Cover Story
Plug-and Play	Some say, a year after Windows 95 ships, PC users won't recall the agony of configuring I/O-board jumpers or DIP switches. Maybe. But before "plug and pray" yields to plug-and-play, vendors must begin to cooperate, and users must forsake 150 million legacy boards as well as the software that runs them. -- Dan Strassberg, Senior Technical Editor
Design Features The hottest new technologies and the latest design techniques to help you work efficiently and effectively.
Smart- battery technology: power management's missing link	You no longer need to view a battery as a power-generating element whose characteristics are beyond your knowledge and control. The technology now exists to provide batteries with varying degrees of smarts, forming a critical link between the battery and host equipment. -- Anne Watson Swager, Technical Editor
Mezzanine buses bring backplane benefits to the board level	Mezzanine buses promise design flexibility and other compelling advantages for backplane-bus board designs. A profusion of competing alternatives, however, has diluted the buses' value. -- Richard A Quinnell, Technical Editor
Quaternions quickly transform coordinates without error buildup	If you have data gathered in one coordinate system and want to express them in terms of a different coordinate system, you probably would use a translation vector and a rotation matrix. You can, however, use a translation vector and a quaternion instead. -- Do-While Jones