Yup if you shelled out for a Socket 1366 (high end i7), you're going to be sticking with Nehalem until Socket R comes out down the line.
If you went with 1156, which I did (P55 Classified + i7 860 @ 4.0 Ghz), then you're screwed, just earlier, since it's now Socket 1155, which isn't compatible even though it's just a 1 pin difference.
I wasn't very happy with Intel when I found this out, since they've recently switched sockets after holding on to 775 for so long, but from my understanding AMD has also done something with the AM-2/3 socket where some motherboards are back/forwards compatible, but others aren't. I think there is a derivative socket, Am-2/3+, that is backward compatible but the Am2-3 standard version isn't forwards compatible. Don't take my word on it though, my builds have been Intel since the Q6600 came out. AMD has done a better job of backward compatibility but the sweet spot for price/performance + overclocking has been Intel chips whenever I've done my last few builds, and I only do builds every few years, usually after new architectures are released so my motehrboards are usually replaced as well.
Anandtech covered upcoming socket changes in more detail in their writeup

Ok -- there were 2 reports -- Eckert & Mauchly put out a memo describing EDVAC that Goldstine (who coauthored the other report with von Neumann) classified. He then deemed the other report unclassified, and began distributing it to academics around the globe, which popularized the concept. EDSAC was the first completed device, led by Maurice Wilkes, due to the friction between Ecker/Mauchly and Goldstein/von Neumann delaying EDVAC.
Eckert had already designed the memory system and implemented it in his previous work before von Neumann arrived at UPenn. Von Neumann definitely deserves some credit for writing up and distributing the paper but if you read the first report he gives no indication that anyone else designed any portion of the machine, and only cites Mauchly for one idea. Von Neumann's contributions to EDVAC were primarily in the logic areas, especially the design of the instruction set, but the First Draft was at best a glaring omission of the work Ecket, Mauchly, and the many other engineers at the Moore School that built ENIAC and EDVAC.
Source: ENIAC -- The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer (which is a great book on the early years of electronic computers--basically convinced me to major in ECE)

Yup -- all the original programmers for ENIAC were women pulled up from the basement where they had previously been doing ballistics table calculations on desktop calculators.

Considering Von Neumann basically stole the idea from Eckert & Mauchley, who had already developed the stored-program architecture and implemented it with mercury delay lines for EDVAC, I would prefer not to give him credit for this and focus on his other numerous acheivements.
Von Neumann's self-appointment as a head of the EDVAC project did more to prevent EDVAC from being the first stored-program computer (instead the British completed EDSAC first) than he ever contributed to the design of any of the early electronic general purpose computers, although his First Draft did disseminate the theory behind these early machines.
If anyone should be on that list (along with Zuse), Eckert & Mauchley should be added. In addition to the first Turing-complete electronic computer, they also went on to found the first computer company and gave other pioneers, and a number of women, including Grace Hopper, the opportunity to work in the industry.

I agree on the myth of HSPICE vs Spectre -- my models were SPICE-syntax (22nm PTM BSIM4 models) so it's just a couple of syntax changes to get them into Spectre.

My results found that Spectre fit much closer to the predictions, while HPSICE's were a bit farther out on simple process characterization tests, as well as on simple designs (FO4 Inverters, etc.). Since Spectre matched the trends closer, I'd definitely have to give it the nod.

The increasing foundry support is definitely a major plus, though all the classes here are taught on Cadence's gpdk090 since it provides full models, does a lot of the calculations automatically so that nobody is forced to learn SKILL on their own to speed things up, and provides layouts for transistors and lots of extras/integration into Assura, etc.

I didn't mean to come off against Spectre -- my experiences with it have been great -- most of the negatives I heard came from some engineers on DeepChip. Personally, I was most impressed with Ultrasim -- it maintains about 98% accuracy on both power consumption and delay of full chips versus Spectre with about 10x speedup on small (~15k transistors) designs and even more significant gains on larger designs. I've tested up to ~1 million transistors with ease on Ultrasim even with large amounts of mismatch across devices.

I just spent the past summer doing research at the 22nm level (designing L1/L2 caches with DVFS and other low-power techniques) and I can't agree more on SPICE/HSPICE's inability to converge.

I shrunk my designs down to the criitical paths (~12k transistors), and even providing the proper nodesets/initial conditions HSPICE was unable to converge or segfaulted quikcly. Fortunately, my university has a deal with Cadence through their University Alliance program -- Spectre may not be quite as accurate at HSPICE for analog circuits, but both it and Ultrasim (a FASTSPICE simulator for large designs) can handle much larger digital designs without complaint.

To the original submitter: Is there a good reason behind the no network connection requirement? If the university has a proper setup, students should be fine either on or off campus -- then it may be worth checking if your university has any deals with either Cadence, Synopsys, or Magma -- their tools are primarily Unix-based (Solaris, AIX, and Linux support), so it's just a matter of having the students SSH in with X forwarding or use VNC. This would even allows users with underpowered machines to simulate large designs quickly since everything is done remotely. I primarily run Windows on my local box, but either VMs with Linux or using Putty with Xming work properly for all these tools.