Impressive battery life of 2007 Nov. version of MacBook

Sometimes it is relaxing to go back to non-technical subject.
I have used the base model of MacBook for a few months. Usually I don’t believe manufacturer’s claim on battery life. If they say that it lasts for 4 hours, the new battery will last about 2 hour and 30 minutes usually, and more realistically 2 hours. If you use that kind of notebook computer for about 1 year, it will be stabilized around 1 hour and 30 minutes.

However, somehow the MacBook has different story.
I charged my machine last sunday, and I turned it on today.
The remained battery level is as follows :

The natural discharging quality is very good. And it actually last more than 4 hours in actual use.

Is the battery really different from those used in Windows notebooks? Or is the Mac OS X power manager is really good?

QueryPerformanceCounter() equivalent on Mac OS X

Timer is quite an issue to some people who need to process image in realtime or who want to measure very fast code.

Because the QueryPerformanceCounter() and QueryPerformanceFrequency() are discussed in my previous post, one will raise a question, “Is there a similar function for the Mac OS X?”.

Yeah.. Actually, my blog stat showed that a few people searched with that term.

I found some functions like mach_absolute_time() and mach_timebase_info().

You can read very nice explanation here at the MacResearch and here at the Apple’s Q&A page.