I suppose I should say something here to the effect that "the material in this document does not reflect any official position taken by Cray Research, Inc." Also, "use at your own risk", "no endorsement of products mentioned", etc., etc. "IMHO"s are implicit throughout. I've tried to keep my own biases (primarily, toward the high end of computing) from dominating what I write here, and other viewpoints that I've missed are welcome. Suggestions, corrections, topics you'd like to see covered, and additional material (particularly on NLP) are solicited. Comments to the effect "who died and made *you* optimal?" will likely be ignored. 8v) In compiling this information, I have drawn on my own knowledge of the field, plus information from contributors to Usenet groups and the ORCS-L mailing list. I give my thanks to all those who have offered advice and support. This FAQ list is also being posted to news.answers and sci.answers, and is archived in the periodic posting archive on rtfm.mit.edu [18.70.0.224], in the anonymous ftp directory /pub/usenet/sci.answers. The name under which FAQs are archived appears in the Archive-name line at the top of the article. This particular FAQ is archived as "linear-programming-faq". You will find many other FAQs, covering a staggering variety of topics, in this hierarchy. There's a mail server on that machine, so if you don't have ftp privileges, you can send an e-mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu containing: send usenet/sci.answers/linear-programming-faq as the body of the message. Copies of this FAQ list may be made freely, as long as it is distributed at no charge and with this disclaimer included. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- END lp_faq