Hi Hypernate - That's absurd that you have to go through all that to hand in an assignment - even if you used nothing but a PC. Also, a student price of $300 for Word or Office is riduculous! Maybe you should remind your school that there is this amazing new medium called email that not only lets you send messages to people, but attach files as well. Disks? That is so Y1K man! Sneaker net.
However, more often than not, teachers and students have difficulty with attachments, and I have heard of people being given incompletes or being marked down for handing in assignments "late" due to corrupt files, disks, deleted messages...
I think that the demand for certain file types rests mainly on peoples inability to understand attachments, file types, "Save as," "import," file extensions (for example a Mac user converting a AppleWorks file to Word but failing to add a ".doc" and/or the receivers inability to use the Word file menu to open a doc rather than double click on the file) and every other potential screw up you could imagine.
I suppose one could say this all rests on people being computer illiterate, but I always wondered why Apple didn't create a killer app *as part of the OS* that would go much further to solve this problem that repeatedly results in people who don't know better to blame the Mac as being "incompatible." I know there are a million ways to handle this - my argument is that novice Mac and PC users just don't get it and many just never will get it (including teachers and school adminstrators). I think file conversion could be handled more transparently and/or without so much user knowledge and understanding of all the afore mentioned attributes of managing files. My basic argument is that people don't have to be registered mechanics to drive a car, so why should they be hackers to send a text file! MS banks on making this difficult - their primary interest is to lock people in to using their apps and ease of use is always a secondary concern. Apple made its mark and continues to make its mark on ease of use.
Any way, I am babbling. I just think your school is being unfair and should accept plain old paper until they get their act together. If you wanted to be a real radical, maybe you could drop a virus infected disk off to your teacher some day - then they would institute a new policy where teachers have to run a virus scan on every assignment, and of course that would be too difficult for most teachers and/or they would find it was too much hassle and then go back to accepting paper only - not that I would ever recommend or do such a thing.
