If you want to do 3D graphics,, nehe.gamedev.net is a fun place to start. I wouldn't reccomend trying to do a huge first person shooter, but you might want to do a 3D graphics demo. If you use an existing 3ds loader library, and 3DS models from somewhere like www.3dcafe.com, you can have a simple 3D first person walk around world with lighting and textures fairly easily. Things like optimisations so your world can be bigger than your RAM, shadows, collision detection, animated enemy models, AI for enemies, etc, all add difficulty in a big big way.
It all depends on how you want to learn from your game programming class. You won't learn to make Doom3. Or Empire Earth 2. You just won't.
OTOH, if what you mean is that you want to have a neat 3D demo that looks awesome, and will impress lots of people, you may want to just drop any pretense of making a game, and just do a 3D graphics study. Teachers love 3D graphics, since they generally ahve no idea what's hard, and what's easy.
I am not diagnosed autistic, but I have always had some behavioral quirks consistent with mild autism, or something similar, and frankly, I have always found the few truly autistic people I have met to be much easier to get along with than mundanes.
So, obviously, there is a very broad range of what autism is from real, diagnosed mild autism, to not-quite-but-sort-of like myself, all the way to the profound autism where people are unable to function.
There is no right answer to whether it should be cured. If somebody is completely unable to function, and to speak for himself, then his guardian should probably consider getting him available treatments. For me, personally, If somebody came to me with a pill that could make me function better in society, and understand people better, and be more normal, I wouldn't take it. I would fight kicking and screaming before anybody forced a normal-pill down my throat. I am curious about what normalcy would be like, but the fact that my brain doesn't work like anybody else that I know tends to be a valuable thing in many cases.
For the middle ground, I think it has to be up to them. Research should continue. Treatments should be available. But, normalcy should not be mandatory.
Yeah, those sick fuckers want to have a pig, which would be raised for slaughter anyway, be able to provide me with a lung transplant in case I get hit by a bus, or get cancer. That's totally sick. I can't believe they would want to do such a horrible thing. Next time some kid gets caught in the crossfire of a gang war, you and I can go to the hospital, and try and keep everybody who tries to save his life away from him. It isn't natural for him to survive, so it must be wrong.
And, guts and organs give me the heebie-jeebies. I can't stand the site of blood, so I make all my moral and ethical decisions based on what personally makes me feel the most comfortable. If I don't have to think about food-animals being able to grow vital organs for humans, then I don't have to think about yukky slimy stuff. Yeah, so it's sick and wrong.
That's why I always reccomend GIF89a, with a textual description overlayed on the actin describing what noises the viewer should make while watching it in order to get the full effect. I hardly ever get complaints from people who only have GIF 87 compatible image viewers.
Naw, I just need a good radio to drown out the sound of my VAXServer. That thing has case fans fo make any PC user run in fear. Seriously, they are like 10 inches across...:)
So, don't use the Apple QuickTime player. Quicktime is mostly a set of libraries. It just happens to come with a shitty player that you can use if you don't want to bother getting something that works better.
Just think of it as libquicktime6.so and you will be much happier.:)
Personally, my favorite player is videolan client. I don't believe it uses the QuickTime libs, because it is available for so many platforms where Quicktime is certainly not common, but it is spifftastic, and it'll play a substantial percentage of the videos I come across. (and, command-F kicks it into fullscreen playback.:)
Okay... You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Using a WMV, an AVI, or a Quicktime file is irrelevant to what the final size is. The only thing that matters is the codec, save for slight variations in header sizes. MPEG4 (Which XVID is a variant of) can be used in AVI as well as QuickTime, so why would one container format be larger than the other by any noticeable amount? If I have a MPEG4 AVI, and an Animation compressed Quicktime, then the QuickTime will almost certainly be dramatically larger.
I'll have to rewatch it. Normally, I pick enough nits to catch a lot of that stuff. I am something of a film-making buff, and I have taken a few classes.
That said, BSG is entertaining enough for my suspension of disbelief to kick in for 90% of teh episode, and I just sit and watch it.:)
Yes, that was exactly the suspicion I had in my post. But, would it actually show a 16% jump in performance. I don't think it should be that big, unless you have a pretty pathological test case. (which the poster may...) Also, I suppose his newer system is only using single channel memory, which would potentially cause some of the performance hit.
Both systems have the same amount of RAM and OS, right? and we are talking about the same version of the software?
Traditionally, this was the case, but current versions of prman do support ray tracing. Apparently, they added it around the time exluna was digging into their market share, in order to be competitive. Before that happened, you had to use BMRT as a rayserver for prman. since the guy who wrote BMRT went off to exluna, it obviously wasn't a good marketing move to suggest using his old software to do raytracing with prman, rather than just buying his newer, better software that didn't need prman...:)
That would be why I specifically asked for my specific information from the poster. The fact that something was measured doesn't mean it's impossible for the measurement to have a flaw. Also, I didn't say he was wrong, just that it sounded like he was running across a fairly uncommon special case (if my understanding of what he was doing is accurate.) If he is doing something fairly odd, then the fact that it is uncommon wouldn't invalidate his benchmarking, it'd just mean that it may not apply to somebody else.
I'd reccomend sticking with BSG. The first one was odd, and I think it took the writers and crew a little time to stretch their legs, and figure out how best to get things going. The second episode of a series, IMHO, is almost always a disappoiontment. I can't think of one that actually impressed me as much as I would have liked.
BSG uses a large story-arc format similar to farscape or B-5, so you may want to get the episodes in order if you can, from your favorite torrent (I didn't say that, honest!) It took until the fourth or fifth episode before I changed from watching it out of convenience to being a fan.
OTOH, if you completely hated the 33 minutes episode, maybe you won't like the series. Different strokes for different folks and all. That episode did have a decent chunk of the general "style" down, but didn't do much character development, or anything else. IMHO, it was almost chiefly a writing excercise for the writers, because they had to write an episode based on a highly technical issue with FTL jumps, but they weren't allowed to use any technobabble to save the day, and the engineer didn't magically invent an invisibility shield, or a super weapon, or a super large jump so they could run faster than the cylons, etc.
If it had been an episode of TNG, Geordi would have had to cross link the deflector dish into a hoozimapharb, and they would have just blown up the cylon ship, and they would have spent half the episode in the conference room with data explaining how the cylons were tracking lemon flavored neutrino emissions from the bussard ramscoop collectors in order to track them, blah blah blah, and it took 33 minutes for them to reach the Enterprise because foo subspace bar baz neutrinos.
In BSG, they just sort of say, yup, they catch up every 33 minutes. Don't worry about the details, because they are make believe, so we won't waste your time fleshing them out in gibberish. Here's what happens to the people...
That would be an unusual special case. First off, most (non realtime) 3D rendering isn't terribly bandwidth or latency sensitive. Assuming the CPU is fast enough that it isn't the main bottleneck, such apps will tend to be more sensitive to latency than to bandwidth. When tracing a ray, for example, one may need to access data from all over memory to do hit-testing, but not need very much information in total. So, the relatively poor latency characteristics of RDRAM don't really suggest a keen funtansticness for 3D rendering. And, considering that current single channel DDR400 has as much bandwidth as dual channel RDRAM did... Well, I'm just surprised that your app would have such a benefit. I'd suspect that there were other differences that caused such a difference in your benchmarks. Do you have any more specifc information, such as what app you use, what sort of scene it was, and what the test systems were?
If you were dealing with slightly different steppings of the same CPU (I assume a P4?) it would be possible that you had two CPU's of the same clock speed, but the newer stepping was less efficient per clock. The P4's, over time, have been tweaked to be less and less efficient over time, in order to facilitate higher clock speeds. RDRAM was popular with the very first generation of P4's, so it'd be logical that the benchmark you saw may have been a newer core. That shouldn't explain a 20% speed difference, but it's an example of a small thing that may have contributed to making the memory system appear to be the determinant item in performance.
Indeed, I think his strength as an actor probably influenced what the casting guys on Battlestar Galactica were looking for when they cast Edward James Olmos. I'll bet good money that at some point, at some meeting, they said, "Give me somebody as dramatic as Stewart, but even more of a badass."
Hey, man... The week before they put bones on TNG, *nobody* watched it, so it must have just been a ratings grab!:) Bones brought up viewership by infinity percent, so I can understand why they would want to repeat the success with Enterprise.
I'm no BSG fanboy, but it has a hell of a lot more going for it than shaky camera moves. BSG feels much grittier partly because of the cinematography, but also because the writers don't suck, the setting and mood are completely different, and the acting and backstory are quite intense. I wouldn't say that they reinvented the genre, but it is frankly some of the best space opera I've seen. period. I don't say that a lot, and I used to be a major TNG fanboy.
The writing in BSG refuses to let the technology get in the way. On Voyager, it was always a damned alient of the week using the particle of the week. On BSG, it's a story about the people, how they interact, how they respond to extraordinary stresses, etc. Star Trek always claimed to be that, but then Geordy saved the day with a fancy modification to the main deflector dish.
BSG explores ideas of how we define God, and who is eligible for religeon, and stuff that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
That said... I don't watch much TV anymore, so there may be other shows I've been missing that are very impressive. I've been reading a lot lately. much better than any space opera TV show.:)
I got "Cocoa-late" your Mac Mini, and I was very confused. For a moment, I thought that the Mac Mini had some problem running apps that use the cocoa API, or something, and the article would be a hack to gain that functionality, then I just assumed it was a case mod to make the Mini look like a shiny blue widget in a cocoa app. Boy, was I wrong!
Others have pointed out that Mac OS X allows you to preserve shortcuts, but what about command line utilities? ls, for example, is so easy and convenient because it is right-hsnd/left-hand/right-hand (including the return). Has anybody ever bothered to make a standard set of symlinks for CLI apps to preserve the feel of typing them? That, combined with OS-X's shortcut preservation would be a big help toward switching.
That sounds like quite an interesting project. I have been pondering for some time building a complete media center setup, with an HTPC plugged into the TV, my main server with all my movies and saved shows, and a small PC embedded in the living room table to act as the mother of all remote controls, so even my dad could use it because everything would be handled in one place, from changing the channel, to browsing archived videos on the server, without ever being able to lose the remote, or carry it into the kicthen and forget it in the freezer, etc.::sigh:: I'll need to take about 20 years off work, and hire a team of helpers to take care of all the projects like that I want to do. BTW, your comment sounded like an interesting enough project that I made you a friend. Good Luck!
Okay... I'll bite. I love torrents because they work great. If something is popular, then the ftp site will be hammered. ( a la the slashdot effect) This usually happens, for example, when a linux distro has a new release. For the first few days, the servers are completely swamped, and you can usually only get a few KB/s at best, if you can get in at all. Sure, when you are downloading from an idle server with a better internet connection than you, there is no reason to think anything else will be faster. In practice, the servers tend to not be as idle as we'd like. And, it isn't that uncommon for me to have at least as much downstream bandwidth as they have upstream, for the smaller sites that don't have fat (expensive!) pipes.
So, suppose you have 100 guys with 1 megabit DSL who want to download your latest work from you. (program, movie, whatever). That means, you need 100 mb of bandwidth to feed them all. Have you priced 100 mb of bandwidth? I sure as hell can't afford that kind of pipe. Oh, and you will want to pay for colocation around the globe, so that guys in korea and australia can get decent speeds downloading your stuff, too.
Or, you just post a torrent from your modest DSL line. As the file propagates to those requesting it, it magically becomes automatically mirrored, and your hundred users can download from each other, getting relatively high speeds. Probably higher than what you could give to just two or three of them!
And, BTW, how the hell is 40 KB/sec "dialup speeds?" 56 Kb/s dialup has a theoretical peak of about 7 KB/s. And, you never would have actually seen 7 KB/s on any dialup connection, due to the fact that modems never actually connect ay 56 K, at least not here in the US, as it's illegal. Then, there is the connection overhead, and the TCP overhead, and so on. 5 KB/sec was a very very good day from what I remember of dialup.
Granted 40 KB/s is only 320Kb/s, which is not a stellar connection, but it isn't terrible. Certainly not if you've got a 512 kb line.
I haven't really familiarised myself with what this guy is doing, but the addition of so many steps does seem a bit odd. Generally, elegant crypto is actually fairly simple. OTOH, I guess having a bunch of crypto on your message can't actually hurt much. Suppose one layer is found to have an algorithmic flaw which can be readily exploited. If you have enough layers, several would need to be cracked before it's convenient to get your message.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to do 3D graphics,, nehe.gamedev.net is a fun place to start. I wouldn't reccomend trying to do a huge first person shooter, but you might want to do a 3D graphics demo. If you use an existing 3ds loader library, and 3DS models from somewhere like www.3dcafe.com, you can have a simple 3D first person walk around world with lighting and textures fairly easily. Things like optimisations so your world can be bigger than your RAM, shadows, collision detection, animated enemy models, AI for enemies, etc, all add difficulty in a big big way.
It all depends on how you want to learn from your game programming class. You won't learn to make Doom3. Or Empire Earth 2. You just won't.
OTOH, if what you mean is that you want to have a neat 3D demo that looks awesome, and will impress lots of people, you may want to just drop any pretense of making a game, and just do a 3D graphics study. Teachers love 3D graphics, since they generally ahve no idea what's hard, and what's easy.
I am not diagnosed autistic, but I have always had some behavioral quirks consistent with mild autism, or something similar, and frankly, I have always found the few truly autistic people I have met to be much easier to get along with than mundanes.
So, obviously, there is a very broad range of what autism is from real, diagnosed mild autism, to not-quite-but-sort-of like myself, all the way to the profound autism where people are unable to function.
There is no right answer to whether it should be cured. If somebody is completely unable to function, and to speak for himself, then his guardian should probably consider getting him available treatments. For me, personally, If somebody came to me with a pill that could make me function better in society, and understand people better, and be more normal, I wouldn't take it. I would fight kicking and screaming before anybody forced a normal-pill down my throat. I am curious about what normalcy would be like, but the fact that my brain doesn't work like anybody else that I know tends to be a valuable thing in many cases.
For the middle ground, I think it has to be up to them. Research should continue. Treatments should be available. But, normalcy should not be mandatory.
Oh, no, I think he was talking about a game where you play fried squids named Darcy trying to take over the world.
At least they put wheels on 'em so you could use them as a VAXume cleaner.
(queue drum hits)
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Yeah, those sick fuckers want to have a pig, which would be raised for slaughter anyway, be able to provide me with a lung transplant in case I get hit by a bus, or get cancer. That's totally sick. I can't believe they would want to do such a horrible thing. Next time some kid gets caught in the crossfire of a gang war, you and I can go to the hospital, and try and keep everybody who tries to save his life away from him. It isn't natural for him to survive, so it must be wrong.
And, guts and organs give me the heebie-jeebies. I can't stand the site of blood, so I make all my moral and ethical decisions based on what personally makes me feel the most comfortable. If I don't have to think about food-animals being able to grow vital organs for humans, then I don't have to think about yukky slimy stuff. Yeah, so it's sick and wrong.
That's why I always reccomend GIF89a, with a textual description overlayed on the actin describing what noises the viewer should make while watching it in order to get the full effect. I hardly ever get complaints from people who only have GIF 87 compatible image viewers.
WMV is not a specific codec. It has several different version which are not compatible.
Naw, I just need a good radio to drown out the sound of my VAXServer. That thing has case fans fo make any PC user run in fear. Seriously, they are like 10 inches across... :)
So, don't use the Apple QuickTime player. Quicktime is mostly a set of libraries. It just happens to come with a shitty player that you can use if you don't want to bother getting something that works better.
:)
:)
Just think of it as libquicktime6.so and you will be much happier.
Personally, my favorite player is videolan client. I don't believe it uses the QuickTime libs, because it is available for so many platforms where Quicktime is certainly not common, but it is spifftastic, and it'll play a substantial percentage of the videos I come across. (and, command-F kicks it into fullscreen playback.
Okay... You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Using a WMV, an AVI, or a Quicktime file is irrelevant to what the final size is. The only thing that matters is the codec, save for slight variations in header sizes. MPEG4 (Which XVID is a variant of) can be used in AVI as well as QuickTime, so why would one container format be larger than the other by any noticeable amount? If I have a MPEG4 AVI, and an Animation compressed Quicktime, then the QuickTime will almost certainly be dramatically larger.
Not everybody consider a naked person to be pornographic.
I'll have to rewatch it. Normally, I pick enough nits to catch a lot of that stuff. I am something of a film-making buff, and I have taken a few classes.
:)
That said, BSG is entertaining enough for my suspension of disbelief to kick in for 90% of teh episode, and I just sit and watch it.
Yes, that was exactly the suspicion I had in my post. But, would it actually show a 16% jump in performance. I don't think it should be that big, unless you have a pretty pathological test case. (which the poster may...) Also, I suppose his newer system is only using single channel memory, which would potentially cause some of the performance hit.
Both systems have the same amount of RAM and OS, right? and we are talking about the same version of the software?
Traditionally, this was the case, but current versions of prman do support ray tracing. Apparently, they added it around the time exluna was digging into their market share, in order to be competitive. Before that happened, you had to use BMRT as a rayserver for prman. since the guy who wrote BMRT went off to exluna, it obviously wasn't a good marketing move to suggest using his old software to do raytracing with prman, rather than just buying his newer, better software that didn't need prman... :)
That would be why I specifically asked for my specific information from the poster. The fact that something was measured doesn't mean it's impossible for the measurement to have a flaw. Also, I didn't say he was wrong, just that it sounded like he was running across a fairly uncommon special case (if my understanding of what he was doing is accurate.) If he is doing something fairly odd, then the fact that it is uncommon wouldn't invalidate his benchmarking, it'd just mean that it may not apply to somebody else.
I'd reccomend sticking with BSG. The first one was odd, and I think it took the writers and crew a little time to stretch their legs, and figure out how best to get things going. The second episode of a series, IMHO, is almost always a disappoiontment. I can't think of one that actually impressed me as much as I would have liked.
BSG uses a large story-arc format similar to farscape or B-5, so you may want to get the episodes in order if you can, from your favorite torrent (I didn't say that, honest!) It took until the fourth or fifth episode before I changed from watching it out of convenience to being a fan.
OTOH, if you completely hated the 33 minutes episode, maybe you won't like the series. Different strokes for different folks and all. That episode did have a decent chunk of the general "style" down, but didn't do much character development, or anything else. IMHO, it was almost chiefly a writing excercise for the writers, because they had to write an episode based on a highly technical issue with FTL jumps, but they weren't allowed to use any technobabble to save the day, and the engineer didn't magically invent an invisibility shield, or a super weapon, or a super large jump so they could run faster than the cylons, etc.
If it had been an episode of TNG, Geordi would have had to cross link the deflector dish into a hoozimapharb, and they would have just blown up the cylon ship, and they would have spent half the episode in the conference room with data explaining how the cylons were tracking lemon flavored neutrino emissions from the bussard ramscoop collectors in order to track them, blah blah blah, and it took 33 minutes for them to reach the Enterprise because foo subspace bar baz neutrinos.
In BSG, they just sort of say, yup, they catch up every 33 minutes. Don't worry about the details, because they are make believe, so we won't waste your time fleshing them out in gibberish. Here's what happens to the people...
That would be an unusual special case. First off, most (non realtime) 3D rendering isn't terribly bandwidth or latency sensitive. Assuming the CPU is fast enough that it isn't the main bottleneck, such apps will tend to be more sensitive to latency than to bandwidth. When tracing a ray, for example, one may need to access data from all over memory to do hit-testing, but not need very much information in total. So, the relatively poor latency characteristics of RDRAM don't really suggest a keen funtansticness for 3D rendering. And, considering that current single channel DDR400 has as much bandwidth as dual channel RDRAM did... Well, I'm just surprised that your app would have such a benefit. I'd suspect that there were other differences that caused such a difference in your benchmarks. Do you have any more specifc information, such as what app you use, what sort of scene it was, and what the test systems were?
If you were dealing with slightly different steppings of the same CPU (I assume a P4?) it would be possible that you had two CPU's of the same clock speed, but the newer stepping was less efficient per clock. The P4's, over time, have been tweaked to be less and less efficient over time, in order to facilitate higher clock speeds. RDRAM was popular with the very first generation of P4's, so it'd be logical that the benchmark you saw may have been a newer core. That shouldn't explain a 20% speed difference, but it's an example of a small thing that may have contributed to making the memory system appear to be the determinant item in performance.
Indeed, I think his strength as an actor probably influenced what the casting guys on Battlestar Galactica were looking for when they cast Edward James Olmos. I'll bet good money that at some point, at some meeting, they said, "Give me somebody as dramatic as Stewart, but even more of a badass."
Hey, man... The week before they put bones on TNG, *nobody* watched it, so it must have just been a ratings grab! :) Bones brought up viewership by infinity percent, so I can understand why they would want to repeat the success with Enterprise.
I'm no BSG fanboy, but it has a hell of a lot more going for it than shaky camera moves. BSG feels much grittier partly because of the cinematography, but also because the writers don't suck, the setting and mood are completely different, and the acting and backstory are quite intense. I wouldn't say that they reinvented the genre, but it is frankly some of the best space opera I've seen. period. I don't say that a lot, and I used to be a major TNG fanboy.
:)
The writing in BSG refuses to let the technology get in the way. On Voyager, it was always a damned alient of the week using the particle of the week. On BSG, it's a story about the people, how they interact, how they respond to extraordinary stresses, etc. Star Trek always claimed to be that, but then Geordy saved the day with a fancy modification to the main deflector dish.
BSG explores ideas of how we define God, and who is eligible for religeon, and stuff that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
That said... I don't watch much TV anymore, so there may be other shows I've been missing that are very impressive. I've been reading a lot lately. much better than any space opera TV show.
I got "Cocoa-late" your Mac Mini, and I was very confused. For a moment, I thought that the Mac Mini had some problem running apps that use the cocoa API, or something, and the article would be a hack to gain that functionality, then I just assumed it was a case mod to make the Mini look like a shiny blue widget in a cocoa app. Boy, was I wrong!
Others have pointed out that Mac OS X allows you to preserve shortcuts, but what about command line utilities? ls, for example, is so easy and convenient because it is right-hsnd/left-hand/right-hand (including the return). Has anybody ever bothered to make a standard set of symlinks for CLI apps to preserve the feel of typing them? That, combined with OS-X's shortcut preservation would be a big help toward switching.
That sounds like quite an interesting project. I have been pondering for some time building a complete media center setup, with an HTPC plugged into the TV, my main server with all my movies and saved shows, and a small PC embedded in the living room table to act as the mother of all remote controls, so even my dad could use it because everything would be handled in one place, from changing the channel, to browsing archived videos on the server, without ever being able to lose the remote, or carry it into the kicthen and forget it in the freezer, etc. ::sigh:: I'll need to take about 20 years off work, and hire a team of helpers to take care of all the projects like that I want to do. BTW, your comment sounded like an interesting enough project that I made you a friend. Good Luck!
Okay... I'll bite. I love torrents because they work great. If something is popular, then the ftp site will be hammered. ( a la the slashdot effect) This usually happens, for example, when a linux distro has a new release. For the first few days, the servers are completely swamped, and you can usually only get a few KB/s at best, if you can get in at all. Sure, when you are downloading from an idle server with a better internet connection than you, there is no reason to think anything else will be faster. In practice, the servers tend to not be as idle as we'd like. And, it isn't that uncommon for me to have at least as much downstream bandwidth as they have upstream, for the smaller sites that don't have fat (expensive!) pipes.
So, suppose you have 100 guys with 1 megabit DSL who want to download your latest work from you. (program, movie, whatever). That means, you need 100 mb of bandwidth to feed them all. Have you priced 100 mb of bandwidth? I sure as hell can't afford that kind of pipe. Oh, and you will want to pay for colocation around the globe, so that guys in korea and australia can get decent speeds downloading your stuff, too.
Or, you just post a torrent from your modest DSL line. As the file propagates to those requesting it, it magically becomes automatically mirrored, and your hundred users can download from each other, getting relatively high speeds. Probably higher than what you could give to just two or three of them!
And, BTW, how the hell is 40 KB/sec "dialup speeds?" 56 Kb/s dialup has a theoretical peak of about 7 KB/s. And, you never would have actually seen 7 KB/s on any dialup connection, due to the fact that modems never actually connect ay 56 K, at least not here in the US, as it's illegal. Then, there is the connection overhead, and the TCP overhead, and so on. 5 KB/sec was a very very good day from what I remember of dialup.
Granted 40 KB/s is only 320Kb/s, which is not a stellar connection, but it isn't terrible. Certainly not if you've got a 512 kb line.
I haven't really familiarised myself with what this guy is doing, but the addition of so many steps does seem a bit odd. Generally, elegant crypto is actually fairly simple. OTOH, I guess having a bunch of crypto on your message can't actually hurt much. Suppose one layer is found to have an algorithmic flaw which can be readily exploited. If you have enough layers, several would need to be cracked before it's convenient to get your message.