I love a good rant, especially when it’s well justified. The carriers want to rip you off. When it comes to paying for tethering on top of your data plan, Mike Elgan hits the nail on the head telling you how it is.

The price finally comes down to a somewhat reasonable level for HDMI cables and now they don’t want to sell them anymore. What about small devices that incorporate hdmi such as phones?

In udev rules, the %k, %b, %n variables are nice and all, but you can also use the variables you’re comparing and setting such as ID_FS_TYPE, KERNEL, SUBSYSTEM, PHYSDEVPATH, etc. When you run a command in a udev rule, there’s nothing stopping you from calling a shell and executing a few commands without actually calling a standalone script to do the dirty work. If you write out the array of environment variables from inside an external program, you can get a better understanding of just which part of the device discovery is matching your rule and getting processed.

Get a developer key and install Unbuntu on a usb disk so you can boot any XO from the USB disk without modifying your XO laptop. All production XO laptops have firmware security enabled when you receive them. Once unlocked, you can run any operating system you want.

The x86 platform is not optimized for real-time usage. Real-time behavior of a system depends a lot on low latency interrupt handling.