] There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on
] the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle
] farmhouse in rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit
] design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school
] dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.

This is kind of a cool story, although I continue to be frustrated by the propagation of Richard Stallman's lie about the definition of the word hacker.

The work hacker, in computerdom, orginally (ie in the 60's) meant a poor programmer, or someone who broke into a computer. It was in the 70's that the word was applied with respect. In the 80's Stallman attempted to separate the word as it is applied with respect from the word as it is applied to people who break into computers. Its hard to apply this split consistently, (for example, which one is Woz?) because what Stallman meant to do was separate boomers and Xers. This has resulted in endless fallacies, such as people who parrot the phrase "hacker in the original meaning," the concept of "white hat and black hat hackers," etc... More infuriating to me is "The Hackers Conference," at which self proclaimed "good hackers" have created a closed and reculsive culture that serves no one but themselves, while so called "bad hackers" have create a wide open culture that is vibrant and reaches out to anyone who has an interest in the subject matter...

Stallman's damage to the word must be repaired.

The New York Times - A Toy With a Story