Annoyed by the system beep from the speaker inside your computer's case? You've probably noticed it when pressing backspace on the terminal prompt, or when Firefox's find function can't locate your query. Using Compiz, it's possible to turn off the beep and replace it with a cool visual effect.

I hate the internal beep speaker. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Okay, maybe not that much hate, but I really don’t like having it enabled. It beeps anytime the terminal cursor goes in the wrong direction. Or if the sound isn’t working quite right when I’m setting things up. Or if it’s time to put another quarter in the dryer. It’s just a nuisance.

"Risto H. Kurppa recently posted about a bad experience with a free software hacker when Kurppa tried to get access to the most recent revisions of an unpublished program’s source code.

Some of you may be annoyed with the beep sound in terminal.
If you want to get rid of that just follow these steps:

Open-source software is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available. Although open-source software is also called "free software" (see www.fsf.org and www.opensource.org), it is far from free. There are specific licensing agreements that are applicable to such code, which specify the responsibilities of the user of the code.

Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) will add an LGPL licensing option for Qt 4.5, due to ship in March. Together with a new policy of opening Qt source code repositories to the public, the more permissive license option should increase the cross-platform GUI application framework's popularity, says the company.

In theory, open source programming of voting machines would remove their veils of secrecy. In practice, though, using open source may not be a viable option if code is not made available. However, a formal effort to work on open source code for voting machines could come at any time from anyone.

Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program (called the source code) must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts (a free software licence), or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.

"...Free software is a political movement that is not only about producing software that’s source code is ‘open’, but it’s vision is a free society & free software. The term OSS gives too much emphasis to the source code being available, and not enough emphasis to freedom.