Being a public company isn't all it's cracked up to be. Granting stock options is more expensive than it was before accounting rules changed. Sarbanes-Oxley regulations make reporting financials a miserably bureaucratic process. And investors are afraid of all kinds of risk. Computer makers Cray and Sun and software maker Novell have nearly enough cash on hand to take themselves private, The Register observes. KKR, a buyout firm, got a seat on Sun's board after investing $700 million. Debt markets may be frozen, but these tech stocks are so depressed that private takeovers might not even require the issuance of debt. Forget the stock options: Employees would welcome a deal that keeps some of their jobs.

Cray, the supercomputer company once known for hand-tweaked $8 million machines, now ships a $25,000 model, the CX1, that ships with either Microsoft HPC Server 2008 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux pre-installed. Cray claims its Wintel machine "combines the power of a high-performance cluster with the affordability, ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation." Computer-aided simulations estimate that founder Seymour Cray is currently spinning upwards of 162,000 RPM in his grave.