Are we thinking of the same iTunes? Any music from earlier than last year has DRM and will pretty much only work on an iPod. Heaps of other music stores sell music in WMA format with DRM, which decidedly won't work on Apple hardware. The iTunes library format and the iPod syncing protocol are anything but standard, and while there are a few alternatives to iTunes (which in my experience are not that great), they're only around because of the massive reverse-engineering effort the community's put in. I'm not sure why you got Insightful for that...

That's a dude's blog. As in, "The views stated herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of Opera Software."

it should not be too hard at all to let it run x86-win32 applications in arm-linux environments

Yes, it should. It's never been done before (to my knowledge), and it is not at all simple.

There is JIT and there is compiling, and the two, although based on exactly the same routine, deliver two different results, performance- and battery-life- wise.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but there's not a huge difference.

I can get referb HP or Dell workstations with 2Ghz CPUs and 1GB RAM for under $100 plus a $100 monitor. These make great Thin clients and simplify administration and security.

Those would make great servers, but they're definitely overkill for clients. I'm using a 10 year old 500MHz P3 with half a gig of ram for a client at home, and it works fine.

Don't you think it would be easier to just download it? There are sites and tools around that let you just download the audio as a mp3.

I doubt the students will have the know how to hack linux.

As a Linux enthusiast and student in the local equivalent of the 10th grade, wrong: those of us that don't, know how to use Google well enough to find out.