Inktomi Corp., a young company that has licensed its search engine technology to the likes of Microsoft and Wired Digital's Hotbot, has released its flagship product, called Traffic Server. The product is a "large-scale commercial network cache," which is designed to conserve bandwidth by saving frequently-viewed Web site data on a central server, thus reducing the amount of time it takes network users to download pages. UUnet and Nippon Telegraph are evaluating Traffic Server - targeted at Internet Service Providers (ISPs), backbone carriers, telecommunications companies, and large corporate networks - which is available on the Sun Solaris platform at a cost of $19,995. In an effort to demonstrate its relevance in the lives of ordinary citizens, NASA today revealed two research efforts targeting the spectrum of women's health issues, including breast cancer, fertility, and osteoporosis.
Both projects cull technologies and lessons learned from NASA's endeavors, such as the Hubble space telescope. Adapting the ways in which the telescope maps the stars to Earth-bound instruments can help doctors more easily detect tiny spots in breast tissue than they can in mammograms, for example.
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Java will jabber for those who want it. At least that's what IBM is promising with its new prototype "screen reader" that will make applications and Web pages speak their contents to blind users as well as those with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
Codenamed JavaJive, the technology is expected to be included as a part of version 1.2 of Sun's Java developers kit and readied for release in the second half of 1998. IBM said JavaJive will speak more than just English, including several European languages and Japanese.
