Pretty much for my entire career in Linux USB (eight years now?), we’ve been complaining about how USB device power management just sucks. We enable auto-suspend for a USB device driver, and find dozens of different USB devices that simply disconnect from the bus when auto-suspend is enabled.
For years, we’ve blamed those devices for being cheap, crappy, and broken. We talked about blacklists in the kernel, and ripped those out when they got too big. We’ve talked about whitelists in userspace, but not many distros have time to cultivate such lists.
See Sarah Sharp’s full Google+ post or read about the resulting patch on the Linux-USB mailing list post.
In a milestone for Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile phone platform, the ZTE Open Firefox OS phone recently 
Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier was a regular name in Linux not so long ago. He first appeared on my radar writing for the different websites I visited. It seemed like he wrote for them all, even the ones I eventually began writing for myself. Later, he really solidified his hero status in my book by actually becoming a full-time Novell employee as community manager for openSUSE. But now, after a bit of a sabbatical, he’s traded in all his green t-shirts for red hats.