Windows 7 bugs and other various computing tips

I've found a rather large problem involving copying/cutting files. I have been ripping some CD's onto my computer, then moving the files to a different location. When I ctrl+a, ctrl+x the files and ctrl+v them into a different folder, they copy just fine. The problem is, I can't delete the folder they just came from. Windows 7 gives me some random error message about not having access or something. It's HIGHLY irritating, because the only solution I've found is to wait it out. Eventually, Explorer will release the handle on the folder. I have no idea why it even bothered to lock the source directory, but it did, and it angers me.

Something else I've discovered: I'm using my desktop (with 7) mainly as a remote server for my laptop (still xp). I use my laptop to remote desktop to my 7 box. If I have media player running with music playing, WMP throws an error about my sound device disconnecting. I don't even need to restart WMP to get music playing again, (just hit play, and it will figure it out), but it's still annoying. When you are remote desktoped, 7 switches your audio output from your sound card to the remote machine. This involves "turning off an audio device" which is where the error comes from. Unfortunately, it looks like WMP doesn't handle that very well.

I've also discovered strange behavior involving the Windows 7 firewall. I've told 7 that I'm on a private network. At my school, each building is on a different subnet, and everyone gets a public IP. If I'm on the same subnet as my 7 box, I can ping it, samba to it, and mstsc to it. When I'm on a different subnet (same first 2 octets on a /24 subnet), I can't ping or samba to my 7 box. It won't respond to either. Fortunately, I can still remote desktop to it from a different subnet. I hacked this by always allowing incoming connections for private networks, but that really isn't a secure solution. Ideally, I would add a rule that allows pings and samba access only, but I don't know how to do that, so effectively disabling the firewall will have to do for now.

On the off chance that you ever deal with typed Russian in your life, I have a helpful tip. I was copying Russian text from a PDF to M$ Word. Some of the Russian was in italics. It was formatted like this:

(some text in Russian here)

When I copied the text to word, it silently copied it like this:

(some text in Russian here)

with italics paretheses, and oblique Russian characters. Since I don't know a word of Russian, it all looked the same to me, and I didn't realize that it was un-italicizing all of the Cyrillic characters.. I did notice on close inspection however, that т in the Russian document was appearing as т in the Word doc. I figured it had something to do with the character sets not being entirely compatible, even though Word seemed to handling the other characters just fine. It took me a long to realize that the two characters were the same, one was simply italicized, and one wasn't. In Russian, some italicized characters look like slanted versions of the oblique versions (just like in English). Others, however, are written in Russian cursive when they are put into italics. So т is actually the cursive (and italic) representation of т in Russian. Just in case you ever want to know.


Now here's something that really ticks me off. After a year of high school physics and two quarters (like semesters at my school) of college physics, I was never taught about inductors, a basic circuit component. This in itself is not criminal, perhaps it is simply a sufficiently advanced topic that most people don't need to know about it. However, what is criminal is that in all three physics classes, Ohm's Law was preached as Gospel. It turns out that it is false in every real-world example. That's right, it's a Law that simply isn't true. In the presence of inductance, V != IR, and EVERY circuit has inductance, even if it is completely minuscule. Ohm's Law ONLY holds for theoretical circuits without inductance or capacitance. Pretty useless, huh? Sorry to have to be the one to shatter your entire grasp of the physics of circuits.