Apple not only released a preview of its next operating system, Mac OS X Lion, to developers today, the company is also giving it to security experts for review.

“I wanted to let you know that I’ve requested that you be invited to the prerelease seed of Mac OS X Lion, and you should receive an invitation soon,” said a letter sent by Apple to an unknown number of security researchers. “As you have reported Mac OS X security issues in the past, I thought that you might be interested in taking a look at this. It contains several improvements in the area of security countermeasures.”

Dino Dai Zovi and several other researchers tweeted about being invited to try out the prerelease version of the new Mac OS. “This looks to be a step in the direction of opening up a bit and inviting more dialogue with external researchers,” Dai Zovi wrote. “I won’t be able to comment on it until its release, but hooray for free access!”

I asked Charlie Miller, another expert on Mac security, if this was the first time Apple had offered to show an OS preview to security experts, and what the significance is.

“As far as I know they have never reached out to security researchers in this way. Also, we won’t have to pay for it like everybody else,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It’s not hiring us to do pen-tests of it, but at least it’s not total isolation anymore, and at least security crosses their mind now.”

“I haven’t downloaded it yet, but if I had, I couldn’t talk about it,” he added. “Damn NDAs.”

In a product-based celebration of absent CEO Steve Jobs’ 56th birthday today, Apple fired a twin salvo, introducing its all-new MacBook Pros, and — to my mind far more interestingly — also releasing the much speculated upon Developer Preview of Mac OS X Lion.

New Macs
As expected, the new MacBook Pros implement the Apple/Intel-developed Light Peak technology, called “Thunderbolt I/O” by Apple. The Macs also feature incredibly powerful Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processors running at up to 2.7GHz and Intel HD Graphics 3000. We’re also seeing the introduction of AMD Radeon HD graphics processors with up to 1GB of video memory in the more powerful MacBook Pro models. These machines are fast.

“The new MacBook Pro brings next generation dual and quad Core processors, high performance graphics, Thunderbolt technology and FaceTime HD to the great design loved by our pro customers,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing in a press release.

Bolt from the blue
“Thunderbolt is a revolutionary new I/O technology that delivers an amazing 10 gigabits per second and can support every important I/O standard which is ideal for the new MacBook Pro,” Schiller also said.

Apple has now conceded that Thunderbolt was developed by Intel with “collaboration” from Apple. This will be why an Apple Mac Pro was used as a demonstration machine when Light Peak was first demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum in September, 2009.

This is an exciting technology, capable of delivering huge quantities of data to and from multiple devices at rapid speed — currently 10Gbps but set to rise tenfold within months.

Light Peak/Thunderbolt can run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable. This means you can connect multiple, different devices with a single cable, so drives, docks and displays, will cause less clutter in your digital den.

Thunderbolt supports two bi-directional channels which “delivers PCI Express directly to external high performance peripherals such as RAID arrays, and can support FireWire and USB consumer devices and Gigabit Ethernet networks via adapters.”

As previously reported, Apple has confirmed Thunderbolt supports DisplayPort and works with existing adapters for HDMI, DVI and VGA displays. The technology is being made available at no charge for implementation on systems, cables and devices.

Apple and Intel clearly have high hopes for the standard, saying they expect it to be “widely adopted as a new standard for high performance I/O”. We’ll hear more on this from Intel later on.

FaceTime any time
The new MacBook Pros also offer a FaceTime HD camera — it isn’t called an iSight any more, it is now FaceTime. Good thing: the resolution of the new cameras is triple that of the preceeding iSight cameras fielded in previous Macs. Now out of beta, FaceTime has today been made available for sale for $0.99 at the Mac App Store;

What we haven’t seen in this iteration is the introduction of built-in flash drives running the OS. I’m disappointed about this as I had hopes as explained yesterday, but it is worth noting that SSD drives remain available as a build-to-order option with capacities up to 512GB.

The roar begins
With WWDC set to take place in mid-summer Apple’s moving to accelerate development of Lion, which the company has previously promised will debut in the summer. I have been predicting a final version of the OS for September, and still consider that likely, but the introduction today of a developer preview of the OS is interesting, as it means development is on the fast track and Lion could prowl earlier.

Newly-revealed stand-out features in this build include a much-improved iPad-like Mail, a new Versions feature, a fantastic way to share files between Macs called ‘AirDrop’ and the addition of Lion Server within the OS itself. All these new features are rather splendid, AirDrop in particular is something we’ve always needed when collaborating on projects.

Versions and Resume
Versions is a new Lion feature in which the OS records a version of the document each time you open it and every hour while you’re working on it. Like Time Machine for projects, you can cascade back to a previous version of your project, copy and paste from previous versions or replace current versions with a previous version. This is rather cool, though the disk space miser in me does hope it works in conjunction with a remote drive, such as a Time Machine, external drive or, dare I say it, MobileMe.

Resume is an associated feature. Just as with an iOS App, when you open your Mac Apps in future they will restart exactly where you left them, project windows and all. I’m quietly thrilled also at Auto Save, which automatically saves your documents as you work. I’m not good at saving. I will have a happier existence as a result of this feature.

Auto Save boasts a lock feature which prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. A Revert control lets you return the document to the state it was in when you last opened it, so you can make non-destructive changes on projects if you wish.

FileVault
I’ve hoped before for a way to find a Mac if it happens to be stolen. Apple isn’t promising this, but has introduced a new version of FileVault — and what a good version this promises to be. As predicted, FileVault “provides high performance full disk encryption for local and external drives”. Even more interesting is it offers the ability to wipe data from your Mac instantaneously. Will this become a remote feature?

Mail
I’ve preferred to access Mail on my iPad since I first took to the tablet. In Lion, Apple is introducing a new version of Mail which acts like it does on iPad. There’s new tools and the capacity to run Mail in full-screen mode. Those of us handling huge quantities of Mail will also benefit from the introduction of much-improved search facilities. There’s also support for new ‘Conversations’ mode, which groups messages from the same conversation, even if the subject changes mid-chat.

AirDrop
So useful you wonder why a seamless and simple way of doing file exchange between PCs hasn’t existed since the dawn of digital time (well, you could argue it has, but AirDrop is better). What it does: you can send anyone near you files over Wi-Fi. Everyone needs to be on the same wireless network and must also be running AirDrop on their computer. This makes me wonder two things: 1/ Will AirDrop be made available as a Mac App for Macs not running Lion? and 2/ Will AirDrop be made available as a utility for other platforms? This would be exceedingly useful for non-heterogeneous mixed platform computer work groups.

Apple says AirDrop works like this: “AirDrop doesn’t require setup or special settings. Just click the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, and your Mac automatically discovers other people nearby who are using AirDrop. You’ll even see contact photos for those who are already in your Address Book. To share a file, simply drag it to someone’s name. Once accepted, the file transfers directly to the person’s Downloads folder. When you’re done with AirDrop, close the Finder and your Mac is no longer visible to others.”

Server, server, burning bright, in the Lion of the night
Forgive the doggerel. Lion isn’t just Lion, it is also Lion Server. This will be integrated inside the standard operating system and will be free should you wish to enable it. This will be very cool — you’ll be able to easily set up your own Mac as a server and “take advantage of the many services Lion Server has to offer”.

Oh and these services — support for named users and groups, push notifications, file sharing, mail, contacts, chat, Wiki Services. Will your Mac become a server proffering you up access to all the data you need via any device you care to authorize for access to the machine? The new server adds support for managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices. I can imagine your home iMac becoming Mission Control for your entire family’s digital life. I suspect Apple can too:

“Lion Server delivers wireless file sharing for iPad. Enabling WebDAV in Lion Server gives iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share documents on the server from applications such as Keynote, Numbers, and Pages.”

I know I keep repeating myself in my insistence that part of the future of the OS includes an access anywhere model for your data. I think the introduction of Lion Server within Lion OS suggests another approach to this.

[UPDATE: Below video was removed, allegedly because someone, presumably Apple, complained over copyright. I won't dwell on what a petty and prissy move arranging for its removal was, but here's the link to the page where you'll find something, near the section marked 'Gestures and Animations']

Taking a look over at Apple’s developer site reveals some additional new interface features within the OS: Popovers, Overlay Scrollbar and Multi-Touch Gestures and Animations. Lion will use those discreet scroll bars you get on iOS, bars which appear only when used as an overlay on top of a windows content. You also get Popovers within the UI (image below). The AV Foundation framework provides essential services for working with time-based audiovisual media.

Sandboxing and Privilege Separation are new inherent Lion features which should boost security for users. Apple explains it thus:

“Limiting the capabilities of an app to just those operations that it needs to perform helps keep the rest of the system more secure in the event that an App is compromised. Privilege separation is another common technique for improving security where an App is factored into smaller pieces, each with their own distinct roles and privileges.”

[This story is from Computerworld's Apple Holic blog. Follow on Twitter or subscribe via RSS to make sure you don't miss a beat.]

Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia and communications technologies company, is enabling mobile and embedded graphics performance to reach new levels with high performance single and multiprocessor POWERVR SGX solutions now appearing in the latest generation of SoCs. Next-generation POWERVR technology, codenamed ‘Rogue’, is in advanced development and is already licensed by multiple tier one lead partners.

Imagination CEO Hossein Yassaie says: “Having evaluated the options the overall mobile and embedded market is increasingly committing to POWERVR as the de facto graphics standard, a fact reflected by the growing commitment of the primary players to our roadmap. POWERVR has established itself across smartphones, tablets, mobile computing and games consoles, attracting an extensive community of POWERVR developers and powering iconic and much-loved products.”

POWERVR delivers not only a clear technology advantage and exceptional roadmap, driven by one of the largest teams of graphics engineers in the world, but also an extensive ecosystem of third party developers which has created hundreds of thousands of apps optimised for POWERVR enabled devices to date.

Chips based on Imagination’s POWERVR Series5XT MP (multi-processor) graphics cores will be demonstrated at MWC 2011 by Renesas and have been announced by Sony as part of the forthcoming NGP handheld games console and Texas Instruments as part of the recently announced OMAP5 family of devices.

Says Jon Peddie, Jon Peddie Research: “Imagination is at the top of their game. The company has been expanding through acquisitions, capturing new customers, and developing new technology. And significantly, what is good for Imagination is good for the industry as a whole, pushing devices to new levels of graphics and multimedia capability and allowing applications, tools and cross-platform consistency to thrive and innovate.”

POWERVR Series5XT arrives in products

More than 10 SoCs utilizing Imagination’s latest multi-processor POWERVR SGX MP cores are currently in design or in silicon.

Texas Instruments’ OMAP5430 and OMAP5432 use multi-core POWERVR SGX544MP graphics accelerators to drive 3D gaming and 3D user interfaces.

Renesas SH-Mobile APE5R features Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR SGX543MP graphics.

Sony Computer Entertainment’s next generation portable entertainment system (codename: NGP) features SGX543MP4 graphics acceleration.

Clock for clock POWERVRVR SGX, which has been shipping in significant volume for several years, outperforms competitive solutions, many of which have yet to ship in any volume. SGX MP opens up a wider performance gap reinforcing POWERVR as the market leader for performance per mm2 and performance per mW.

Imagination’s unique and extensively patented Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) architecture for graphics, together with use of advanced architectural techniques such as hardware multi-threading and substantial investment in production-ready drivers across all mobile and embedded operating systems has resulted in Imagination leading the market for performance per mm2 and performance per mW for all of its on-chip multimedia and communications solutions.

Next-generation in advanced development

Imagination’s next generation POWERVR Series6 architecture, codenamed ‘Rogue’, has now being licensed by multiple lead partners. ‘Rogue’ delivers unrivalled GFLOPS per mm2 and per mW for all APIs.

ST-Ericsson has announced that its new Nova application processors will include Imagination’s next-generation POWERVR Series6 ‘Rogue’ architecture.

Series6 GPUs will be fully compatible with Series5 and Series5XT GPUs, ensuring a smooth migration path for developers upgrading applications optimized for Series5 to the new architecture.

POWERVR Series5XT GPU IP cores are available for licensing for all partners now; POWERVR Series6 is being licensed to lead partners at this time.

Multiple other strategic partners have also licensed POWERVR Series5XT and Series6 cores and will be disclosed when they are ready to do so.

Contacts:                                                                           For Release: February 15, 2011

Evgenii Levin, Associate Scientist, Ames Laboratory, 515-294-0105

Rama Venkatasubramanian, RTI International, 919-541-6889

Steve Karsjen, Public Affairs, 515-294-5643

Automobiles, military vehicles, even large-scale power generating facilities may someday operate far more efficiently thanks to a new alloy developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. A team of researchers at the Lab that is jointly funded by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, achieved a 25 percent improvement in the ability of a key material to convert heat into electrical energy.

“What happened here has not happened anywhere else,” said Evgenii Levin, associate scientist at Ames Laboratory and co-principal investigator on the effort, speaking of the significant boost in efficiency documented by the research.  Along with Levin, the Ames Lab-based team included: Bruce Cook, scientist and co-principal investigator; Joel Harringa, assistant scientist II; Sergey Bud’ko, scientist; and Klaus Schmidt-Rohr, faculty scientist. Also taking part in the research was Rama Venkatasubramanian, who is director of the Center for Solid State Energetics at RTI International, located in North Carolina.

So-called thermoelectric materials that convert heat into electricity have been known since the early 1800s. One well-established group of thermoelectric materials is composed of tellurium, antimony, germanium and silver, and thus is known by the acronym “TAGS.” Thermoelectricity is based on the movement of charge carriers from their heated side to their cooler side, just as electrons travel along a wire.

The process, known as the Seebeck effect, was discovered in 1821 by Thomas Johann Seebeck, a physicist who lived in what is now Estonia. A related phenomenon observed in all thermoelectric materials is known as the Peltier effect, named after French physicist Jean-Charles Peltier, who discovered it in 1834. The Peltier effect can be utilized for solid-state heating or cooling with no moving parts.

Thermoelectric materials and technology have powered spacecraft for decades. But, thanks to advances in efficiency discovered at Ames Laboratory, thermoelectric materials may have new, broader “green” energy applications.

In the nearly two centuries since the discovery of the Seebeck and Peltier effects, practical applications have been limited due to the low efficiency with which the materials performed either conversion. Significant work to improve that efficiency took place during the 1950s, when thermoelectric conversion was viewed as an ideal power source for deep-space probes, explained team member Cook. “Thermoelectric conversion was successfully used to power the Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, Cassini, and Viking spacecrafts,” he said.

Despite its use by NASA, the low efficiency of thermoelectric conversion still kept it from being harnessed for more down-to-earth applications – even as research around the world continued in earnest. “Occasionally, you would hear about a large increase in efficiency,” Levin explained. But the claims did not hold up to closer scrutiny.

All that changed in 2010, when the Ames Laboratory researchers found that adding just one percent of the rare-earth elements cerium or ytterbium to a TAGS material was sufficient to boost its performance.

The results of the group’s work appeared in the article, “Analysis of Ce- and Yb-Doped TAGS-85 Materials with Enhanced Thermoelectric Figure of Merit,” published online in November 2010 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials (see below).

The team has yet to understand exactly why such a small compositional change in the material is able to profoundly affect its properties. However, they theorize that doping the TAGS material with either of the two rare-earth elements could affect several possible mechanisms that influence thermoelectric properties.

Team member Schmidt-Rohr studied the materials using Ames Laboratory’s solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy instruments.  This enabled the researchers to verify that the one percent doping of cerium or ytterbium affected the structure of the thermoelectric material.  In order to understand effect of magnetism of rare earths, team member Bud’ko studied magnetic properties of the materials.  “Rare-earth elements modified the lattice,” said Levin, referring to the crystal structure of the thermoelectric materials.

The group plans to test the material in order to better understand why the pronounced change took place and, hopefully, to boost its performance further.

The durable and relatively easy-to-produce material has innumerable applications, including recycling waste heat from industrial refineries or using auto exhaust heat to help recharge the battery in an electric car. “It’s a very amazing area,” Levin said, particularly since many years of prior research into TAGS materials enables researchers to understand their nature.  Better understanding of the thermoelectric and their improvement can immediately result in applications at larger scale than now.

Additionally, the Ames Laboratory results – dependent as they were on doping TAGS with small amounts of cerium or ytterbium – provide yet more evidence of rare-earth elements’ strategic importance. Cerium or ytterbium are members of a group of 15 lanthanides,  deemed essential to just about every new technology from consumer electronics and cell phones to hybrid car batteries and generator motors in wind turbines. The Ames Laboratory has been a leader in rare-earth research going back to the closing days of World War II. Fears of shortages of rare-earth elements have caused these little-known materials to be a much-talked-about subject in the news lately.

For more information, see: E.M. Levin, B.A. Cook, J.L. Harringa, S. L. Bud’ko, R. Venkatasubramanian, K. Schmidt-Rohr, “Analysis of Ce- and Yb-Doped TAGS-85 Materials with Enhanced Thermoelectric Figure of Merit,” Advanced Functional Materials, 2010, in press. DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201001307; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201001307/abstract

Partial funding for this research was provided by the DARPA/DSO Program, along with the DOE Office of Science.

Ames Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research facility operated by Iowa State University.  The Ames Laboratory creates innovative materials, technologies and energy solutions.  We use our expertise, unique capabilities and interdisciplinary collaborations to solve global challenges.

At a site in Plano, Texas, roughly 20 miles from its corporate headquarters in Dallas, AT&T (NYSE:T) today will formally open an innovation center, the first of three such facilities planned by the operator. And AT&T is not alone: Operators across the country have been opening the gleaming, multimillion-dollar facilities in partnership with vendors and other third parties at a rapid clip during the past year. The goal of of these centers is to foster never-before-seen products and services.

Innovation centers serve to showcase the promise of developing ecosystems such as machine-to-machine communications and LTE networks. Additionally, the centers give equipment vendors like Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) and Nokia Siemens Networks the ability to demonstrate to carriers that they are willing and able to be strategic partners and not just companies that sell hardware.

And yet even proponents of the centers agree: These innovation centers likely won’t produce many mass-market products, and that in order to be truly successful they must be partnered with open developer initiatives.

“It is a more agile way of adapting to a quickly developing marketplace, so that you can do things in a sandbox, you can leverage the community of resources that are all trying to do things in collaboration,” said Jason Collins, vice president of innovation of prototyping at Alcatel-Lucent.

Centers of experimentation

“The carriers themselves are putting an emphasis on trying to pull together standardized ecosystems in order to create greater efficiencies in how they deliver these services,” said Phil Marshall, an analyst at Tolaga Research.

No two innovation centers are exactly alike, and, indeed, AT&T, Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) and Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) are all taking different approaches to how they operate their respective centers. The carriers also are setting up multiple facilities for different purposes. (T-Mobile USA declined to comment on its plans for an innovation center.)

But the common theme is a desire by carriers and their vendor partners to push the envelope on new mobile ecosystems like LTE and M2M, and engage with application developers and other players on new products, services, and, ultimately, business models.

“There are so many new applications and systems that are being developed by people across the board,” said Keith Shank, Ericsson’s director of advanced technology labs. “We are looking for what is the best technology, the best products that we can bring into a mobile environment that people want to use.”

Take an innovation center tour

AT&T

Sprint

Verizon

Sharing the benefits

Both vendors and carriers said that the centers offer an opportunity to build closer bonds.

“It gives us the opportunity to really work on opportunities that are relevant for the customer because you’re both directly engaged and have a faster time to market for those applications,” said David Lewis, the senior marketing manager for Nokia Siemens in North America.

“They’re under such huge amounts of pressure to deliver,” he added, referring to carriers. “I think this is just one of the avenues open to them to be able to deliver the applications that consumer want.”

Nokia Siemens has two innovation centers of its own, including a Smart Lab to test new products and applications and a Next Generation LTE Lab, both of which are in Irving, Texas.

There are benefits for vendors as well. “It gives them a forum and place to kind of expose their emerging technologies,” said  Peter Hill, AT&T’s vice president of ecosystems and innovation.  Vendors are constantly searching the market for new products and solutions, he said, and working with AT&T allows them to introduce those ideas efficiently and in a collaborative way.

Peter Jarich, an analyst with Current Analysis, said that when vendors work with carriers at these centers, it allows them to get closer to the operators on a more strategic level. “It allows them to say, ‘I’m responsive to their needs. I’m not just going to come in and sell you products, I’m going to come and help you with innovation.’”

The nature of innovation

Still, it remains to be seen whether these centers are mere showcases or actual places of innovation.

“I can certainly understand what they’re trying to do,” Tolaga Research’s Marshall said. “The problem that you have when you institutionalize innovation, across multiple companies with different agendas, different timelines and challenges in the market around them, the solutions tend to become suboptimum.”

Marshall said that instead of focusing on the “least common denominator” solutions that localize innovation, carriers should focus on fostering developer communities akin to smartphone OS communities.

And carriers and vendors agree the centers are not the only answer. “I think the innovation center by itself is subject to that criticism if you don’t couple it with a strategy of a more open developer community on top of a service provider as a platform idea,” Alcatel-Lucent’s Collins said. Indeed, Verizon has its Open Development Initiative for LTE and Sprint has an Open Device Initiative.

All of the parties said they expect the innovation centers to become more import in the years ahead. “With any new technology that you have and any new capability, these centers become very important,” said Brian Higgins, Verizon’s executive director for ecosystem development. “And I think these kinds of centers will evolve, like anything else, as new capabilities become available.”

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.