Page 10      Diablo Blue      April, 2001

Universal design is a term that has been getting more and more use in the computer industry lately. Money, people, and resources are finding themselves assigned to "Universal Design Teams." However, unlike such terms as "vapor ware" and "synergy based designed projects," this is something that has started to change the computing experience of the average user in some real and meaningful ways..
One of the main reasons that the industry is focusing on this is Section 508. President Clinton signed this amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 into law on August 7, 1998. It mandates that federal agencies must make everything accessible, both to their internal employees and to their clients.
Last fall, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a report entitled "Falling Through The Net." It was the first comprehensive study on access to technology by Americans with disabilities. It turns out that even though more than twenty percent of the U.S. population is disabled, access to high tech tools that would be of special help -- personally and professionally -- to people with disabilities is extremely limited. Sometimes just finding technology with adaptive features is one of the biggest barriers to computer access.
Even before the report came out agencies were beginning to change the way they do business. While there is not as much money being budgeted by them to comply with Section 508 as there was for Y2K preparation, federal agencies are spending enough to get the industry thinking of ways to provide products and services that meet these requirements.

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My good friends at AMD just delivered my new super system. I am a very happy camper. This thing is fast. Just about the time my new system came, the D-Link switch that manages our home network decided to give up the ghost. Luckily it was still under warranty. I bought the D-Link because it had a built in fan and I figured that was a good thing.
Any guess as to what died? The new D-Link switch (which bears the same model number as the old one) has no fan -- an improvement??
I hooked up the new switch and immediately three of the computers on my home network could not see the network. The switch seemed to be working just fine, but no connectivity -- yet I could see two of the unconnected machines in Network Neighborhood.
I wondered if somehow in swapping out the switch I loosened some wires in the plastic connectors of the network cables. So I bought a cable tester (actually two -- one for each end of the installed cables) and my cables tested just fine. So, I decided it must be the switch. I went out and purchased a Netgear 8 port switch and two of the "missing" computers are back up on the web -- problem solved. The third, my new screamer, still is MIA. I get 2 green lights on the switch (link and 100mbps) but no connection.
Here is the imponderable -- I plugged the cable from my machine into a 10mbps hub and then plugged the hub into the switch (no cross over cables) and guess what -- my computer is up and running on the web -- working just great, but only at 10mbps. I tried a cross over cable and nothing.
So -- why does my machine work great plugged into a hub plugged into the switch but won't work plugged directly into the switch. (As my old computer had been.) Why did the D-Link switch not recognize the other 2 computers on my network?
I called Netgear's 24x7 tech support on Sunday and they suggested I call back during the week -- they can't figure it out either. Anyone out there have any ideas?