You need to have a culture set of getting shit done. We have a team of about 8 coders with another 3 html/css + 2 qa people sharing a roughly 40x40 foot room, and it's freaking awesome. All of our desks are pretty large, we all wear headphones when we want to get work done, and we don't when we want to talk to each other and take breaks. Our 2 team leaders set this culture, and everyone else follows and kicks ass. It's been working great for us, but it comes down to the team leader(s) to set the norms.

Absolutely true, but there is an apex that both achieve to reach which is photo realistic rendering. There is a foreseeable point that both of these two technologies will one day meet and then eventually move completely past that into faster than realtime rendering where we could possibly be rendering in realtime many different virtual spaces. One useful example of this might be for content creators such as the movie studios to watch a video of a scene they are working on in real time with many different lighting conditions. So yes, realtime rendering will never be on par with offline as eventually offline rendering will be an antiquity.

Depends largely on what your annotating and why. You might want to check out mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ which has been pretty great for just managing documents. If your more interesting in annotating and learning a lot about what and why your annotating you might want to look into the fields of mixed methods research such as EthnoNotes.com http://www.ethnonotes.com./

Wow, I was actually going to give in and get rid of my old HTC for the 3G. Not a F'ing chance. Screw you apple!