Hardware solutions can be quite beautiful in their simplicity. HP's first product was a precision oscillator. To get the necessary precision, they needed a negative feedback mechanism to stabilize their oscillation circuit. They used a lightbulb. As the circuit drew more current, the lightbulb element heated up, causing its resistance to go up and thus acting to reduce the current through the circuit.

This is just zero-insight flamebait.

This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system.

+ Both people here are fundamentally asked to solve a hardware problem. Of course the CS person does not know how to design complicated hardware, so of course he or she will just stick in an arduino and write code ...

+ The CS person easily also could have said "it's a toaster" and then would have an almost identical solution to the EE (or vice versa). Keep in mind that EEs are limited because of manufacturing expenses ... again, we seem to be penalizing the CS majors because they would ignore hardware manufacturing costs!

+ Hardware is redesigned every few years to accommodate needs, just as software is.

"this looks like something i've seen before. i can get you a better one by tomorrow." mark it up by a factor of 2 to buy a toaster someone else built and sell it for profit. assure the king you can massively produce the toasters, but you must retain the licensing rights to sell to other countries. you buy the rights to the toaster and make millions.

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As an engineer; the engineering solition presented here is very poor. It ignores the problem domain almost entirely and focuses on only one minor (and hard to quantify) variable.

The cs solution is banal too - but it appears thisis down to the writers bias.

Software "engineering" != CS. I know Greenspun knows that, and I know the CS label is just for the purposes of the joke, but still. Java has already been harmful enough to CS. :-p

I'm a software guy, and I'd just use a bimetallic-strip thermostat with an adjustable spring, whose tension is controlled by the knob.

Off to the patent office...