I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the r

I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes. The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch). I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.