I have been working with computers since the late 70s, and that's not for boasting purposes, but to tell you where I come from. When I started, I was always told to NEVER plug/unplug the following ...
In my last column [see LJ December 2002], we covered the serial layer in the 2.5 (hopefully soon to be 2.6) kernel tree. We mentioned in passing that a USB-to-serial driver layer in the kernel helps ...