Soo...you like dinosaur comics yes?

This might be offtopic, but while we're on the topic here, does anyone know of any *afforable* FPGA kits for students?

Our university used the Altera DE2 boards, found here http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/DE2/

I really liked the DE2 because it has a whole lot of peripherals and can be used with Quartus II. I wanted to get one so I could tinker with it in my own time for fun.

Any recommendations for one less than $500~ ?

We were introduced to VHDL in our University's Digital Circuits course.

Most of the above commenter's have mentioned that Verilog is C like, I personally have never used or programmed in Verilog so I can't comment on that.

I did however like VHDL very much, particularly because it was *different* from C, I'm kinda growing tired of C like languages and VHDL was a breath of fresh air. It made FPGA's and the entire course in general a whole lot of fun.

It's strong typed nature was a bit cumbersome at first especially with converting std_logic to std_logic vectors and such because we weren't really shown how to do this or given a syntax/library reference like MSDN or Java's Documentation site.

So I'd say make a good introduction to Entities, Ports and Architectures, explain Process, Signal and Constant statements very well, also particularly highlight the strong typed nature of VHDL.

I think most of your students (such as myself) will not have done any programming in a true strongly typed language before, so this will be bit of a shock, and getting those conversions will be frustrating. (I have been there, Googling really does not help all that much)

I hope your students get as much fun out of that course as I did.

Cheers,
filereaper.

Relating to this, India's going through elections and E-Voting is being used there. We've used a different approach alltogether towards this problem and thought readers might like to read if they're interested. :)

Here's the main article covering the devices used:

http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html

Here's the /. article covering that:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/14/1448230&art_pos=5

I for one am constantly launching links in new windows from Firefox's retarded right click menu, it's actually really noticeable when I use Google Chrome...I have to force myself to choose the first menu option when I right click a link.

Hey Mozilla, forget Javascript performance, how about more simple things like making a decent right click menu?