This new Diana design reminds to the famous Diana yacht’s of the 80’s like Jamaica Bay and Rio Rita. With her steel displacement hull in combination with classic lines and a beautiful canoe stern this yacht offers total luxury and comfortable cruising performance. With a range of 5,000 nm and maximum speed of 14 knots she will be suitable for blue water cruising around the world.

Eye catcher of Hakvoort’s YN 246 is the owner’s deck with the luxurious master stateroom at the foreside with a 270 degree panoramic view. This lay-out asks for a raised wheelhouse, which Diana’s designers have integrated in the yacht uncompromising in her classic lines. Together with four VIP staterooms on the lower deck she can accommodate a total of 10 guests.

The amount of tenders and water sport toys is unique for a yacht of this size, the area forward of the raised wheelhouse is used as a garage which carries multiple tenders and water sport toys. On the main deck there is a large tender bay where a 7,5m (!) tender is stored. When the tender is launched, this area will be used as a bathing place, the boarding ladder brings you to the fold-out swimming platform to get in close contact with the sea.

Panasonic has started shipping samples of an ultra-thin Blu-ray disc drive for lightweight notebooks.

The new drive is capable of reading and burning high-definition DVDs in the Blu-ray format. It also supports reading and writing standard DVDs and CDs, and can store 50 Gbytes of content.Panasonic has slimmed down a standard DVD disc drive to 0.28 of an inch thick. Toshiba has said that it plans to release an equally thin drive for reading and writing DVDs in the HD DVD format, which competes with Blu-ray.

Ultra-thin disk drives make it possible for notebook makers to build even lighter and slimmer products. The drives could also find a place in even small ultra-mobile PCs.

Panasonic has other Blu-ray disc drives. Last summer, the company became one of the first to introduce a drive with a 4x writing speed. The latest drive is 2x.

Marvell today unveiled a new version of its TopDog wireless chipsets that could dramatically improve the speed of already fast 802.11n Wi-Fi connections. The 11n-450 will use three transmitters and three receivers to achieve a maximum speed of 450 megabits per second. The connection is 50 percent faster than the 300Mbps peak for today’s draft spec 802.11n chipsets and results in even more range: the new chip increases range by 160 percent over 300Mbps models and sports about five times more range than the earlier 802.11g standard, Marvell claims. The advancement should allow multiple streaming videos at once over longer ranges.The chipset is technically compatible with official 802.11n and earlier Wi-Fi standards but includes special features that should improve performance over other chipsets, such as Special Time Block Coding that maintains speed over longer distances. The chipset itself is made on a 90-nanometer process that should consume less power and generate less heat than most earlier wireless hardware.

Marvell plans to ship the new TopDog sometime in the spring and believes it will be used for notebook computers as well as media hubs, game consoles, and network routers; no specific companies have yet announced that they will use the technology.

Japanese rail operator Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Central) has announced it will build the world’s fastest maglev system, with 310mph (500km/h) vehicles running along a 180-mile (290km) track between Tokyo and central Japan.

According to Reuters, the 5.1 trillion yen ($44.7bn) project will be completed by 2025, and while JR Central has not confirmed the final destination, previous reports suggested a “first phase” between Tokyo and the central industrial city of Nagoya, with a later extension to Osaka.

A company spokesman confirmed that the new maglev, designed to replace the country’s famous bullet trains, will outpace its Shanghai counterpart - currently the world’s only commercially-operative example of the tech which flies at a modest 267mph (430km/h).

In China meanwhile, state media proudly reported earlier this month that the country’s first 190mph (300km/h) bullet train has rolled off the production line, destined to cut journey times from 80 to 30 minutes on the 71-mile (115km) Beijing-Tianjin route, and due to enter service before the Olympics kick off in August next year.

Wang Yongping, a Ministry of Railways spokesman, explained that the streamlined aluminium alloy train is the “lightest of its kind in the world”, and duly enthused: “China has joined an elite world club after Japan, France and Germany, to become the fourth country capable of turning out such high speed trains.”

France is, of course, the operator of the world’s fastest conventional tech train, which regularly reach 199mph (320km/h). Back in April, it broke the world’s fastest “train on rails” record by accelerating a modified TGV to an impressive 356mph (574.8km/h).Thanks theregister.co.uk