Dear Miss Protocol,

I was recently invited to a wedding, and the couple (my cousin and her fiance) noted on the invitation that they were registered at Bloomingdale's. Isn't that considered rude? Compounding the shock was the fact that they had registered for a Linux kernel for their Alpha. How can I explain to them that they're better off compiling their own, or just installing Red Hat via FTP, rather than asking someone to pay Bloomingdale's $100 100 USD?

Compliant Reader,

Consistent with Miss Protocol's belief that the New Economy is all about employing powerful technology to do things exactly the way they were done before, Red Hat Linux is not the only item available from Bloomingdale's that is definitely overpriced or possibly useless.

With respect to the definite overpricing, it is perfectly acceptable to acquire an equivalent item elsewhere and notify the registry that the item has been so acquired. Avoid technical terms such as "FTP" or "CD burner" when communicating with the registry; instead, just say that you bought it at Sears instead.

With respect to the possible uselessness, Miss Protocol is perplexed by the couple's implicit assertion, by virtue of placing Red Hat Linux on their gift list, that Red Hat Linux would be useful in their family life after the wedding. Judging from her most recent experience installing and configuring Red Hat Linux, Miss Protocol considers shrink-wrapped Red Hat Linux to be more useful than online-downloaded Red Hat Linux only for people whose primary use for Red Hat Linux is to watch abstruse "[  OK  ]" messages scroll by. For those people, Red Hat Linux would be practically useless anyway. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for you to buy something else on the couple's gift list and enclose download and compilation instructions for Red Hat Linux on a sheet of paper.

A final, non-normative note: When it comes to general wedding etiquette, Miss Protocol defers authority to Miss Manners and the Web, the latter containing the "lifestage/wedding FAQ", available at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/lifestage/wedding-faq/. This is because weddings, unlike XML-enabled e-business infrastructure transactions, have yet to be documented in open, non-proprietary standard specifications by innovative, non-monopolizing software company/ies.

Feeling proprietary? Address your technical questions to Miss Protocol at miss.protocol@bantha.org. The bandwidth shortage prevents Miss Protocol from answering questions except through this column.