Tazed in the brain

Maybe Chuck Lorre is putting all his scientific and technological consultants on The Big Bang Theory. But he ought to put at least one of those on Two and a Half Men, since Ashton Kutcher's character Walden is supposed to be some sort of computer genius turned millionaire. The technobabble does not quite come up to Star Trek levels, but since this show takes place in the present, there is the definite danger of the show's writers making a serious gaffe.

On tonight's Men rerun, Nicole (Odette Annable) asks Walden for help with her software start-up, presumably coding and capital. After some haggling, Walden agrees. After reviewing the computer code, Walden has a suggestion: "if we reconfigure this kernel, we're gonna save a lot of time and money." Sounds vague enough that it could apply to anything, right?

Well, I did a Google search for "reconfigure the kernel," and it seems that it's mostly a Linux or Unix thing. Of course the episode doesn't tell us what exactly it is that Nicole's software company is working on. A website? A database? An operating system? A mobile app? Not that Men is all that funny a show to begin with, but failing to pay attention to details like these does not help matters.

Apparently, this kernel reconfiguration business is antiquated, like, say, mobile pagers. "It's good, you know, for 2002," says Barry (Clark Duke). You know what else was available in 2002? Source code control. Despite Barry and Nicole's criticism, Walden goes ahead with the kernel reconfiguration, causing Nicole to complain that it's going to take her a day to undo Walden's "help." Walden claims he can undo it in an hour. Um, excuse me, does this mean that Nicole's start-up doesn't use source code control?

Microsoft's MSDN summarizes source code control thus: "Source code control ... allows different developers to work on the same project, with reduced fears of lost code or overwritten changes. Source code control also implies a version control system that can manage files through the development lifecycle, keeping track of which changes were made, who made them, when they were made, and why." So if Nicole uses source code control, shouldn't she be able to undo Walden's changes in a matter of minutes if not seconds? Unless maybe both Barry and Nicole think source code control is such an antiquated concept not worthy of their use. It's possible there are developers like that in real life, but in this context it diminishes credibility in the tech cred of these characters.

By the way, TV Guide made a mistake. The episode described above, bearing the classy (not!) title "Tazed in the Lady Nuts," was what reran tonight, and not "West Side Story."