Criticism.Com: Tech White Papers, Linguistics, Critical Theory

Criticism.com presents white papers and essays on technology, critical theory, linguistics, and discourse analysis.

Recent Publications

Modernize Your Network with VMware Telco Cloud Platform. Powered by field-proven telco infrastructure and cloud-first automation, VMware Telco Cloud Platform is a cloud-native platform that enables CSPs to rapidly deploy and efficiently operate multi-vendor CNFs and VNFs with agility and scalability across 5G networks. Published by VMware.

Blog Post: Announcing VMware Telco Cloud Platform — A Cloud-Native Architecture to Propel CSPs Toward 5G. How can you modernize your network and your infrastructure in a way that gives you the agility and efficiency to be able to pursue your 5G objectives while maintaining carrier-grade performance, quality, and reliability? This blog post announces VMware Telco Cloud Platform and explains how its cloud-native architecture can modernize your network for 5G. Published on the VMware Telco Cloud Blog.

Telco Cloud For Dummies. CSPs that can undergo a profound transformation to capitalize on the promise of the digital era can move from disrupted to disruptor. Imperative to this transformation is the evolution toward a cloud model—a telco cloud. With a telco cloud, CSPs gain a modern platform to design, deploy, and manage new digital services and applications with greater agility, security, and customization. I was a contributing writer and editor for this eBook published by Wiley and VMware.

Intrinsic Security for Telco Clouds: Protect Infrastructure with Built-in Measures. This short paper explains how the VMware Telco Cloud emphasizes intrinsic security—security that’s integrated with the software and infrastructure so it’s programmable, automated, adaptive, and context-aware. Published by VMware.

Intrinsic Security for Telco Clouds at the Dawn of 5G: An Integrated Approach to Helping CSPs Meet Emerging Security Standards. This technical white paper summarizes the security risks and requirements that CSPs face as they transition to 5G networks and increasingly rely on virtualization, containers, and cloud computing. The paper illustrates how VMware technology protects telecom networks with an array of built-in security measures, many of which can be automated. Published by VMware.

Blog Post: Adapting to a Changing Telco Landscape and Shifting Requirements with Built-in Security. Published on the VMware Telco Cloud Blog.

VMware Ready for Telco Cloud. A short overview of the solution.

Kubernetes on vSphere For Dummies. Book published by Wiley and VMware.

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes: An Introduction to Cloud-Native Technology. This e-book introduces you to containers and Kubernetes, explains their business value, explores their use cases, and illuminates how they can accelerate your organization’s digital transformation. Published by VMware Press.

Disclaimer: Although Criticism.Com contains links to white papers that I’ve written while employed by VMware or EMC, the views expressed in the pages published on Criticism.Com are strictly my own and are not the opinions or views of VMware or any company that I have worked for in the past, such as EMC. The white papers published by VMware or EMC are on their respective web sites; these are just links to those papers.

Containers on Virtual Machines or Bare Metal?: Deploying and Securely Managing Containerized Applications at Scale. This white paper meets objections to running containers on VMs with technical explanations and evidence-based responses. It argues that combining containers and VMs establishes the perfect catalyst for reliably and robustly deploying and operating containerized applications at scale. Published by VMware.

Driving Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes: How Kubernetes Manages Containerized Applications to Deliver Business Value. A white paper published by VMware.

Cloud Native Stack Security eBooklet. Published by VMware.

A Dash of Security: Locking Down Kubernetes Admin Access to Thwart Crytojacking. An unsecured Kubernetes Dashboard on the Internet is an open invitation for hackers to hijack your cloud compute resources to mine cryptocurrency. Here’s how to lock the dashboard down. Published on the VMware cloud-native apps blog.

Glossary of Cloud-Native Terms. This booklet presents definitions for terminology in the cloud-native space. The definitions are not intended to be axiomatic, dictionary-style definitions but rather plain-language descriptions of what a term means and an explanation of why the technology associated with it matters. Published by VMware.

Demystifying Kubernetes. Published by VMware.

Managing Microservices Across Multiple Kubernetes Clusters. Published by VMware.

Managing Microservices at the Application Layer with Istio. Published by VMware.

Securing Cloud Platforms with Project Lightwave. Published by VMware.

Disclaimer: Although Criticism.Com contains links to white papers that I’ve written while employed by VMware or EMC, the views expressed in the pages published on Criticism.Com are strictly my own and are not the opinions or views of VMware or any company that I have worked for in the past, such as EMC. The white papers published by VMware or EMC are on their respective web sites; these are just links to those papers.

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White Papers

Disclaimer: Although Criticism.Com contains links to white papers that I’ve written while employed by VMware or EMC, the views expressed in the pages published on Criticism.Com are strictly my own and are not the opinions or views of VMware or any company that I have worked for in the past, such as EMC. The white papers published by VMware or EMC are on their respective web sites; these are just links to those papers.r

Driving Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes: How Kubernetes Manages Containerized Applications to Deliver Business Value. A white paper published by VMware.

Containers on Virtual Machines or Bare Metal?: Deploying and Securely Managing Containerized Applications at Scale. This white paper meets objections to running containers on VMs with technical explanations and evidence-based responses. It argues that combining containers and VMs establishes the perfect catalyst for reliably and robustly deploying and operating containerized applications at scale. Published by VMware.

Linguistics

Topical Structure Analysis of Accomplished English Prose: This study analyzes the topical structure of accomplished essays and compares the results with the topical structure tacitly preferred by assessors in their judgments of student essays. The paper examines whether the same patterns of topical structure that are rewarded by assessors in student writing recur in professionals writing within a similar genre.

Creating Coherence with the Passive Voice: Joseph M. Williams, the author of two influential books on academic and professional writing, advocates the use of the passive voice to manage the flow of information across sentences. For Williams, passive voice not only develops an idea by adding details to it but also tightly fuses sentences into a coherent whole. More: The passive voice can place new information in a syntactic slot that emphasizes it–the end of the sentence.

Identifying and Resolving Ambiguity: This page analyzes some headlines that exhibit at least one of three kinds of linguistic ambiguity–lexical, syntactic, and semantic. In some of the examples, the unintended meaning is so strong that, on first reading, it overshadows the intended one.

Interpretation and Indeterminacy in Discourse Analysis: This essay argues a hard line: the exact meaning of a speaker’s utterance in a contextualized exchange is often indeterminate. Interactional linguistics, however, reduces the indeterminacy and yields a more principled interpretation than other approaches to discourse analysis.

A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discourse Analysis: This essay takes Wittgenstein’s influence on discourse analysis a step further by using his writings as the theoretical foundation for an approach to analyzing discourse that is distinct from speech act theory, which stems from the analytic tradition in philosophy. The essay suggests that a Wittgenstein-inspired approach is closer in spirit and content to that of an unlikely candidate whose views, in contrast to the analytic school, harbor a distinctly Continental flavor and influence critical theory: Mikhail Bakhtin.

Critical Theory

Max Weber’s View of Objectivity in Social Science: This essay seeks to shed light on Weber’s view of the applicability of objectivity by answering a question that dogs Weberian scholarship: Was Weber an advocate of value-free social science?

Saussure’s Sign: The sign, the signifier, and the signified are concepts of the school of thought known as structuralism, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, during lectures he gave between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. His views revolutionized the study of language, inaugurated modern linguistics, and influenced critical theory. The central tenet of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life are unintelligible except through their network of relationships, making the sign and the system (or structure) in which the sign is embedded primary concepts. As such, a sign–for instance, a word–gets its meaning only in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system of signs.

The Myth of Psychoanalysis: Wittgenstein Contra Freud In this essay, my central thesis is that if, as Wittgenstein says, Freudian psychoanalysis is based in myth, its application to actual psychological problems does not, indeed cannot, resolve them. Instead, all it can do is clarify them or present them in a different light. Implicit in my argument is that this is how Wittgenstein thought of the results of psychoanalysis, much like he thought of the application of his philosophical technique to philosophical problems, especially those of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. As such, Wittgenstein is also subverting a larger myth: that the insights gained in psychoanalysis lead to the scientific resolution of psychological problems. Read on …

Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Bargain Trips: See The Country By Car And Save In A Drive-away, in the Chicago Tribune.

Book Projects and E-Books

Telco Cloud For Dummies. CSPs that can undergo a profound transformation to capitalize on the promise of the digital era can move from disrupted to disruptor. Imperative to this transformation is the evolution toward a cloud model—a telco cloud. With a telco cloud, CSPs gain a modern platform to design, deploy, and manage new digital services and applications with greater agility, security, and customization. I was a contributing writer and editor for this e-book published by Wiley and VMware.

Kubernetes on vSphere For Dummies. Book published by Wiley and VMware.

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes: An Introduction to Cloud-Native Technology. This e-book introduces you to containers and Kubernetes, explains their business value, explores their use cases, and illuminates how they can accelerate your organization’s digital transformation. Published by VMware Press.

Cloud Native Stack Security eBooklet. Published by VMware.

Glossary of Cloud-Native Terms. This booklet presents definitions for terminology in the cloud-native space. The definitions are not intended to be axiomatic, dictionary-style definitions but rather plain-language descriptions of what a term means and an explanation of why the technology associated with it matters. Published by VMware.

 The Encyclopedia of the Democratic Party and The Encyclopedia of the Republican Party. Won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award. (M. E. Sharpe was acquired to Routledge in 2014.)

Resume: Technical White Paper Writer and Technology Evangelist.

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