Except that the analogy was applying to the absurd suggestion of changing operating systems to get a better text editor.

No, instead of listening to a crappy radio station, I listen to a good one.

Yeah, and that spirit is just like suggesting buying a new car to get a better radio.

Switch to a new OS to use a shitty build system anyway... that makes a lot of sense.

And what is that supposed to prove?

Last time I had linux installed it was Mandriva and I got a message due to trying to run something without permission.

The message said the incident was going to be reported. That's like being spotted stealing something trivial from work and getting grassed up for it.

I thought linux was supposed to be cool. There's a world of difference between being an amiable nerdy tech-enthusiast and complete twat who's life is so devoid of pleasure that he gets a kick out of writing such strings into the kernal of an OS.

Must have gotten your password wrong. If you run and app with sudo, and get the password wrong enough times, it'll give you that message and exit.

It actually sends an email to "root", its not about people getting jollies writing "such strings", its about security, and knowing that you can tell when someone is trying naughty things with your box.

Also, its not written into the kernel

It's pseudo-proof. Your arguments is that most scientists use Linux because it is better even when money is meaningless. Your graph shows, if anything, that most scientists use Linux, but it does not provide reasons.
My guess would be that Linux is the OS of choice for entirely different reasons - the most crucial applications for computers, in the scientific world, involve really large computers - clusters where you can reserve a few hundred CPUs with a few dozen terabytes of RAM for a few days straight to perform your calculation. For such computers, a highly modular OS, fully configurable and every part tweakable to the max, to the point that parts of the OS kernel can be rewritten to suit particular needs, is the best choice, and a closed-source OS simply cannot satisfy this. User-friendlyness is relatively unimportant: When you have three days to do your calculation, spending an hour or two on learning command line basics is relatively meaningless.
So the most mission-critical systems run Linux - everything else follows naturally, just like a company that uses SQL Server for their databases is likely to run Windows on everything.

No one bothered to tell you to open the file from within Code::Blocks. Code Blocks will let you select the line ending type as well as correctly read text files with any line endings. If you create a new file in Code Blocks you'll have to select 'all files' in the save type under the save as dialog and put quotes around the file name, but after that it will save normally.

Cheers, thanks. Good to see some familiar faces.

Does Notepad++ have syntax highlighting? What about project files or compiler and linker options? You should really try Code Blocks. Thanks to this thread I checked their website and version 10.05 came out last May so I downloaded it and I'm going to try it out tomorrow.