-
Save 15% on ALL SFF Network merch, until Dec 31st! Use code SFF2024 at checkout. Click here!
General Chat Thread
- Thread starter onlyabloke
- Start date
Degenerate president backed by an occult of lawless cronies.
Does anyone know if a micro USB + 3.5 jack to USB C cable exists? Wondering if there is a way of simplifying my speaker cables from 2 to 1.
New here. Thanks to everyone for being so helpful.
Does anyone else feel a bit of frustration at the amount of sff stuff that seems perpetually unavailable? So many cases that are always out of stock, lots of services threads where the service is not longer available.
For a market that seems so profitable and in demand, there seems to be very few businesses (individual or large company) taking advantage of it.
Does anyone else feel a bit of frustration at the amount of sff stuff that seems perpetually unavailable? So many cases that are always out of stock, lots of services threads where the service is not longer available.
For a market that seems so profitable and in demand, there seems to be very few businesses (individual or large company) taking advantage of it.
Yes, it looks profitable but the market is relatively very small compared to the larger formats.
So, it is like: large profit x very small market = still very small profit.
Yep. There's also the rather unavoidable correlation between shrinking size and increased need for customization and/or strict adherence to compatibility - i.e. you can fit pretty much any parts you want into a standard ATX mid-tower, but when you're shooting for as little wasted space as possible you are suddenly looking at a very complex table of which GPUs/CPU coolers/PSUs/etc. that fit into which cases. Meaning that there's more need for choice (to accommodate all the various hardware combinations people have/want/need) in SFF than in non-SFF, further shrinking profits as sales numbers per product shrink. Not to mention the abundance of different form factors (console-style, old-school PSU stacked above CPU cooler with either SFX or ATX, Ncase-like long "standard" layout+SFX, long sandwich+SFX, sandwich+Flex/1U, various externally powered layouts, etc., etc.) and how much aesthetic preferences play into component choices (as SFF cases tend to sit on your desk people tend to be picky in what they like). In the end you are left with a "large" market (that is still tiny when compared to the DIY/BYO PC market) divided into hundreds of smaller ones. It would be extremely interesting to see sales numbers for the various successful (read: has reached production) cases that have been developed by/in this community - I would assume the most successful ones have sales in the low thousands, with the vast majority maybe not even breaking a hundred orders. Then compare that to major manufacturers with worldwide distribution networks, streamlined product development and name-brand recognition, all while operating in the larger non-SFF market - it's not even a fair fight. Development costs of SFF cases are likely comparable if not higher than non-SFF cases, driving up prices, with the only "advantage" being a lot of enthusiasts being willing to work for free in developing this stuff.
Now, to be fair, there are some brands making an attempt - like Fractal or Silverstone with their console-style cases, or In-Win with the A1. But most of these have to make concessions in one way or another to make them easier to plan a build in - with the most common being bundling a PSU to avoid people buying oversized PSUs that don't fit, which immediately excludes anyone advanced who would want a different PSU for some reason - and generally can't offer the level of customization of more flexible small-scale manufacturers.
The back side of this is of course that these small-scale manufacturers are - at best - struggling to maintain profitability at all, and I would imagine the vast majority of them do this stuff as a side project rather than a main job. People need to eat, after all. Which leads us back into limited and variable product availability cycles (how many cases can you afford to order for a given production run to ensure availability beyond pre-orders, but also how long can you afford to have unsold inventory sitting around before you start racking up interest on any debt you got into financing the production run?) and the like. There are no economics of scale to alleviate these problems, meaning there is no way to smooth out the fluctuations. And no manpower/organization to step in when unforeseen things happen - if a case is designed and sold by a single person and they get sick or have some other major life event happen to them, there's nobody else who can step in and keep the ball rolling, unlike a company with hundreds of employees.
In short, I don't think stuff like this is avoidable at all for specialty hardware like SFF components, sadly. Comes with the territory.
You've narrowed it down a BIT, buuuuuuuuuut.... you're not alone there.
Mine's just made a HUGE decision that we may come to regret #FarewellEU
I never thought 'laughable' is meant to be literal! I mean, I had a long good laugh when I saw on TV last night Trump refusing to shake hand with Pelosi and Pelosi later tearing Trump's speech hardcopy, right in front of everybody.
Ugh, that whole scene made me cringe. The level of immaturity - on both sides! - is baffling. I mean, there are crazy things in Norwegian politics too (I can give some very entertaining examples!), but at least the vast majority of our politicians act like somewhat respectful adults to each other. I guess it helps that we're not saddled with a deeply dysfunctional two-party system (instead we have ... 9 parties currently represented in parliament, which isn't exactly a recipe for smooth operations either, but at least it ensures diversity and discourages partisan silliness like this).
Had to change the password on my work account today. Didn't consider that I have to type in the password every single time I wake my laptop from sleep. Kind of regretting the 27-character length I ended up with now.
Y
I hear ya, in my country we had a political party and administrative state composed mostly of pedophiles attempt a soft coup on our President even before being sworn in, twice setting up false charges based on what they(the opposing party) were actually doing with the help of foreign governments.
I saw that a couple of days ago, looks really neat, but isn't it rather small for case building use? Looks amazing for making various small parts though.
I still struggle to see what a "soft" coup would be. I mean, either you (try to) sieze power or you don't. There are many different ways of doing so, but the only meaningful distinction really is whether it involves military might or not - beyond that the various possible methods are so many, complex and varied that trying to classify them (especially in what seems to be a vague dichotomic classification of soft/hard) doesn't add anything meaningful - I would assume there's an opposing "hard" coup, which is then what? A military coup? If so, there's already a term for that. And if not, then I sincerely doubt there's a clear line to be drawn between two distinct forms or groups of possible non-military coup d'etat methods. Which is why a term like that warrants some explanation.
I don't see what's so hard to understand, these concepts are common place, soft = no shooting, hard = shooting and yes our military was involved. The former admininistrsation(and the DNC/Hillary campaign) coordinated the NSC(Clapper), CIA(Brennan), FBI,(Comey), DOJ(Rosenstein) and DoD (thru back door contracts with CIA assets like Stefan Halper in the UK ($1M) who attempted to entrap at the very least George Popadopoulos, Carter Page, and former Gen Michael Flynn through phony seminars etc). The DNC hired law firm Perkins Coie which was used as a cutout to pay foreign civilian and intelligence actors(like Simpson, Steele, and Milfsud) from Britain to the Ukraine to create the fake dossier which was the illegal basis for FISA warrants used to justify the illegal Special Counsel investigatiion(illegal as a crime must be shown, an intelligence investigation is not a legal basis). They also produced the fake black ledger thru Chalupa the DNC activist in Ukraine used in an effort to railroad Manafort(they ended up using 10 year old charges the DOJ had formerly declined to prosecute). Then the latest so-called Ukraine-gate further to used state dept and military members(recently fired from the NSC) to cobble together another fake event in an attempt to impeach the President. Hopefully lots of 6AM no knock raids start soon.
