (writing viruses for money and OSX is more secure aside).

You probably will need to be running OSX to write an effective virus for OSX and obviously have quite a bit of skill with it. If that's the case then you're probably a member of the mac community, and they don't wish harm on each other.

It sounds lame I know, but fanboys stick together and OSX community is a close one.