This two-part video essay on Nortel. The videos are interesting primarily as a source on the build up and eventual crash and long burn of Nortel as a company but also as not-insignificant commentary on Canadian-American relations and the northern nation’s sentiments of inferiority. I’ll highlight some points of interest:
- In 2000, one Nortel manager was poached by an American company per week, on average.
- In October 1998, Nortel’s share of the TSE 300 was under 5%. By Summer 2000, it grew its share of the TSE 300 to 38%.
- When renovating Nortel’s main Ottowa campus for the Canadian Department of National Defence, electronic eavesdropping devices were found throughout the building, and no origin was found!
- Nortel filed for bankruptcy on January 14, 2009, the final settlement was completed via joint US and Canadian courts was approved January 24, 2017, making it the sixth-longest bankruptcy in US history with about $2 billion (2017 dollars, approximately $2.5 billion in 2023 [time of writing] dollars) in legal fees.
- In 2008, the US declined to pursue a criminal case against Nortel. Canadian courts went ahead bnut ultimately decided they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt any fraud had actually occurred.
Porsche
In Porsche: The Hedge Fund that Also Made Cars, we see another instance of how a particular contract specification and set of circumstances can lead to funky behaviors. In 2008, Porsche generated $13.5 billion pre-tax profit. $136k per car sold (98,652 cars). However, $11.5 billion of that was from buying calls on Volkswagen. Wendelin Wiedeking was CEO at the time. When he became CEO in 1993, he negotiated that he would be paid 1% of the company’s profits as bonus if they made a profit. When he did this, Porsche was losing $150MM a year.
Apex
What Makes Apex Tick: A Developer Deep Dive into Servers and Netcode goes into the main networking intricacies of a relatively large multiplayer first person shooter. They have a server tickrate of 20Hz. That means at the end of every tick, the server saves the full world state and replicates it to all clients. This is a tricky number to compare between games because many don’t compute the full world state each tick. The 20Hz rate means Apex consumes roughly 60kB/s at the beginning of the game. Keeping bandiwdth low is very important for games because jitters and variable speed are much more important. Increasing the tickrate to 60hz only gives about 2 frames of response time of improvement, which isn’t much for how much more processing it takes, so they elect not to try to increase tickrate. Apex intentionally writes their game state conflicts to resolve in certain ways such that low and high ping can benefit from certain interactions in symmetric ways (let’s give LOW 50ms ping and HIGH 300ms ping):
- if LOW and HIGH shoot at each other at the same real-world time, LOW’s shots arrive at the server first, so LOW has advantage
- if they suddenly become visible to each other via e.g. turning a corner, LOW will see HIGH first, so LOW has advantage
- if LOW goes behind a corner while getting shot by HIGH, HIGH’s shots can still land on LOW before he goes into cover (to LOW, this looks like getting shot behind cover), so HIGH has advantage