How did Rick Perry become governor of Texas?

[Al B. Sure!]

Dude is stupid. And he's been governor for 11 years?

Is he just smart at playing political games?

[giblets]

He was originally elected lieutenant governor, and I'm guessing candidates for that office don't receive a whole lot of scrutiny, and then he became governor when Dubya became the president. Then he got re-elected because it's really hard for a Republican incumbent to lose in Texas.

[SlowwHand]

States' rights advocate.

[Hauldren Collider]

He was originally elected lieutenant governor, and I'm guessing candidates for that office don't receive a whole lot of scrutiny, and then he became governor when Dubya became the president. Then he got re-elected because it's really hard for a Republican incumbent to lose in Texas.

Untrue...You realize Texas had a Democratic governor before Bush was governor? Texas is only uniformly republican at the federal level, and that's even only been the case for a few decades.

[SlowwHand]

Ann Richards wasn't a few decades ago, and she was loved.

[giblets]

Untrue...You realize Texas had a Democratic governor before Bush was governor? Texas is only uniformly republican at the federal level, and that's even only been the case for a few decades.

So let's see... a Democratic governor who was elected over two decades ago when facing an opponent who wasn't an incumbent is your rebuttal when someone says "it's really hard for a Republican incumbent to lose"...?

[SlowwHand]

If Texas has voted primarily Republican, it's not like it's a sin. I wasn't trying to rebuttal anything. I was pointing out that Ann White was a very popular political figure in Texas. Just a statement of fact.

[giblets]

I was responding to HC. That's why I quoted him.

[SlowwHand]

Oh. I thought you meant I had answered him improperly. My mistake.

[Tupac Shakur]

Dude is stupid. And he's been governor for 11 years?

Texans are even dumber than Perry is.

[Hauldren Collider]

Explain Texas Instruments.

[SlowwHand]

Explain Collins Radio, founded by Art Collins, that morphed into Rockwell International. Explain why Drake's parents didn't feed him to wolves when he was a baby.

[Asher]

Explain Texas Instruments.

Texas Instruments could've been so much bigger and better than it was. It sucked from the public teat for defense contracts for far too long, and more recently they've just been aping Qualcomm.

[Asher]

As a complete sidenote, TI is the most unprofessional company I've ever dealt with.

We ship some of their ****-tastic calculator software with our products to schools. We have a legal obligation to work with it in several ways. Without telling us, they pushed software update out to schools which renamed the executable and broke the interface. So we started getting support calls. So we contacted TI to try to find out which of their many calculator binaries they renamed, and when. And if they plan to rename others going forward. We ended up emailing four or five times to various contacts we've had, and didn't receive a single reply. Not one.

We ended up shipping an update that ripped out support for TI calculators from the software. Then TI's legal department contacted our legal department threatening action for breach of contract. When we showed the unanswered communications and genuine effort on our part to fix the problem, their lawyers agreed the contract was not being held on good faith on their part and dropped the threat, nullifying the contract.

Just a bunch of douchebags. Not surprisingly, the asses we talked to were based in the Dallas office.

[Asher]

Do you guys know about how TI ****ed up a chance of owning the PC industry?

Their first PC product shipped with a calculator style keyboard. It also was modular computer which enabled expansion (great idea!). The geniuses made it so each add-on is a physical module that plugs into the left of the computer, so you could daisy-chain them. A fully functional PC was about a meter wide. Apparently this did not fit on many desks properly? Huh.

Oh, and they didn't seem to think the concept of software was important. They didn't license or try to get any popular software to run on it. And when others tried to make software for it, they threatened legal action and even put in digital "locks". How dare you make the product useful!

Pretty alarmingly stupid product decisions screwed them completely out of what obviously became a very lucrative market.

And don't they still make cutting-edge calculators based on the Zilog Z80?

Their most relevant products these days are in areas with little appreciable competition (back-end telecoms) or rebundling other people's IP for use in consumer electronics (the OMAP processors).