I've been contemplating the ever-present specter of death and eternal nothingness, mostly because Warcraft has been getting a little dull lately. I'm not too worried about the disposition of what eternal soul I may or may not possess, but I realize my surviving loved ones will have to deal with the rapidly cooling rest of me.

I've pretty much settled on cremation, because of the efficiency and because the whole pallbearer conversation is so awkward. But then what? I'm just not an urn sort of guy. Those who are into urns, who are part of the urn scene, recognize me when I come in the door and avoid me.

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Technology, as always, comes to the rescue. There are so many neat things you can do with the dead, burnt part of yourself these days that mulling over the options is like visiting a death-obsessed Apple Store. Here are just a few of the options available to you, me or anyone mortal.

Ashes to Portraits will take your earthly remains, mix them into some paint and paint a picture ... of you! It's like a really sensitive mad scientist. If life were a movie, I'd completely go for this one, because you know you can't get made into a corpse-portrait without something cool happening. You'll come back to terrorize the family that moved into your home, or you'll help a young insecure woman find true love, or maybe you'll just drive someone insane with the staring. There's no bad outcome.

But this is real life, or so I'm told, so I see no reason to be painted into a portrait of me. I'd rather be a painting of a robot version of myself with vibro-claws, earthquake-beam eyes and a nice HD screen.

This is the go-to destination for the rich, accomplished, dead geekish person, thanks to Space Services. Timothy Leary went this route. So did Gene Roddenberry.

I'm not so keen on it myself. Why should my remains get to do something I can't? I'm the one hauling these calcium phosphates around, but after I get hit by a semi or try the pork tartare, they get to go on the trip of a post-lifetime? Let my ashes buy their own freaking ticket if they want to go into low-Earth orbit so much.

For those who enjoy jewelry, and the being thereof, LifeGem will infuse your remains into a diamond. Becoming one of the hardest substances known to humanity doesn't sound too bad -- at least I'd finally be in shape. Michael Phelps may have a perfect swimmer's body, but can he scratch chrysoberyl? I think not.

I'd want all my cremains made into diamond, though. No reason to break up the set. That's either a lot of diamonds, or one huge diamond, requiring the assets of a small European country to purchase. All the more reason to get one to install me now as overlord.

Yes, you can get your ashes made into a bunch of pencils. I'm not sure if this is commercially available yet, but I don't really care. Who uses pencils? People who are bad at crosswords, that's who. And people taking Scantron tests. Those are not groups I want fondling my remains. I'm sure there are many people who would love nothing more than to spend their post-life being sharpened, but I'm not one of those people.

Of all the services I've covered, the fireworks option is my favorite. My loved ones will be touched to see me reincarnated briefly as a shining work of art in the night sky, and my enemies will enjoy seeing me blow up.

The toughest decision is whether to go for the smiley-face. They can make me into one of those smiley-face fireworks, but do you think they'd be willing to explain to the crowd that I'm being ironic?

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a moralizer, a morphologist and a memento mori.

With CERN's Large Hadron Collider finally coming online, watercoolers around the world will soon be abuzz with talk of Higgs bosons, gluons, and other mind-blowing subatomic thingies. How to keep track of all that quantum fluff? It's easier than you think. Fans of shows like Survivor, American Idol, Top Chef, or America's Next Top Model already have the tools they need to wrap their heads around the fundamental bits in our universe. Turns out, if you understand reality TV, you can understand reality.

Gluons are the Donald Trumps, Tyra Bankses, and Mark Burnetts of the subatomic world. Just as these executive producers (often doubling as onscreen overlords) dictate the rules and force contestants into tightly knit alliances for survival, gluons wield what's called the strong nuclear force, impelling quarks to clump together into the neutrons and protons of an atom's nucleus.

There are six types of quark, arbitrarily named up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. Think of them as the personality types that make every reality show go: the gay one, the jock, the bumpkin, the minority, the brainiac, and the drunken train-wreck girl. They always form alliances (called hadrons), and, well, they work best in threesomes. Hot!

We know the Higgs boson particle must exist — it's why matter has mass. But physicists have been unable to observe it. Have folks like Kelly Clarkson found the Higgs boson of reality TV — enduring stardom? Let's hope so. Because like the real Higgs boson, if lasting fame isn't possible, the whole Theory of Everything will need to be reconsidered.

Photons carry electromagnetism, which bonds electrons to nuclei, and generally keep the excitement level up. Zooming around at the speed of light, these energetic particles hold the whole shebang together — just like Ryan Seacrest, Idol's charismatic liaison between judges, contestants, and viewers.

Many shows have a panel of regulars that sit on the sidelines and observe. This is the lepton family. Some, like electrons, matter (Tom Colicchio).Some, like muons, are overblown and unstable (Simon Cowell). Others, like neutrinos, pass through without ever making contact with reality (Paula Abdul).

W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which causes other particles to decay. These are like the parents, ex-lovers, and others who pop into a show merely to wreak havoc. Think Flavor of Love's Tiffany Pollard, aka New York, who returned in season two to terrorize anew.

Illustrations by Kirsten Ulve

Six years after its official launch, the consumer electronics industry's high-definition successor to DVD still hasn't taken off.

That's got manufacturers concerned enough to take action. Fortunately for consumers, the action will include lowering prices, adding features and integrating players into "connected ecosystems" that let users take advantage of increasingly popular online media as well as content that comes on shiny plastic discs.

Three main factors contribute to the perception that the now-dominant high-definition Blu-ray disc standard is stagnating: high overall prices, a general satisfaction with the current DVD format and buyer confusion in the midst of competing and multiplying technologies.

"The [Blu-ray format] is being adopted in a similar pattern as previous technologies, but it is not being adopted at the same [rate]," says Paul Erickson, Director of DVD and HD Market Research for DisplaySearch. While DVD also took years to become popular, he says, the adoption curve for Blu-ray is even longer and is fraught with bumpy obstacles, such as a few DRM security code and playback problems.

The two-and-a-half-year standards war with a competing high-def format, HD DVD, certainly didn't help. The battle ended in early 2008 when HD DVD's last major supporter, Toshiba, threw in the towel, but consumer confusion lingers. A tough economy has also slowed consumers' acceptance of the format.

At next week's CEDIA 2008 conference, an annual gathering of television and home theater manufacturers, retailers and installers, expect to see an orgy of competing Blu-ray players. Some will focus on low prices (like Philips and Netlogic), and others will highlight features that integrate their physical content with wireless systems to download content from the internet (such as BD Live).

Still, not everyone is convinced that these measures will help Blu-ray. Josh Martin of the Yankee Group says there are still too many "unclear messages" surrounding the format (such as unconventional BD spec profiles, which offer different versions of a player's capabilities) that throw that ecosystem out of whack.

There's also a value disconnect: Most people can't justify purchasing a Blu-ray player that costs five times as much as a DVD player -- especially if it's not five times better. "The opportunity lies in creating a simple, mass-market device," says Martin. So far, that device hasn't arrived, despite tries by everyone from Sony to Magnavox.

Until that device arrives, Martin says, a small price change (like Sony's recent 25 percent drop announcement), or even a cool spec upgrade won't make a difference. "Blu-ray will continue to struggle towards the end of [2008] because the format adoption is driven by price," Martin concludes.

Andy Parsons, a senior vice president at Pioneer and chair of the Blu-ray Association, sees a different side. He points to the 8 million Blu-ray players already sold this year (on pace to triple last year's sales) as an example that people are excited about Blu-ray and HD technologies in general, and will respond to more aggressive features:

"People say [low Blu-ray sales last year] were because of a lack of demand but it was really a lack of supplies. The demand was high," Parsons says.

The shortage wasn't caused by the difficulty and expense of creating Blu-ray discs and players, which many critics of the format often cite, but because manufacturers simply didn't expect to sell that many players in the first place, Parsons says.

Given the state of change, companies at CEDIA 2008 are focusing on developing the technology, regardless of the price. Pioneer will release a new Elite player next week that the company says will surpass every other high-end player in quality, but it comes with a heart-stopping $2,000 price tag. Yamaha is coming out with its own high-end player, as is up-and-coming Sherwood. And, it seems, every big-time audio maker at CEDIA is preparing huge systems to blow up the high-end sound produced by these players.

But that relative excess is the heart of the problem, says Gartner analyst Steve Kleyhans. For him, the entertainment ecosystem is simply too expensive to keep up with. In order to fully realize the value of a Blu-ray player's high-definition features, families also need to buy new HDTVs, new speakers and who knows, maybe an extra fluffy couch. Watching an HD movie on the 14-inch analog TV just won't cut it.

That's why Kleyhans predicts that more HDTVs will be sold as more Blu-ray players and other high-def media proliferates.

What about the threat from downloadable or streaming internet video? Interestingly, most manufacturers and analysts we talked with do not believe that online media is an immediate threat to optical discs.

First, the national bandwidth infrastructure is incomplete and can't come close to delivering HD movies on a wide enough scale to compete with physical discs within the next five years. Second, the market for set-top boxes that display internet video on your TV offers too many options, and most services are still incomplete (for example, Roku's set-top box only provides access to 10 percent of the Netflix catalog). And third, as Martin concludes, the experience is "still not as simple as popping in a disc."

It looks like for the majority of people, popping a disc in a slot for entertainment is proving too hard of a compulsion to let go. It's just going to take awhile before that disc is a Blu-ray one.

Google's famed co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came out to support Chrome, saying that browser technology is fundamental to the company's success, so Google decided to get more involved in this area.

"Everything we do is running on the Web platform. It's very important to us that works well," Page said during a press conference Tuesday that was webcast from Google's headquarters.

"People are doing a lot more online, and the Web has evolved pretty dramatically & but the underlying browser architecture is still very similar to the original Netscape browser," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management.

Brin concurred, saying that the ultimate goal of Chrome isn't to be a Web operating system of sorts, but rather a better browser vehicle for the next generation of Web applications, a core business for Google.

"I wouldn't call Chrome the OS of Web apps. It's a very basic, fast engine to run Web apps. We'll see more and more Web apps of greater and greater sophistication, of the kinds of things that today are pretty challenging to do on the Web because of browser performance," Brin said.

Google is releasing Chrome as open source in the hopes that it will be improved by external developers, and simultaneously help improve other products, including the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE (Internet Explorer).

In other words, Chrome is meant to be a catalyst for faster innovation in browser technology. "Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly, so any improvement to any set of browsers as a consequence of Chrome is good for Google," Brin said.

Brin, Page and Pichai all went to great lengths to praise Mozilla's work with Firefox, crediting it with jump-starting innovation in browser development at a time when the only game in town was IE. "Without what [Mozilla] has done, this probably wouldn't be possible," Page said.

Chrome, in the works for about two years, highlights the importance for Google of its increasingly sophisticated Web applications, such as its ambitious Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication office-productivity suite. Apps, built around the Web-hosted "cloud computing" model for delivering applications via the Internet, is considered a major threat to Microsoft's Office/Exchange platform.

Thus, it's easy to understand why Google wouldn't want to look from the sidelines as Microsoft takes IE in the direction it so chooses. The browser is the key software for accessing Web applications, so it's no surprise to see Google finally jump feet-first into the development of browser technology.

Among the enhancements Google is promoting on Chrome are a more stable and secure environment in which a tab can crash without freezing the entire browser, as well as improved speed and performance with a new JavaScript engine called V8.

The Google cofounders' presence at the press conference underscores the importance of the Chrome initiative, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.

"This isn't one of those projects that started as a 20 percent time thing," Valdes said, referring to Google's policy of letting employees spend part of their time on projects they come up with. "This is definitely a strategic initiative that has been two years in the making and involves dozens of engineers."

Indeed, Google officials acknowledged at the press conference that the company has invested significant resources on Chrome.

But framing it as Google's attempt to win the browser wars is a mistake, Valdes said. "It's about the Web apps battle. It's about having a platform that will support the next generation of Web apps," he said.

Web applications in general, and Google's in particular, are pushing the limits of current browsers, including IE, Safari and Firefox. "Google is pushing the envelope and Chrome gives it a bigger envelope for Web apps," Valdes said.

"More importantly, Chrome is the platform Google will control," he added. "That makes it a strategic element in their technology portfolio."

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney agreed that investing in developing its own browser makes strategic sense for Google. "Given that search has become such a fundamental part of Internet usage, anything that impacts overall Internet usage is important for Google," he wrote in a research note Tuesday. "Also, while browser developments have to date had no material impact on Googles advertising base, a hedge against future browser developments makes sense."

However, he noted, it remains to be seen whether users will consider Chrome faster, simpler and safer enough than current browsers to justify switching to it.

Chrome is now available as a free download.

This story was updated on September 2, 2008

Novell Tuesday is launching its Compliance Management Platform, a combination of existing identity management and security-event management products with additional reporting and analysis tools.

The goal behind integrating the two existing server-based products is to make sure provisioning and access control is a monitored activity kept in conformance with business security policy. It will give IT managers a source for real-time monitoring of all identity repositories and allow for compliance report generation on the fly, according to Novell.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

"It can send an alert or even block an action," says Jim Ebzery, a Novell senior vice president and general manager. He says the platform will better enable customers to notice incongruent and suspicious events, such as if someone were logged in on an office LAN but at the same time that individual's electronic-badge credentials were being used to gain access to a corporate building in a different location.

Specifically, the Compliance Management Platform includes Identity Manager 3.6 (compare Identity Management products) integrated with Novell's SEM product, Sentinel 6.1 (compare Security Information Management products).

The Compliance Management Platform comes with several predefined policy templates to aid in setting it and includes Sentinel's software connectors for centralizing security-event information from hundreds of sources.

The offering costs $99 per user.