Version Numbering Schemes?

zburke asks: "I need to make the first release of an application but I have no idea how to tag it -- version 1, version 1.0, version 1.0.0? Is it worth trying to encode major version/minor version/bug fix into an a.b.c scheme? Microsoft's "NT 4.00 Service Pack 6a" sucks, but so does Oracle's "8.1.5.4.0". Apache has the simplest versioning I've seen, but the only thing I know about 1.3.14 is that it came after 1.3.12. Any ideas or references?" The most popular version numbering scheme stems from the <major>.<minor>.<patchlevel> scheme, and that works well enough, but what other versioning schemes can you all come up with that are different enough, but not a pain in the butt to decode?