I've really been wanting to get into VHDL, despite the poor quality of Xilinx's software mentioned several pages back, so I decided to try the latest version of the free Xilinx software to see if they fixed the many problems I noticed. Surely they would have, since it would be a big selling point to get students into their stuff which would subsequently move businessess toward it also, right?
Apparently not. I downloaded the latest version, and the ~5MB installer took around 6 hours to install the program. The whole time it was using practically 0% CPU, so I'm not sure what it was doing but it was progressing very slowly. After that, I went to download the tuturials and noticed there was one specifically designed for the latest free version of the software. Awesome! It must have fixed all the problems where the tutorial didn't cover steps required and did cover impossible steps.
So I thought. I load up the tutorial and start following the directions, only to find out after a few steps that I couldn't proceed because an important option on a dialog isn't actually in the program. I look around in an attempt to be able to continue, but I'm unable to find the option anywhere so I can't do the tutorial. Not only that, but really the tutorial starts with a 90% finished project so I'm not sure how much it would have helped to be able to complete it since I'm not sure I could redo the work already done in the project.

Oh well. Xilinx 0 - Extrarius 0
VHDL will have to wait another while at least
I would go with Altera, because from what I hear they actually have superior parts, but I haven't seen a board with similar functionality to the Spartan 3 Board for a similar price and I'm not willing to pay anything more because it'd just be a hobby.


After all that work for nothing, I checked my email and I noticed 1&1 finally canceled my account with them after I emailed them something like 30 times each getting the same response of "Mail or Fax us the form" even though the idea was I didn't want to spend any more money on those domains. I'm pretty sure the catalyst was that the only CC# they had expires before the next billing cycle. If they had just canceled them when I asked the first time, they would still have my business (even though I hated their control panel because it was so slow) but because of their hostility I transferred all my domains to the much more expensive but much more friendly GoDaddy.