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

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

Recent Publications

Containers on Virtual Machines or Bare Metal?: Deploying and Securely Managing Containerized Applications at Scale. This 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. VMware Pivotal Container Service, which uses Kubernetes to orchestrate containers on virtual machines in a VMware software-defined data center, stands at the center of this combination. This white paper is published by VMware.

Deploy Modern Apps with Kubernetes as a Service: Cut Costs and Control Access with VMware Kubernetes Engine. Kubernetes as a service (KaaS) makes the transformational power of Kubernetes instantly available to developers. KaaS lets you exploit the power and benefits of orchestration without the overhead of deploying, securing, operating, and maintaining Kubernetes. VMware Kubernetes Engine puts Kubernetes at your fingertips. 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.

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.

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.

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

Accelerate Deployment by Moving Apps to VMware Pivotal Container Service. Repackaging an application to run in containers and then moving the app to a modern platform—that is, replatforming the app—is a critical step toward reaping the benefits of container technology. Replatforming accelerates software development, eases infrastructure management, and automates deployment. After deployment, a replatformed application can be orchestrated and scaled on demand with Kubernetes. A solution overview published by VMware.

Photon OS: A Linux Container-Optimized Operating System. Project Photon OS is an open source Linux container host optimized for cloud-native applications, cloud platforms, and VMware infrastructure. Photon OS provides a secure runtime environment for running containers.

Build and Manage Cloud-Native Apps with VMware Pivotal Container Service, a solution overview published by VMware.

Securing Cloud Platforms with Project Lightwave, a white paper published by VMware.

Repackage Applications with Containers to Accelerate Application Development and Deployment, a solution overview published by VMware.

Deliver Self-Service Infrastructure for Agile Development, a solution overview published by VMware.

Running Photon OS on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute. Photon OS can serve as a runtime environment for Linux containers on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). This article demonstrates how to get Photon OS up and running on EC2, customize Photon with cloud-init, and run a containerized application with Docker.

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

Deploying Cloud-Native Applications with Photon OS, a white paper published by VMware.

Document Icon EMC Isilon Scale-Out NAS for In-Place Hadoop Data Analytics. Storing data in EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached storage optimizes data management for Hadoop analytics. Separating data from HDFS clients and storing it in an Isilon cluster provides scalability, efficiency, and workflow flexibility. Published by EMC.

Document Icon OneFS Multiprotocol Security Untangled. This white paper describes the role that identity management, authentication, and access control play in the EMC Isilon OneFS security system. Published by EMC.

Document Icon Data Lakes for Data Science: Integrating Analytics Tools with Shared Infrastructure for Big Data. This paper examines the relationship between three primary domains of an enterprise big data program: data science, analytics frameworks, and IT infrastructure. A decision about tools or infrastructure in one domain can affect, and potentially limit, what can be done in the other domains. Published by EMC.

Document Icon EMC Isilon Multitenancy for Hadoop Big Data Analytics. The EMC Isilon scale-out storage platform provides multitenancy through access zones that segregate tenants and their data sets. An access zone presents a portion of an Isilon cluster as a secure virtual storage region with a unique HDFS root directory for the zone’s tenant. With NFS, SMB, and HDFS access to each zone, an Isilon cluster delivers a scalable multitenant storage solution for analytics tools. Published by EMC Isilon.

Document Icon Compliance and Security for Hadoop Scale-Out Data Lakes. As credit card companies, medical researchers, and financial institutions analyze data with Hadoop to detect fraud, improve health care, and create innovative products, the stored data poses a compliance problem: The Hadoop File System lacks the enterprise security features that compliance regulations require. As a result, big data analysts are imperiling the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of their Hadoop data. This white paper explains how the EMC Isilon OneFS operating system securely stores data for Hadoop analytics to help meet such compliance regulations as PCI DSS, FISMA, and HIPAA. Published by EMC.

Document Icon EMC Isilon Multiprotocol Data Access with a Unified Security Model. This white paper explains how the unified security model of OneFS resolves mismatches between the permissions of Windows and Unix systems while preserving the security of files and satisfying the expectations of users. Published by EMC Isilon.

Running Containers at Scale with Photon Platform: A Secure, Multitenant Architecture for Cloud-Native Applications, a white paper 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

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

Document Icon Articles at Sys-Con Media and in XML Journal.

Technical Articles

Running Photon OS on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute. Photon OS can serve as a runtime environment for Linux containers on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). This articles demonstrates how to get Photon OS up and running on EC2, customize Photon with cloud-init, and run a containerized application with Docker.

Setting Up a Kubernetes Cluster. Running a web application on Photon Platform demonstrates the power of Kubernetes as a service.

Book Projects

Storage Architectures for Big Data Analytics.

The Encyclopedia of the Democratic Party and The Encyclopedia of the Republican Party, M.E. Sharpe, Publisher. Won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques.

Resume: Technology Evangelist.

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