Machine naming schemes

Lars Wirzenius blogged about computer naming schemes earlier today. I agree with him that naming schemes are a good thing; when I co-founded NixSys, we considered a wide range of possible naming schemes. Things we considered included:

• Composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, ...)
• Animals (Elephant, Monkey, Horse, ...)
• Opera characters (papageno, carmen, donjose, ...)
• ... and many more, but I don't remember all of them, and seem to have lost the list

Eventually, we ended up not using a common naming scheme, though. We installed our laptops before the naming scheme was decided upon, and thoughtlessly picked the naming schemes we used at home, without changing it to something else again afterwards. In my case, that meant musical styles (I have "rock", "blues", "folk", "hiphop", "trance", and "quickstep"; the laptop is "worldmusic"), whereas in his case, it was "hermes" at first (the old and well-known greek gods naming scheme) and "loge" now (although I don't really know what his new naming scheme is all about).