Smart software makes the difference

How smart should software be? I think it should be smart enough to fix our mistakes, but not smart enough to be intrusive. Let's compare Gmail and Hotmail. Let me start by saying I don't use Hotmail anymore. The reason is that it wouldn't let me send emails because it "detected" that the emails I was sending contained spam (I promise they didn't). This was a really frustrating experience, and very quickly Hotmail became useless to me.


With Gmail it's a completely different experience (excluding the UI changes to the interface... I'll leave that rant for another time). First of all, at least it let's me send emails. Now, when I was getting ready to send an email in which I wrote "I'm attaching", I got this message:

This is a good example of software that is smart, yet not smart enough to be intrusive. Kudos to Google.

Sharing files between 2 Amazon AWS instances

This is not intuitive at all, and moreover, I found only 1 post that indicated how to do this. The idea is to open the following ports between the instances:

• Microsoft file sharing SMB: User Datagram Protocol (UDP) ports from 135 through 139 and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) ports from 135 through 139.
• Direct-hosted SMB traffic without a network basic input/output system (NetBIOS): port 445 (TCP and UPD).

After this, you should be good to go. I got this information from this post, or you can go to this KB article from Microsoft as well.