Domino Cards

Domino cards

Chinese dominoes first appeared around the Southern Song dynasty and are derived from all twenty-one combinations of a pair of dice. They became available in card format around 1600. Though not visually apparent, they are divided into two suits: civil and military (originally Chinese and barbarian respectively until the Qing dynasty). The invention of the concept of suits increased the level of strategy in trick-taking games; the card of one suit cannot beat the card of another suit regardless of its rank. The idiosyncratic ranking and suits come from Chinese dice games. Domino card decks [zh] come in different sizes. Smaller decks are used in trick-taking and banking games. 32-card decks, with the civil suit doubled, are used to play Tien Gow and Pai Gow. Larger decks, for rummy or fishing games, may have well over a hundred cards and can include wild cards. Although originating from tiles, domino card games inspired the creation of a tile game, Digging Flowers [zh]. Unlike regular domino tiles, these are short and squat allowing them to stand upright like mahjong tiles. This is a fairly old game, possibly preceding mahjong by decades if not a century.

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Other Playing Cards

Gossip Cards - These cards act similarly to the Telegram cards, but in the form of passenger conversations. Payment, for example, is written in the form of bribery, or instructions on movement can be seen as instructing a Player to follow another more suspicious character. Bellhops - The Bellhop tokens can be used to evade Steerage or moving to an undesirable place. However, they cannot be used as an exchange for money. Bellhop tokens are given free of charge to players whenever they land on a Bellhop space on the Board or are gifted one via telegram.

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Brands that produced T206 cards

T206 cards were issued with 16 different backs, representing the 16 different brands of cigarettes/tobacco with which the cards were issued. Due to the same card having different backs, there are actually far more than 524 "different" T206 cards. The actual number of front/back combination is not fully known as collectors still discover new combinations from time to time. The 16 backs are: American Beauty - more thinly cut than other brands due to the narrower size of the cigarette packs Broadleaf Carolina Brights Cycle Drum El Principe De Gales Hindu - Found in both brown ink and red ink (rare) Lenox - Found in both black and (rarely) brown ink Old Mill - Found in black and, very rarely, brown inks. A single example of a blue backed Old Mill is known. Piedmont Polar Bear - Only brand that is not cigarettes; Polar Bear was loose tobacco, also known as scrap tobacco Sovereign Sweet Caporal Tolstoi Ty Cobb - Not highly regarded as a T206 back as it is only found with a single image front Uzit Blank - unprinted backs appear infrequently but are likely printing anomalies

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Other I/O cards

An M1000e enclosure can hold up to 6 switches or other I/O cards. Besides the ethernet switches as the Powerconnect M-series, Force10 MXL and Cisco Catalyst 3100 switches mentioned above the following I/O modules are available or usable in a Dell M1000e enclosure: Ethernet pass-through modules bring internal server-interfaces to an external interface at the back of the enclosure. There are pass-through modules for 1G, 10G-XAUI and 10G 10GbaseXR. All passthrough modules offer 16 internal interfaces linked to 16 external ports on the module. Emulex 4 or 8 Gb Fibre Channel Passthrough Module Brocade 5424 8Gb FC switch for Fibre Channel based Storage area network Brocade M6505. 16Gb FC switch Dell 4 or 8Gb Fibre-channel NPIV Port aggregator Mellanox 2401G and 4001F/Q - InfiniBand Dual Data Rate or Quad Data Rate modules for High-performance computing Infiniscale 4: 16 port 40Gb Infiniband switch Cisco M7000e Infiniband switch with 8 external DDR ports the below Powerconnect 8428-k switch with 4 "native" 8Gb Fibre channel interfaces:PCM 8428-k Brocade FCoEAlthough the PCM8024-k and MXL switch do support Fibre Channel over Ethernet, it is not a 'native' FCoE switch: it has no Fibre Channel interfaces. These switches would need to be connected to a "native" FCoE switch such as the Powerconnect B-series 8000e (same as a Brocade 8000 switch) or a Cisco Nexus 5000 series switch with fibre channel interfaces (and licenses). The PCM8428 is the only full Fibre Channel over Ethernet capable switch for the M1000e enclosure that offers 16 x enhanced Ethernet 10Gb internal interfaces, 8 x 10Gb (enhanced) Ethernet external ports and also up to four 8Gb Fibre Channel interfaces to connect directly to a FC SAN controller or central Fibre Channel switch.

The switch runs Brocade FC firmware for the fabric and fibre-channel switch and Foundry OS for the Ethernet switch configuration. In capabilities it is very comparable to the Powerconnect-B8000, only the formfactor and number of Ethernet and FC interfaces are different. PowerConnect M5424 / Brocade 5424This is a Brocade full Fibre Channel switch. It uses either the B or C fabrics to connect the Fibre Channel mezzanine card in the blades to the FC based storage infrastructure. The M5424 offers 16 internal ports connecting to the FC Mezzanine cards in the blade-servers and 8 external ports.

From factory only the first two external ports (17 and 18) are licensed: additional connections require extra Dynamic Ports On Demand (DPOD) licenses. The switch runs on a PowerPC 440EPX processor at 667 MHz and 512 MB DDR2 RAM system memory. Further it has 4 Mb boot flash and 512 Mb compact flash memory on board. Brocade M6505Similar capabilities as above, but offering 16 X 16Gb FC towards server mezzanine and 8 external. Standard license offers 12 connections which can be increased by 12 to support all 24 ports. auto-sensing speed 2,4,8 and 16Gb. Total aggregate bandwidth 384 GB Brocade 4424As the 5424, the 4424 is also a Brocade SAN I/O offering 16 internal and 8 external ports. The switch supports speeds up to 4 Gbit/s. When delivered 12 of the ports are licensed to be operation and with additional licenses one can enable all 24 ports.

The 4424 runs on a PowerPC 440GP processor at 333 MHz with 256 SDRAM system memory, 4 Mb boot flash and 256 Mb compact flash memory. InfinibandThere are several modules available offering Infiniband connectivity on the M1000e chassis. Infiniband offers high bandwidth/low-latency intra-computer connectivity such as required in Academic HPC clusters, large enterprise datacenters and cloud applications. There is the SFS M7000e InfiniBand switch from Cisco. The Cisco SFS offers 16 internal 'autosensing' interfaces for single (10) (SDR) or double (20Gbit/s) data rate (DDR) and 8 DDR external/uplink ports.

The total switching capacity is 960 Gbit/s Other options are the Mellanox SwitchX M4001F and M4001Q and the Melanox M2401G 20Gb Infiniband switch for the M1000e enclosure The M4001 switches offer either 40 GBit/s (M4001Q) or the 56 Gbit/s (M4001F) connectivity and has 16 external interfaces using QSFP ports and 16 internal connections to the Infiniband Mezzanine card on the blades. As with all other non-Ethernet based switches it can only be installed in the B or C fabric of the M1000e enclosure as the A fabric connects to the "on motherboard" NICs of the blades and they only come as Ethernet NICs or converged Ethernet. The 2401G offers 24 ports: 16 internal and 8 external ports. Unlike the M4001 switches where the external ports are using QSFP ports for fiber transceivers, the 2401 has CX4 copper cable interfaces. The switching capacity of the M2401 is 960 Gbit/s The 4001, with 16 internal and 16 external ports at either 40 or 56 Gbit/s offers a switching capacity of 2.56 Tbit/s Passthrough modulesIn some setups one do not want or need switching capabilities in one's enclosure. For example: if only a few of the blade-servers do use fibre-channel storage one do not need a fully manageble FC switch: one just want to be able to connect the 'internal' FC interface of the blade directly to one's (existing) FC infrastructure.

A pass-through module has only very limited management capabilities. Other reasons to choose for pass-through instead of 'enclosure switches' could be the wish to have all switching done on a 'one vendor' infrastructure; and if that is not available as an M1000e module (thus not one of the switches from Dell Powerconnect, Dell Force10 or Cisco) one could go for pass-through modules: 32 port 10/100/1000 Mbit/s gigabit Ethernet pass-through card: connects 16 internal Ethernet interfaces (1 per blade) to an external RJ45 10/100/1000 Mbit/s copper port 32 port 10 Gb NIC version supports 16 internal 10Gb ports with 16 external SFP slots 32 port 10 Gb CNA version supports 16 internal 10Gb CNA ports with 16 external CNA's Dell 4 or 8Gb Fibre-channel NPIV Port aggregator Intel/Qlogic offer a QDR Infiniband passthru module for the Dell M1000e chassis, and a mezzanine version of the QLE7340 QDR IB HCA.