When Good Codenames Go Bad (2006) | Hacker News Reader

When Good Codenames Go Bad (2006)

aarongiles.com

66 pointswalterbell47 comments

I really like these kinds of names with a coherent theme. I think the most widely known ones are the Mac OS X large cat / geographic place names and the Intel lakes / coves. Are there any more from popular tech companies?

There's Google with dessert themed names for Android versions

Google has been pretty bad with released product names, e.g. YouTube Red, Google Wave, G Suite, Google Assistant, Google Home Hub... not very creative

There is no "Google" for these purposes. Every org has their own practices and there's minimal central review. GFoo is in vogue in some parts of the company, but you won't see that branding in YouTube, Chrome, Android, Fuschia, etc.

Unfortunately, they stopped doing this after Android 9 Pie (2018). All subsequent Android versions are just referred to by version number.

They should have gone with Android "Quark"...

AMD names their processors on italian cities while ServiceNow names their releases on big cities (they have Berlin and Paris and maybe had one on an indian one, but I don't remember).

AMDs server processors are named after italian cities (Bergamo, Turin, ...), their desktop and laptop CPUs and APUs are painters (Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne, ...), but that hasn't been entirely been consistent (e.g. the latest threadripper pro is code named Chagall which refers to a painter, but previous ones had names like Whitehaven).

Debian releases are Toy Story characters.

Ubuntu releases are always alliterative Adjectival Animals (assigned alphabetically).

Background for the curious:

> So, what's with the "Funky Fairy" naming system? Many sensible people have wondered why we chose this naming scheme. It came about as a joke on a ferry between Circular Quay and somewhere else, in Sydney, Australia:

> lifeless: how long before we make a first release?

> sabdfl: it would need to be punchy. six months max.

> lifeless: six months! thats not a lot of time for polish.

> sabdfl: so we'll have to nickname it the warty warthog release.

> And voila, the name stuck.

(First Ubuntu release was "Ubuntu 4.10 - Warty Warthog")

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames

This naming scheme seemed extremely shortsighted to me as it wreaks havoc on Internet text searches. It forces one to search for numerous possible references to a release: the adjective alone, the animal name alone, the release number, maybe abbreviations or nicknames of the code name, and so on.

You know there's also a version number, always worked great for me.

The issue I have more often is that APT repos generally are just named "jammy" or such, and then you have to remember which release that was.

I'm surprised this is not mentioned on Ubuntu's wiki but this is called Alliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration

one project, RedHat/Fedora or something, was a pattern like "word A", "word B related to word A", "word C related to an alternate meaning of word B", etc.

Yes, both RedHat and Fedora used a free association-like naming scheme.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History_of_Red_Hat_Linux

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/name_history/

(Vouched for parent comment since it was on-topic.)

VLC Media Player uses Discworld character names.

Flash Player releases toward their later years were codenamed after San Francisco street names, in alphabetical order (a bit like Android's alphabetical dessert names).

Another fun thematic one from that era was Adobe's Flex platform, which had two separately codenamed parts: an SDK and an IDE. One release cycle both codenames were food related: Burrito and Hero (like the sandwich). So the follow-on minor release of course used the codenames Super Burrito and Superhero. The overall platform got the codename Superstar (i.e. "Super *"). And then I think the next release after that became "Megastar." As far as I know none of that was planned in advance, much like the story above.

Wordpress does Jazz musicians.

The themes are fine but the issue i have with mac os codenames (this can apply to anything else though) is that it would be good to keep them alphabetically ordered so you instantly know how recent/old any version is.

They started such a theme with Android Studio - not since the very beginning, but 2020. So far there have been Arctic Fox, Bumblebee, and Chipmunk.

Apple's big cat theme was the funniest one with Puma, Panther and Mountain Lion all referring to the exact same animals that happens to be known by the same name.

I enjoyed Craig Federighi‘s joke name for macOS 11, Sea Lion, back before switched the naming convention.

Intel used to use names from various locations around Oregon (Coppermine, Katamai, etc).

AMD used to use horse breed names for various Athlon XP models.

Linux Mint is unfortunately named with female names. It’s creepy because leadership is mostly male, and because, by design, people are expected to move on to the next new “release”.

Some are collected at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name#Commercial

Not a tech company despite their ambitions, but many Volkswagen models are named for winds (in German):

* Golf - Gulf Stream,

* Jetta - Jet Stream,

* Passat - Trade wind,

* Polo - Polar winds,

* Scirocco - Mediterranean/Saharan wind.

Huh? "Polo"! How elegant. Too bad the evidence for it seems to be basically hearsay.

Maybe someone digs up a German source? Would be a cool addition to the Polo's Wikipedia articles. (The German Wikipedia says it's after sport not after the polar wind, but it's entirely unsourced.)

It was received wisdom to me, but on closer inspection, it seems to be all nonsense: https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2013/05/inside-the-industr...

My apologies!

AMD Linux graphics driver developers use(d) their own naming scheme (separeate from the hardware codenames) for RDNA2 GPUs based on X11 colors and fish names to make it harder to speculate on unreleased hardware based off the open source drivers. This gave us Sienna Cichlid, Navy Flounder, Dimgrey Cavefish, Beige Goby and Yellow Carp. It seems they stopped doing that for the upcoming RDNA 3 cards though.

Some car manufacturers have coherent names.

For instance, consider BMW.

For sedans/hatchbacks there's basically 1 through 8 (1 series, 2 series etc). Even numbered series tend to be high performance models and are usually coupes.

Prefix "X" means it's an SUV.

Prefix "I" means it's electric.

The suffix "i" stands for petrol engine, "d" for diesel, "e" for plugin hybrids (?).

The other numbers indicate the relative performance of the engine (ie., 530 > 525)

"x-drive" means AWD.

An "M" in there means high performance. If there's "competition" tacked on, there's even more performance, and "CS" means it's really badass.

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BMW is not the only one with a coherent naming though. Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo etc (just naming a few) also have similar naming strategies.

I don't really see the problem with these, none of them seem offensive to me. Native-speaker care to elaborate?

Is there something deeper on a linguistic level or slang or something? Snowball is iirc some mix of drugs, like speed+downer or something, but then again, for those looking through police dictionaries of street slang, you quickly realize basically the entire vocabulary is slang for drugs.

Snowball and Napoleon are two characters from George Orwell's Animal Farm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_(Animal_Farm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_(Animal_Farm)

In case others are wondering, they're not just two characters. They are the names of two pigs on the farm.

And rather negative characters at that.

Wow, learning something new (and troubling) about Snowball (or rather, one portrayal of Snowball) in that article:

> When the novel Animal Farm was adapted for the screen in the 1950s, the CIA investors were initially greatly concerned that Snowball was presented too sympathetically in early script treatments and that Batchelor's script implied Snowball was "intelligent, dynamic, courageous". A memo declared that Snowball must be presented as a "fanatic intellectual whose plans if carried through would have led to disaster no less complete than under Napoleon." De Rochemont subsequently implemented these changes.

> .Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of animal Farm, pp. 75–79

Scary. I had no idea CIA had anything to do with movie production in the US. Wonder if that's still the case.

Ignorance is bliss. Enjoy it as long as possible :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

Death Star Canteen (2007): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw

It probably is; if a film wants to use any military hardware, the Pentagon gets the final say about the contents.

And if they want to earn big in China and get subsidies from their film funds, it cannot be critical of China / Chinese people, they can't be the bad guys, it has to have at least a secondary Chinese actor, and it needs a scene in a Chinese city. That's what I've observed with some of these films anyway, e.g. the Transformer films.

Yeah, that's been my observation too. If I watch a movie and they end up in a Chinese city (HK, Shanghai etc), it's often a strong indicator of Chinese investors. At least when it comes to blockbuster movies.

When it comes to the US military lending support, I've read that the movie cannot be critical or portray us military in a negative manner.

The implication is (I think) that the punning just got more and more annoying that people got fed up.

I've seen situations where the product code names become so publicly popular that the company uses yet another unrelated codename to refer to them in internal conversation and code (but even those internal names still leak out anyways). A bit silly if you ask me.

Just some things I've noticed with codenames:

Previous generation likes using mythology, greek and roman specifically, as well as space (lots of overlap obviously).

So many "Cerberus", "Apollo", and "Polaris" projects.

My team tries to use pokemon, but business and management don't like it. So we end up with acronym soup instead...and then everyone complains that there are too many acronyms, so we should use names but "no fun or cute names" so round and round we go back to the greek/roman/space stuff because we like for the next CRUD service to sound like it's gd Apollo 11 levels of effort. Going to prod is the same as going to the moon right?

The older Redhat ones were novel. Each release name was linked to the prior release, but the prior release was not related to the forthcoming release. For example:

Picasso

Rembrandt

Colgate

Vanderbilt

Picasso is related to Rembrandt as famous artists. Rembrandt and Colgate are both (US) toothpaste brands. Colgate and Vanderbilt are both (US) universities.

Colgate and Picasso have no direct relation.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux#Version_history

It's a fun game trying to determine what the relationships are because they're not all obvious.

Here are more from the list if you want to weigh in:

Thunderbird

Mustang

Hurricane

Manhattan

Apollo

Starbuck

Hedwig

Lorax

Cartman

Piglet

Zoot

Pinstripe

Guinness

Fisher

I found Project Hailstorm for an authentication system by Microsoft one of the worst chosen codenames. Even though I did find the tech to be quite a good idea honestly, at least the general direction to minimize username/passwords.

Especially in the era of MS this was chosen it didn't quite evoke the good will necessary to have them establish a standard (whether it would have been open or not)

A company I worked for had an internal project that was a .NET monstrosity (the rest of the firm was either mainframe/COBOL or JVM based). They named it "Project Maelstrom". A more apt name could not have been had.

Note: .NET is not bad in itself, I guess, but we had no real production experience with it and was mostly spearheaded by people who used it as an REU (Resume Extension Unit) to get jobs at Microsoft, with little to no actual justification for using it where we did. I guess that was their dream, and for at least one person it worked as such. But I always felt it was kind of underhanded.

Why not just use artificial words generated with Markov chains or whatever? Finding it extremely hard to invent meaningful names for every tool/script I write I decided to just go this way.

The point of a codename is that you want people to remember it.

It's much easier to for people remember the name of a project called "Sea Serpent" or "Bulldozer Gear" than ones called "Therty Athemark" or "Systiong", because the two former have previous associations that help us remember them.

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