A name that isn't the one you are officially identified by. Login IDs, nicknames, and false names adopted to confuse people as to who you are, for example, are all aliases.

Alias is an ongoing comic book series from Marvel Comics on their Marvel Max label.

The comic is written by Brian Michael Bendis, the art is by Michael Gaydos, and the covers are by David Mack. The first issue was released in November 2001 as the first of the Marvel Max comics, and was very contraversial due to the nature of its content. As of this writing, the series is on issue #20 and is scheduled to continue.

The story for Alias revolves around the main character, Jessica Jones, and her work as the sole employee of Alias Investigations, a private investigation firm. Jessica was known as, at one time, a super-hero by the name of Jewel. She had fairly generic superpowers, including enhanced strength and limited flight capabilities. Jewel didn't get much popularity, but did spent time with the Avengers during her brief career. Eventually Jessica gave up her costume for a (relatively) normal life.

The first 15 issues alone guest star Captain America, Daredevil, Cage, Juggernaut, Ant-man, and more, with appearances by Thor, Iron Man, The Human Torch, Spider-man, Doctor Octopus, and others.

Though I haven't read everything out there, I think it's fair to say that the style of the comic is unique. The fact that it is on the Marvel Max comic label means that there is heavy use of swear words and some (sometimes fairly graphic, sometimes benign or absent) sexual content. This, combined with Bendis' "natural" dialogue, makes the comic seem much more like real life and less fantastic than most comics. I would describe the art as "minimalist" (though I'm no art critic). The drawings are sometimes very basic, but easily get the point across. The frequent repetition of using almost exactly the same frame multiple times conveys the sense of monotony that comes with existing in real life. The covers may take several minutes of staring to catch it all.

If you're looking for a different kind of comic book, or if you're just looking for something interesting to read while you're waiting for your mail, I recommend this series highly. They go for about $2/issue on ebay.

Alias Research Inc. was a Toronto-based software development firm founded in the early 1980s. It developed Sketch software for Macintosh, and the Studio and Animator series of software for IRIX and AIX systems. In 1995 it was bought by Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) and merged with Wavefront, a Santa-Barbara based competitor, to form Alias|Wavefront.

Aliasing probably goes on in E2 a lot more than we suspect: with the addition of the node voting system (tm) noding has become much more 'political' so the stakes for getting your nodes upvoted or cooled are higher. With two or more aliases you can do lots of things: you can cool and vote on your own nodes, you can draw extra attention to a writeup in chatterbox and you can downvote those nodes that directly oppose your own with double the force. Sure, you have to spread out your votes/nodes between more IDs but, I bet, in the long-term it works out better especially if you are writing unpopular nodes.

Apple terminology for symbolic link or shortcut. A small placeholder file that represents its target in a different location.

For example, when I create a piece of artwork that my art director needs to review before I send it on to the build team, I have to log on to the projects server, find the folder for this project and the sub-folder of my work and the sub-sub-folder for this week, and copy my file there. Instead, I keep an alias of that sub-sub-folder in the same folder on my machine as my work, and drag the new artwork onto that alias. If the network connection is already established, the file gets copied to the right place without all the extra navigation. If the server is not mounted, double-clicking or dragging to the alias makes the connection automatically (on Macs, anyway).

Aliases are also an underused solution to the "User Keeps Everything They Ever Use On Their Desktop" problem.

(UN*X shells:)

An alias is a renaming of a command by the shell you're using. Bourne shell (sh) doesn't have aliases; csh and its derivative tcsh, as well as bash, zsh and a gazillion other shells all support aliases.

Simple aliases just call a command by another, possibly more familiar, name. For years, if you were new in UN*Xland from DOSland, you were expected to announce this fact by saying

alias dir ls
alias DIR ls
alias type cat
alias TYPE cat
in your .cshrc (you probably weren't told about other shells, so I'll not cover their peculiar syntax here). This supposedly made you feel more at home by letting you type TYPE filename.txt instead of cat filename.txt. Note, however, that it's still case sensitive, and that it probably doesn't look like DOS. Such aliases are still useful, however, to shorten long commands.

csh-style aliases

These take the form
alias short long
where each of short and long is a single "shell word" (in particular, you probably want to quote long!).

If long looks "normal", then short arg1 arg2... will be treated as long arg1 arg2. So you can say

alias print 'lpr -Pmyprinter'
and it will work.

If long contains csh history expansion tokens, then short arg1 arg2... will be replaced with long, after history expansion is performed on it as if short arg1 arg2... were the previous line of input! Here are 2 examples from the manual:

alias lookup 'grep \!^ /etc/passwd'
lookup bill
expands to grep bill /etc/passwd;
alias  print `pr \!* | lpr
print file1.c file1.h file2.c
runs pr on file1.c file1.h file2.c and sense the result off to lpr.

Thanks to the horrible syntax of csh, it is hard to think of something more awkward than writing a good alias there. But we still do it.

zsh-style aliases

These use the different syntax

alias short=long
just to annoy you. The -g option allows you to set a global alias, which expands anywhere in the command line. Alias expansions ending in a space trigger attempted expansion of the next word after.

Despite all this, this style of aliases is actually simpler than csh's: you cannot manipulate the words of the command line. The availability of functions at the shell level means you can use aliases just for simpler purposes, where they are more handy; use functions when you need to process the parameters.

Other Bourne-shell derived shells generally have similar aliasing mechanisms.

Alias is a Television series that originally aired in the U.S. on ABC at Sundays at 9:00 PM Eastern Time but is now on Wednesdays after Lost. I believe it also airs on CTV in Canada at the same time, but could easily be wrong/out of date. I know nothing about the rest of the world. Warning, there may be some spoilers for season one below. I'm only going to talk about season one because A. I'm lazy and don't feel like updating it, B. I've got a girlfriend and a job and sleep and so on and don't have time to update it, but mainly C. it's a somewhat involved show that people will best enjoy if they watch from the start and work forward. Rent the DVDs ok?

It's a show with several layers. On the surface it's an action oriented spy thriller. Each week the main character Sydney Bristow goes out on a dangerous mission for SD-6. When she was recruited into SD-6 she believed it to be a secret division of the CIA, in truth it was one of a number of private for-profit espionage groups operating around the world. Now she knows the truth, and each time she does a mission for SD-6 she also does a counter-mission for the CIA. During the first season the show made heavy use of the cliffhanger. Each episode literally left you hanging with about 10 minutes of story that would begin the next episode. To make the show more accessible the network has cut down on that during the latter part of season 1 and in season 2.

Beneath that outer layer of story you are left with Sydney's relationships with the people around her. She has to deceive her SD-6 partner Marcus Dixon, who believes he is working for the U.S. government. She obviously cannot tell her friends what she does for a living, instead allowing them to believe her cover, that she works for an international bank. She definately has deep feelings for one of her friends, a now ex-journalist Will Tippin, and also for her CIA handler Michael Vaughn. She has a complex relationship with her father, they were never close while she was growing up and Sydney only finds out at the beginning of first season that he is also a spy. He is already a double agent within SD-6 working for the CIA.

The final element of the show is an over-arcing plot concentrating on a set of artifacts from an artist, architect, and prophet who lived many centuries ago. This storyline was in the very first episode, though that won't be obvious for some time. This man, Milo Giacomo Rambaldi, was a prophet greater then Nostradamus. Rambaldi was able to see the future in such detail that he was able to use specific part numbers of items being manufactured today within his designs. He used encryption, compression, and chemical reactions to hide his messages in a variety of subtle means. Each organization among the privatized espionage groups in the world of Alias is after these works for whatever fruits they may bare. This part of the show continues on through the later seasons when many other story elements reach closure.

These elements overlap with each other with fluid ease, creating an excellent show. Exciting to watch, sometimes heartfelt, and always leaving you wanting more.

sources:
http://www.abc.go.com/primetime/alias/
http://www.alias-online.net/

A"li*as (#), adv. [L., fr. alius. See Else.] Law (a)

Otherwise; otherwise called; -- a term used in legal proceedings to connect the different names of any one who has gone by two or more, and whose true name is for any cause doubtful; as, Smith, alias Simpson.

(b)

At another time.

 

© Webster 1913.


A"li*as, n.; pl. Aliases (#). [L., otherwise, at another time.] Law (a)

A second or further writ which is issued after a first writ has expired without effect.

(b)

Another name; an assumed name.

 

© Webster 1913.

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