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you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.

I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.

OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ for good starter boards.
If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm

If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm

You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/
http://celoxica.com/

(some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)

FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...

With you all the way there :-)
Still this isn't my favorite way to do parallel processing - something like the approach
http://www.celoxica.com/
use (with FPGAs and C-like parallel languages) is my favorite, but still not mature and going no-where near the desktop yet. Although one group has got linux synthesised into hardware which you have to admit is cool :-)

Seems like we have the worst of all worlds at the moment, if we could just get a hardware platform that was easy for the compler to map an inherantly parallel language onto and then re-train all the worlds programmers to use it :-)

multi-core processors may be a way to this, they may not, I'm just glad that we're finally on the route to parallelism.

This is a passion of mine so I'll try to be brief If you look up transputer you'll see the amazing stuff that was done on parallel langauges; CSP (communicating sequential processes) is old technology. OCCAM being a classic example of an inherantly parallel sequential language. As far as I can tell it never took off as they were a small british company that could never keep up with process technology and so although they had a massive advantage in terms of performance in some respects they lost out because their massivly parallel chips using the last process generation were always in $/MIPS = to your normal microprocessor that was using latest technology. And they tried to be all things to all people. some of the people who worked on this left and formed http://www.celoxica.com/ This now does a c like language that runs on FPGAs. I have seen code written in this Handel C and appart from a few par and ser statements it is c. So we could be there if we embrace it, what all the technology lacks is market and mindset penetration. But I'll stop now before I get carried away... BTW I don't work and never have worked for any of these companies, but I do design ASICs for a living so I do have an interest in seeing/getting things done better.

I have some pictures of the board on the coure web site. The bluetooth module is just above the "Rev B" sticker in the first picture.

The xilinx parts are for embedded systems, and have no real benefits for your average PC user (hence they can market them them for $$$).

Look here for genuinely cool FPGA technology. They use transputer based technology to implement parallel algorithms in, well, parallel. The demos are very impressive - real time raytracing @50MHz anyone?

is a C-based HDL. We've been reviewing it, and its pretty impressive. Not really C, but fairly similar. One of our engineers managed to port a complete GSM codec (originally in C for some 16 bit DSP) from scratch in about 3 weeks, so its easy to use. Check out their site.

If you can write in C type languages you can design on FPGAs.
A Handel-C (C with extensions for parallelism and timming models etc.) to FPGA, development environment called DK1 was released by a UK company Celoxicaearlier this year.
There's an eval download for DK1 on their site.

Celoxia also appears to be addressing the SOFTWARE issue with links to C.

Computer Savvy /.ers like yourself may wish to explore these many links

for more detailed info than the NASA Press Release (geared for the general public) allows.