Columnists’ Corner: What with consultants being much better at moving equipment than data, and the high-priced folks who actually understand that data getting laid-off amid an acquisition, our IT Off the Record author found himself in the belly of a Great White Shark, so to speak. But they weren’t paying him enough to stick around rather than start his own business, so he fought his way out, only to learn that with no knowledge workers left the project was still lingering 18 months later. The news beat: Publishing titan Rupert Murdoch predicts a decline in portals and says that News Corp. is bullish on building social networking sites. An IBM official cautions customers that burned CD’s have a shorter lifespan than pressed CDs. In another story, Big Blue is leading an effort to improve the quality of patents and speed up the patent approval process. Open source: MySQL gets the U.S. government’s stamp of approval in the form of a five-year contract that will make it easier for government customers to buy the open source database. Novell kicks off AppArmor, a Linux application security program, and will donate the AppArmor technology it acquired last year from Immunix to the project. Hot review: The ShoreTel 6 IP PBX had Wayne Rash scratching his head and wondering if perhaps it was too easy to be true. “Surely, I thought, there must be a point at which the ShoreTel PBX becomes a pain in the neck,” Rash writes in his review. “I thought wrong.” Databases