Today marks the tenth anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and many people who have followed the rise of the RHEL platform may be surprised that it is so young. Released while the burning embers of the dot-com boom were still smoldering, it–along with Red Hat’s comprehensive support for an open source platform–appealed to many businesses who wanted a low-cost way to facilitate useful workplace applications without massive IT headaches. And, as Red Hat itself notes, RHEL has also found a home in government installations.

According to a tenth anniversary statement from Red Hat:

"In 2003, the U.S. Army commissioned a study on ‘The Business Case for Open Source Software’ and the then DOD CIO John Stenbit released the first DOD-wide guidance on open source software, which implicitly permitted its acquisition, development, and use. Nine months later, in July of 2004, the Office of Management and Budget issued a similar memo that covered the government as a whole."

"At the same time, Red Hat released the first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. The Army deployed Red Hat’s operating system in its Blue Force Tracker system, which lived in jeeps and tanks on the battlefield. Major General Nicholas Justice, the man responsible for Blue Force Tracker, said later: “When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source.”

The Register also has an interesting summary of RHEL’s earliest days attempting to gain traction with businesses:

"RHEL emerged from the craze for Linux company IPOs that went hand-in-hand with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Red Hat went public in August 1999 and Linux was on fire with Red Hat, as the first big Linux distro offering commercial support, the hottest. Red Hat had lined up partnerships with Compaq, IBM, Oracle, Computer Associates, and others in the systems racket after Linux was enthusiastically embraced years earlier by academics and the supercomputing labs."

To this day, a big part of Red Hat’s strategy remains renewing support subscriptions from its most loyal users, and banking on positive word of mouth generated by these loyal users. The company’s model of providing top-notch support for open source software is being copied by many commercial open source companies.

At this point, Red Hat is the only public, U.S company focused exclusively on open source, now that Sun Microsystems and Novell are no longer independent entities. Both Novell and Sun had lots of capital expenditures and operating expenses over time, and lots of fat of other kinds built into their business models. Red Hat’s lesson is that a company can run lean simply supporting open source software and still fare well over the long run.

We have already told you about Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop, which the company claims is the world’s lightest 14-inch ultrabook, but the X1 is just one of many new Ivy Bridge-powered ThinkPad models. Hit the jump for a quick rundown of these new business-friendly mobile PCs from Lenovo.

The new ThinkPads include everything from run-of-the-mill laptops to convertibles and span the T, X, L and W lines:

ThinkPad L Family: The updated L series comprises the L430 and the 15-inch L530, both of which will be available next month starting at $879. Both these no-frills ThinkPads sport identical 1366 x 768 displays, USB 3.0, mini-DisplayPort and discrete graphics. Lenovo is claiming a maximum battery life of 9.5 hours.

ThinkPad T Family: Last year’s T420, T420s and T520 make way for the T430, T430s and T530, respectively. The new T series, which comes with the promise of up to 30 hours of battery life, starts at $879 with the 14-inch T430, a laptop that’s said to be appreciably lighter than its predecessor. Next up is the T430s with a starting price of $1,399. The T430s boasts a mini-Display Port, 1600 x 900 display option, Thunderbolt (Core i7 variants only) and Lenovo’s RapidCharge technology. These two models are expected to go on sale next month. However, not a lot is known about the T530 at this stage.

ThinkPad W530: The W530 mobile workstation is not only the most powerful of the lot, it’s also the heaviest at a shade under 6 pounds. The W530 starts at $1,529 and packs a quad-core Intel Ivy Bridge processor, up to 32GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive, Nvidia Quadro graphics and a backlit keyboard.

ThinkPad X Family: The outgoing X220 and X220T have been replaced by the X230 and X230T (convertible), respectively. The two tip the scales at less than 3 pounds and feature 12.5-inch IPS displays, built-in 4G connectivity, mini-DisplayPort, SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, face tracking and Dolby Advanced Audio. Scheduled to begin shipping in June, the X230 and X230T will start at $1,179 and $1,479, respectively.

Yesterday we published a news story on Scott Thompson, who left Yahoo as CEO. Further news on the story today indicate that Thompson did not step down, but was in fact fired from his position on Sunday. It has been revealed that he falsely claimed he earned a computer science degree.

Thompson was earning a salary of $1 million a year. and Yahoo will not be paying him severance pay for the 5 months he was in charge of the company. Yahoo employ 12,000 people. He will however receive cash and stock to compensate him for money he gave up when he left eBay. He was in charge of the Paypal division. Those award are said to be worth $6.5 million according to the Wall Street Journal.

Scott Thompson – ex CEO of Yahoo

Yahoo have declined to make any comment on Thompson and the public issues surrounding his departure.

Ross Levinsohn has taken over as CEO on an interim basis, but he is apparently interested in the job, full time. Yahoo are facing tough times ahead, with competition from Google and Facebook hitting their core business hard. They have recently made 2,000 people redundant.

There are very few laptops as appealing as the Thinkpad, and Lenovo have updated the X1 model with carbon fibre materials. We reviewed the X1 on Kitguru last September.

Lenovo have increased the screen size from 13 inch to 14 inch but the weight is down, thanks to the use of a carbon fibre rollcage. The new carbon fibre ThinkPad X1 is also the lightest 14 inch business class ultrabook available, say the company.

Lenovo are shipping the Carbon X1 with a 1600×900 resolution screen, a 720p HD camera which has face tracking capabilities and a backlit keyboard. It has built in 3G connectivity as well for business users. The machines will feature Intel third generation Ivy Bridge processors.

Lenovo claim that the new version of the X1 will feature the same ‘Rapid Charge’ feature, which means that the battery will recover from dead to 80% in only 30 minutes.

Pricing has not yet been confirmed but we expect it to be around the same price as the original, which means it should be an excellent purchase.

You can measure how well a market is doing in a number of different ways. IDC takes the ‘macro’ view – researching hard to work out what the long term patterns look like. At the other end of the scale, IC Insights watch the the fabrication plants (FABs) and they know who has bought which chips. Cross-referencing these stories brings a new kind of accuracy. Tecnobitsholds one set of data in its left hand and another in its right – while wearing a ‘slightly pervy blind fold of justice’. Which one’s heavier?

While Qualcomm has managed a massive increase in semi-conductor sales, those chips are mostly helping to fuel the mobile market. Specifically, the arrival of multi-core Snapdragon designs are being, er, snapped up by phone manufacturers – eager for an alternative to the Samsung produced chips powering Apple’s rise. Ironically, some of Samsung’s own anti-Apple designs also use Qualcomm. Nice.

Off the back of Qualcomm’s new launches, analysts are predicting that Qualcomm’s shares will bounce up by a least 10% in value. That will make them very attractive, given that banks themselves are in the ‘suffering huge loses business’ right now with the collapse of the Greek economy.

While Samsung’s dominance in the phone market is not as strong as Intel’s is in the PC business – the Korean giant still commands around 60% of the multi-core mobile market.

Which brings us back to the title of this article, which is based on the latest info from market gurus IC Insights.

If we add together the chip shipments for Intel, nVidia and AMD – comparing Q1 2011 to Q1 2012 – then we see an overall increase of just 0.18%

That’s as close to zero as makes no difference.

The wonderfully flexible April demonstrates the kind of growth curve we'd like to see from AMD, Intel and nVidia – but it looks like there won't be enough stimulation in the market until next year – according to IDC

Tecnobitssays: While the phone market is booming now and the PC chip business is flat – IDC is predicting a big jump next year. The entire industry is hoping that IDC is right about growth patterns for 2013/14. This industry needs some good news.

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.