Bachelor of Software Engineering (Hons) - Overview

Software Engineering is the creative application of engineering principles and methods to the design and development of hardware and software systems.

The programme provides students with an excellent foundation in current software development practices. Specific studies include all facets of the software engineering process and programming languages such as C programming and Java. This programme provides graduates with the necessary skills and industry experience to develop quality large-scale software systems and manage various aspects of software engineering especially project management and quality assurance.

Entry Requirements:

Entry Level	Entry Requirements
Taylor's Foundation in Computing (FIC)	CGPA 2.0*
Taylor's Diploma in Information Technology (DIT)**	Average of 60%
Sijil Tinggi Persekolahan Malaysia (STPM)	CGPA 2.75 (3 subjects) Including C in Mathematics
Unified Examination Certificate (UEC)	5B (Maximum 22 points) Including B in Mathematics and English
A Levels	CCD (Minimum 220 points) Including C in Mathematics
Australian Matriculation (SAM)	ATAR 75 Including 14 in Mathematics
Canadian Pre-University (CPU)***	65% Average Including 70% in Mathematics
International Baccalaureate (IB)***	32 points Including 5 points in High Level Mathematics AND 6 points in General / Business Mathematics

*Credit in Mathematics at SPM
**Exemptions of subjects for the chosen degree will be on a case-to-case basis
***Based on 6 subjects
Note: All information is correct at time of web update (November 2011) and is subject to change.

English Requirements:

Entry Level	Entry Requirements
IELTS	6.0
TOEFL	79 (Internet Based Test) 550 (Paper Based Test) 213 (Computer Based Test)
MUET	Band 4
UEC English	B4
O Level / 1119 English	C3
Taylor's Intensive English Programme (IEN)	Upper Intermediate Grade B or Advanced Grade C

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Diploma in Information Technology - Overview

The Diploma programme is designed to equip students with the necessary combination of knowledge and skills to assist in an organisation’s computing infrastructure and its users. The programme provides a broad-based education in technological discipline with aspects of information and communications technology, mathematics, and providing the students with the skills and knowledge to responsibly be part of today's IT workforce. Students are exposed to various techniques of analysing user requirements and specifications, as well as designing and implementing of software systems.

This programme will prepare students for roles in programming and software development, or research-based careers in the IT industry or to continue their higher studies. This programme is also embedded with the relevant study skills and practices to develop effective communication skills which prepares them for an entry level executive career particularly in the area of technical support, through the development of personal and interpersonal skills and, in particular, the ability to work independently or within a team, and technical capability and skills in IT-related industries.


Entry Requirements:

Entry Level	Entry Requirements
SPM / 'O' Levels	Minimum 3 credits including credit in Mathematics
STPM	Grade C in One Subject
'A' Levels	Pass
Other qualifications	Other equivalent qualifications will be considered on a case-by-case basis

Intakes: March & July

Duration: 2 ½ years

Further Studies: Upon completion of the Diploma, students who qualify may apply for a direct entry into the second year of the degrees offered at the Taylor's School of Computing and IT.

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AT&T fires back at FCC staff report on T-Mobile deal

he U.S. Federal Communications Commission has invited questions about its impartiality with a staff report laying out concerns about AT&T's proposed acquisition of rival mobile carrier T-Mobile USA, AT&T said Thursday.
The FCC announced Nov. 22 that its staff had found the proposed $39 billion deal to be contrary to the public interest, and on Tuesday, the FCC released its 157-page staff report laying out concerns about the merger, while also granting AT&T's request to pull back its application to transfer T-Mobile spectrum licenses.
AT&T fired back on Thursday, calling the staff report unfair and lacking in objectivity.
"We expected that the AT&T-T-Mobile transaction would receive careful, considered, and fair analysis," Jim Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said in a blog post. "Unfortunately, the preliminary FCC Staff Analysis offers none of that. The document is so obviously one-sided that any fair-minded person reading it is left with the clear impression that it is an advocacy piece, and not a considered analysis."
The report raises questions about whether its authors were "predisposed," he added. "The report cherry-picks facts to support its views, and ignores facts that don't," Cicconi said. "Where facts were lacking, the report speculates, with no basis, and then treats its own speculations as if they were fact. This is clearly not the fair and objective analysis to which any party is entitled, and which we have every right to expect."
The staff report "dispassionately" analyzed the facts of the merger, based on a 200,000-page record and the participation of more than 50 businesses and consumer groups, an FCC spokesman said. "The AT&T/T-Mobile merger would result in the single greatest increase in wireless industry consolidation ever proposed," he added. "The objective analysis concluded, like that of the Department of Justice and multiple state attorneys general, that the transaction would decrease competition, innovation and investment, and harm consumers."
The FCC, in the staff report, has ignored its own findings that 90% of U.S. residents have a choice of five or more mobile carriers, Cicconi's blog post said.
The report also discounts AT&T's promised 4G rollout, he added. AT&T has said the merger will allow it to roll out LTE mobile broadband service to 97% of U.S. residents, instead of the 80% that the company had planned. The FCC report dismisses this commitment based on "speculation" that AT&T would expand its network even without the merger, Cicconi said.
The FCC report also ignores job gains that would likely come as AT&T expands its network, Cicconi added. AT&T and supporters of the merger have argued that AT&T's promised $8 billion in network deployment spending would create up to 96,000 new jobs at AT&T and other companies. The FCC, in October, estimated that its new $4.5-billion-a-year broadband fund would create up to 500,000 jobs over six years, he noted

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Sprint, Clearwire lay out deals on LTE, WiMax, funding

The companies will cooperate on continued WiMax service and future LTE buildouts

 

 Sprint Nextel may help finance Clearwire's LTE network and keep offering WiMax service through 2015 under a set of agreements worth as much as $1.6 billion that the companies laid out on Thursday.

The deals fleshed out a non-binding memorandum of understanding that the companies announced in late October and will help Clearwire to stay afloat and maintain its WiMax network, as well as build a planned LTE (Long-Term Evolution) system. As they detailed the new agreements, the companies also announced that Clearwire had made a scheduled $237 million interest payment on its debt, which Clearwire had suggested it might delay.
Thursday's announcement helped to clarify how Sprint and Clearwire hope to maintain their current partnership and move forward. Clearwire and Sprint both use a WiMax network, now reaching more than 130 million U.S. residents, that was the country's first 4G network. Sprint is Clearwire's majority shareholder and biggest wholesale partner. However, Clearwire has struggled financially since its creation in 2008, and both companies have separately announced plans to adopt LTE, which is becoming the industry-standard 4G technology. They will also use different versions of LTE but have vowed to make them work together.
Sprint will pay Clearwire $926 million for unlimited access to its WiMax network in 2012 and 2013, subject to certain conditions, the companies said. Sprint said it will continue to sell WiMax devices through at least 2012 with two-year contracts and support them through the course of the contracts. Sprint gets long-term usage-based pricing commitments for WiMax in 2014 and beyond and will be able to use the WiMax network at least through 2015.
The companies also said they set competitive long-term pricing for re-wholesaling of WiMax by Sprint, allowing Sprint to set up MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) relationships with other carriers.
Looking toward the LTE future, the companies said they would collaborate on an LTE network plan and that Sprint would pay Clearwire as much as $350 million, over two years, for capacity on Clearwire's LTE network. The deal gives Sprint long-term usage-based pricing for the network in 2012 and beyond. But Sprint's payments depend on Clearwire meeting certain build-out targets and network specifications by June 2013.
Sprint is looking to Clearwire's LTE network as a complement to its own LTE system, which is to be rolled out as part of its multi-technology Network Vision deployment starting next year. The two companies have agreed to identify cell sites where Clearwire's LTE will help Sprint cover "hot spots" with high demand for mobile data. And depending on the timing of the buildout, Sprint said it expects to start selling devices including phones and laptop cards that support Clearwire's network starting in 2013.

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Feds report tech job losses in Mass. between '01 and '09

- A snapshot of high-tech development in Massachusetts by the federal government found that tech employment in the state declined 15%, or 47,000 jobs, between 2001 and 2009.
That decline sounds dramatic, but underlying it is a shift away from manufacturing to services and scientific jobs that require highly educated workers, according to a recently released U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report.
Computer equipment manufacturing jobs, for instance, fell 40%; communications equipment manufacturing jobs declined 78%; and even software publishers, a labor category that includes developers, declined by 10% over this period. Massachusetts wasn't alone. The IT industry shrank nationally as an employer over the last decade.
Meanwhile jobs in scientific research, in particular, increased by more than 32%, accounting for 44,000 of the state's 272,700 tech jobs counted in 2009. One out every five dollars paid in wages in that state is attributed to tech.
That increase is the result of the state's bio-tech industries, with most of the beneficiaries being the highly educated, said Frank Conte, editor of the Beacon Hill Institute's economic indicators project. The Institute is the research arm of the economics department at Suffolk University in Boston.
Even as the overall number of jobs declined, tech wages overall increased nearly 30%, according to the BLS.
For instance, software publishers -- the BLS counted 22,000 such jobs in 2009 -- saw their average wages increase 25.5% to $119,300.
The rising wages, coupled with the decline of workers in some areas, means "the industry is getting more productivity out of fewer workers," said Conte, which may also point to increasing outsourcing of lower-value work.
For those involved in scientific research, wages grew 45% during this period, reaching $110,000.
Christopher Anderson, the president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, an industry group, said there are fewer large technology companies in the state and in New England, "but there has been an explosion of small, younger technology companies."
Anderson said the council is working with others in New England to increase the visibility of these firms.
But citing the state's unemployment rate, which has been just above 7%, lower than the national average, Anderson said "I don't see a negative trend here."
The BLS study cuts itself off at a time when tech unemployment was rising. But the Federal Reserve Board is reporting growth in revenue and wages in New England tech firms.
In its latest Beige Book released Wednesday, the Fed said that its New England software and IT contacts are reporting year-over-year revenue increases from mid-single digits to 20%.
These firms, as well, are increasing headcounts, many by more than 5%, according to the Beige Book, which is a collection of anecdotal reports of economic activity from unidentified sources around the U.S.
Many firms also report "continued difficulty in attracting and retaining qualified software engineers, programmers, and sales personnel," the Beige Book reported. Annual wage increases for most employees were reported between 3% and 5%, "with one firm increasing the wages of software engineers by more."

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VirtualSharp to enable disaster recovery to public clouds

VirtualSharp hopes to soon let its customers set up disaster recovery plans that fail over from their private clouds to public clouds, the company announced this week at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood City, California.
VirtualSharp's software lets customers do disaster recovery on their private clouds and also easily simulate failovers -- as often as daily or even every few hours -- in order to make sure the disaster recovery process will work properly in a real outage. Currently, customers use a different internal data center or additional virtual machines for the failover.
On Wednesday, VirtualSharp announced features in its ReliableDR software that will let public cloud providers provide the disaster recovery services. Companies will be able to sign up for the service online and set a so-called service level agreement for the disaster recovery process. For instance, the customer can say that it wants to be able to recover an application in 30 minutes and run a disaster recovery test every six hours. If those parameters aren't met, the cloud service provider can send an email to the customer indicating what is causing the holdup.
"This means that when you have a threat to recovery it will be found long before it impedes or becomes an obstacle to recovery" in a real outage, Carlos Escapa, CEO for VirtualSharp, said.
For now, the product is compatible with clouds -- public and private -- using VMware hypervisors.
VirtualSharp expects to be able to announce a public cloud partner in the coming weeks and anticipates service availability in the first quarter.
Pricing will be dependent on the public cloud provider. Escapa hopes to eventually achieve a cost of US$100 per virtual machine in the public cloud per month. Current customers license the software and pay a maintenance fee based on the number of virtual machines they use.
VirtualSharp represents a new kind of disaster recovery process, and not just because it automates the process, Escapa said. A company may be doing data replication for disaster recovery, but that's not enough anymore because companies are increasingly running complex applications that may span data centers.
"I feel strongly that the focus is not so much on data protection. There's a shift to service protection, which is data plus apps plus configuration plus storage plus the virtual machine," he said. "All of these things have to click together to make sure a service can be restarted if the cloud gets blown away."
While VirtualSharp has large customers, it has been surprised to find that half of its users are small companies. That's because smaller companies tend to be the ones going "whole hog" to the cloud, Escapa said. "Therefore, they actually have mission critical apps being virtualized. We have seen the cost of an outage can be very high for small to medium size businesses, so for them this is a form of insurance," he said.

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Top search queries, Facebook posts shine light on 2011

Disaster in Japan, Casey Anthony trial account for top news stories of the year for Bing, AOL and Facebook

 

 As the end of the year approaches, a look at what people searched for and shared online can start painting a picture of what most interested people during 2011.

Microsoft this week released a list of top search queries on Bing, while AOL released a similar list and Facebook weighed in with the most-shared news stories by its users.
Google, the world's largest search service, hasn't yet released its top 2011 search queries, but nevertheless one can already get an idea of what most captivated people throughout the year.
Based on those reports, online user interest was all over the map this year, ranging from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March to zodiac signs, faithful dogs and criminal trials.
The disaster in Japan drew a lot of attention -- in fact, Facebook said satellite images of hard-hit areas before and after the disaster published in the New York Time's was the most shared news article of the year.
Microsoft and AOL noted that the Japan disaster was the fourth most searched story on their respective search sites.
Stories on the Casey Anthony trial, the death of Osama Bin Laden and Hurricane Irene were also among the most popular search items on Bing.
AOL said its search users showed strong interest in Casey Anthony trial, the Royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
The most shared articles on Facebook showed a bit more user eccentricity.
Two of the top 10 shared articles on Facebook were about zodiac signs, and another was about a giant crocodile captured in the Philippines. Facebook's dog lovers were shared stories about a faithful dog mourning the death of a Navy SEAL and about a dog in Japan staying with his friend in the rubble of the earthquake and tsunami.

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