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Energy Company Refutes Windows TCO Claims
apt-get writes "Computerworld Australia has a gem of a case study on Country Energy with comments from an IT manager that shoot down Microsoft's 'objective' Windows TCO claims. My favourite; 'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'. Interestingly, in almost every area of its critical IT infrastructure, open source and commercial software work in peace together. The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up."
As for open source on the desktop systems, Peters said although most of the applications are Webbased, a nonnative version of Lotus Notes for Linux and the lack of Microsoft Office are impediments to Linux on the desktop
I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?
I live in Chile and i must say Chilean IT managers are very intrested in this kind of resources. At least 6 big Chilean firms are considering moving existing management, database and mail(the pain of spam beaking throug) to Linux as a safer, cheaper and more reliable alternative. But in general people are affraid since there always will be a Microsofr counterreport saying otherwise. As long as Linux doesnt gain reputation within the corporate world, it'll still be a small idealistic comunity. So TCO i think is the best way to change things theese days.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
I would hope that reading such as this is sought out by IT managers looking at a migration to any other platform. Real world results are what count. Trusting studies paid for by $COMPANY is just plain ignorant.
Trolling is a art,
To repeat a popular statistician's aphorism:This has been a public service announcement.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I have not come across anything that MS Office can do that another office programme, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice can't do. AppleWorks is a bit crippled. The MacOS X version seems to be exactly like the one that I used to run on my PowerBook 1400c way back when. .DOC files? Feature wise MS Office has always kind of pissed me off, but document formating was a total sabot in the gears when trying to get my stuff to print off of windows machines at school
Is the cause just coverting some of the document formating used in existing
f.p. too
"Also, it is easy to find Oracle admins for support."
And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?
tim
They probably want to acquire more machines for Windows. Hence they are advertising their liking for open source stuff so that Steve Ballmer will visit them soon and offer to shave off 90% of the price + free training.
Fortunately, on the other hand more and more government institutions give Linux a fair chance as well in competing with Microsoft and especially on the cost side, Linux (and other open source) wins! (Community of Munich, Amsterdam is considering it and I bet there are more examples)
About time, I could really welcome a tax cut. I hate to lose my tax money on Microsoft.
Product L is free, widely available from a variety of sources who compete purely on technical quality, and designed principally by its own users to be portable, reliable, and as efficient as possible.
... duh.
Product W (its primary competitor) is sold at quite a high price, by a single vendor who relies on marketing, market position, and features to sell the product. The product's users have little to say about the evolution of the product and nothing at all to say about its internal design.
The vendor of product W releases studies which it pays for proving that W is cheaper to own than L. Later, a large field trial proves that product L is, actually cheaper than product W.
Who is kidding who here? There is a very good reason that small businesses with any technical savvy at all jump onto the Linux/OSS bandwagon as soon as they possibly can. It saves money.
Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first.
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It was reported that the latest virus incurred a loss of about 30b dollar globally. At this backdrop, I am just wondering do these consultacny firms like Gartner and all include the cost of fighting virus and the loss incurred by them while calculating the TCO ?
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
- Experience of personnel
- Age of the system and its knowledge base
- Number of inherent maintenance problems
- Cost of expertise
- Severity of maintenance issues
- Perceived impact of issues
and so on, and so on...Too often, the people making decisions based on marketing numbers like TCO fail to realize just how many issues are involved in these measurements. The buzzword TCO becomes another name for just one of the measurable items (e.g. Number of inherent problems).
What's needed are top-level executives that weren't churned out by a college and hired because of thier good-old boy connections. CIOs, CTOs and other executives in power need to be from one school, the school of hard knocks, so that they can make INFORMED decisions instead of blindly relying on the marketing fodder that are handed.
Useful quote from the review '...it's now so easy (and reliable) to use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for reading doc, ppt, and xls files, that I'm beginning to fear that those programs -- which I was getting so good at doing without - - might no longer be relegated to the status of "options of last resort".'
Breaking the MS Office to Windows OS tie-in will seriously undermine the MS monopoly.
Crossover Office (http://www.codeweavers.com) runs MS Office 2000 very well under Linux, and claims to run Office XP as well. I can't personally verify the latter claim, but can testify that Office 2000 works well.
(I have no affiliation with CodeWeavers, I'm just a happy customer.)
After reading several TCO reports and even writing one myself, I've come to the conclusion that TCO is not something that one can make a sweeping generalization about.
Cost is one thing and convenience and time are another thing. Windows costs more than GNU/Linux is most cases, but no doubt someone somewhere can twist the numbers to make it look otherwise. Windows is less secure than GNU/Linux, but again -- someone, somewhere will come up with bullshit numbers or statistics or outright lies (Steve Ballmer!) to "prove" differently.
Companies (and home users) should choose to leave Windows because of its licensing, first and foremost. The MS EULA basically says, "we own you" and people should take issue with that. If we all followed every license to the letter of the law, very few people would be using proprietary software -- especially Windows.
Everyone has their own take on TCO and TBO (Total Benefit of Ownership) and anyone can make either "side" look like it "wins." Licensing costs and rights are undeniable though; that's one area that is not up for debate. What is the hidden cost of being tied down by fascist licensing? It costs you your freedom and subjects you to software audits. Violation of the EULA is US$200,000 and up to five years in jail...
-JemHaving MS Office on Linux isn't the problem, users who believe they HAVE to have MS Office is. That bit of software your business needs, just needs to be rewritten to open standards and if enough clients start to leave SoftwareCompanyX, believe me, they'll write it. Or find the same integreation with Evolution.
Question - since MSJVM isn't available for distribution (from MS, I know what I can find with google) why hasn't that piece of software been rewritten to work better with Sun VM? You need to demand more from your vendors, or if you're going to drink the MS punch, don't make comments about migrating to Linux. I've migrating companies to linux and all were estatic with the final results. They were quite suprised how easy it was.
In fairness, they are migrating from UNIX. In such a situation, I'm not surprised that Linux is a better fit for them.
The truth is, what is better for you will depend on your situation, existing applications, existing in-house skills, etc. I don't believe Microsoft's funded propaganda, but there can be situations in which Windows is an appropriate choice. Look at what you are running and then make a decision. In this case it is obviously Linux.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I believe you quite handily defeat yourself there.
"Product W [...] is sold [...] by a single vendor who relies on [...] features to sell the product." (emphasis added)
Features are more important than stability to many people. Rebooting is annoying, but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable. In environments were stability is most important (always-on systems, such as internet, power, and telecom), Linux will do well. In other environments, it won't.
"Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first."
You assume that OpenOffice is just as good as OfficeXP. For people who don't use any advanced features, this may be true, but not for many others. OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor, for example. For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite. Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch? People paying licensing fees for multiple machines are far more likely to need the features not found in OO.org than individuals, in my estimation.
G
Best quote from the article (at least for me):
:-)
I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that.
There you have it, in a nutshell...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
so download the source and rename the application names.
I'm betting that 90% of msoffice users will not know the difference.
I did that here, replaced IE on all desktops with firebird + a IE skin.
nobody noticed anything changed.
most of the time it's resistance to change, even when there is very little change.
This is in fact what MS is saying. That if your company does not have significant unix skills but instead is windows based then switching to linux will be more expensive. Sure they mess around with it but that claim is pretty valid. It is always more expensive in the short term, and tco is short term roi would be long term, to switch.
So yes he does say the lack of MS Office is keeping the linux desktop down. True or not this is hardly likely to ever change. Hell MS is even backing down on MS office of the apple.
Nice headline, pity it doesn't seem related to the story.
To those impatient to see when Linux will overthrow MS windows look back at history and ask how long it took MS to go from nobody to somebody. There was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked. With PICTURES!!!!!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Movie production tools
Really? I cant find ANYTHING for linux... even something I could buy that can do movie production..
kino and the other early alpha video editing software and tools cant even touch a 10 year old version of Premiere (Premiere version 4.x) I have tried Cinderella (sucks, cant use DV2 files and crashes alot!) I bought Main Actor... it also can't edit DV2 files or anything standard for movie production that is for anything but low quality web release and it also crashes like a madman..
Finally there is absolutely nothing available for linux that can do anything that After Effects can do. and there is nothing available for DVD creation that is even useable.. DVDlab is desperately needed to be ported to linux...
I desperately want to be able to do my video editing on linux, it can not be done right now. I tried, wasted 6 months trying my hardest. Main Actor has been all but abandoned on the linux side, Cinderella is not interested in performance/stability but is on a "ooooh Shiney! New features!" kick for the past 2 years and is still only early alpha quality.
I would be 100% microsoft free if I could do my video editing and full DVD creation under linux..
but it can not be done right now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
'Objective Studies' aside, there is little comparison in performance, ease of maintenance, etc. The answer I've begun giving the Windows Admins here at work (who are fighting for server installs - a losing battle in this age of dropping budgets and 'increased efficiencies') is this: Go and administer an enterprise level *nix network for five years, then come back to me and we'll compare notes. (Yes, I did my time as an MS Admin, MCSE+I and all that crap, back when NT was going to save the world)
IMHO, the only reason M$ still has any of the server space at all is 'time to market' considerations, and the overall lower level of expertise. Back when I was a Windows admin, I used to say: "The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft designed it so that any idiot could set it up - and most of them do."
Any given network is only as stable/secure as its administrator, it's true, but remember that the ideal case stability of the platform represents a hard limit, no matter how competent the admin. Anybody wanna bet their job on 5 9s from NT?
Thinking outside my Head
How much is it costing when M$ releases a patch for IE (last week) and it erases all of your IE passwords? Imagine the call centers and helpdesks getting slammed for password resets because people don't know what their account info is.
Features definitely do not equal value despite the propaganda that tries to convince people otherwise.
The essence of good design is simplicity and value comes from the elimination of unnecessary features, not their addition.
You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.
As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users. You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.
Finally, people will switch to OOorg for several reasons. Firstly when the weight of yearly licenses starts to hurt. Secondly, to avoid yet one more cycle of upgrades that break large numbers of existing configurations for little obvious gain. Thirdly, when they are running old versions and do not want to pay once more for new ones. Lastly, and I believe significantly, many people use MS Office with no license at all. OOorg provides them a way to become "legitimate".
Now, the discussion is not about "why switch", it's about cost.
In a global market, any business that pays more than it needs to for a service (including software) is at a competitive disadvantage, and will eventually be beaten by leaner competitors.
Microsoft's offerings costs more, and for the majority of its users, this extra cost simply does not translate into extra value. You cannot debate this observation away. If you work for Microsoft, you would do better to consider how such an unbalanced business model can actually survive. Eventually your customers will be unable to pay for your products, however much they like them. What will you do then?
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>...open source and commercial software work in peace together.
Commercial doesn't always mean non-free. MySQL and RedHat are both companies which produce commercial software which is open source/free software.
we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool
When you start off thinking that Linux is shareware then you've just demonstrated that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Anything else that follows in your post can only be viewed as slapstick!
having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming
Oh man you're a scream. This has gotta be a troll. A very funny one at that.
kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem
Ok gotcha, this is for those who still don't realise its a joke post. Tell em something obviously false.
Yes a hilarious post, though unfortunately some people might think you actually mean what you said. If you did .... well um ... hate to say it but you're an idiot, just hope your clients don't find out.
Bitter and proud of it.
Peters, Country Energy's information systems manager, wanted to leverage the large amount of inhouse Unix skills within the IT department by choosing Linux as the operating system platform for front end applications.
Of course it's going to be cheaper to run Linux in their environment; they have a large in-house staff that already knows Unix. This is not rocket science and I myself would tell them to go the Linux route. However, if your a Windows-only shop like our little cranny of the world then moving to Linux doesn't make a lot of sense because their is no internal knowledge base. Moral of the story: Use what's best for you because if you don't have the resources then the alternative most times will be more expensive.
The "I _NEED_ Office" mentality is quite well hammered into average users. When I used to work at a certain office supply big box store (I was young, and needed the money!), at least four times a week someone would come in and ask for a full out copy of office. They would then freak out at the price and ask things like "why is this so expensive?!". Most of these people honestly didn't need all of office. A basic word processor, spreadsheet and email program were all they'd really need. I'd usually mention openoffice, and scrawl down a url for them to take home. Maybe that's why I didn't last long working in that dive :) MS seems to have done an exceedingly good job at promoting the idea that your pc is useless without having a copy of office running on it.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Not only does Samba 3 support Active Directory (see "Major New Features" on that page), but it's also 2.5 times faster than Win2k3 Server in the same role, and scales up considerably better as well.
Kinda funny how Samba kicks the shit out of the thing it was designed to emulate, once again showing that Open Source is A Good Thing(tm).
Organic free-range music... yum!
Do you want Linux video editing or just non-Windows video editing? Right now, Mac OS X is probably the best operating system for video editing, simply because of the software that works on it: iMovie (good for most purposes), Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, and Avid.
The first job that I worked for, in India, back in 1997-98, was a big M$ shop. We worked on C/C++/Win32SDK/VC++/MFC/COM. I used to be treated as the villain around the office, because I was the only Linux evangelist. I had to sneak in one 486 and run a seperate domain for the few linux lovers there.
Last week I had a chance to run into my previous project manager, and he was telling me that they went completely Linux. The organisation grew from a group of 40 programmers to 250 dudes. The only reason for this is, with the recent M$ licensing policy it was impossible to buy so many licenses. Now the whole organization is running RH 9.x and they use it to monitor home security systems and medical automation.
So please dont give us bull about TCO M$!!!
Linux won't try and screw you over for the next dollar, ever.
It's good for peace of mind
You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.
I don't know. Ask Larry Wall.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
"There's no reason *not* to use Windows."
For you there might not be but for Company IT people there are many.
1. You said, "I can go to Best Buy, pick up a game and just know it will work." This is a down side for many companies. You put a copy of Ultra Mega Super Pimp on your work computer and you company could be sued for sexual harasment, and or piracy.
2. You said, "As for all the supposed problems with Windows, they're non-starters for me." But they are not non issues for the rest of the world. Outlook is a security nightmare. It has allows millions if not billions of dollars in damages from exploits. Lets talk about trojans? How many have there been for Windows? You run firewall. That is nice but in a setup with even as few as a few dozen people all that has to happen to make your firewall usless is for on person to hook up there notebook at a hotel and then come back to the main office and plug into your network. You now have the worm on the inside of you network.
Windows is not secure. Just because you have not been hit does not mean they are non-starters. I know a few people that drank like a fish and smoked all the time that made it to 90. That does not prove that smoking is a non-issue.
In a corprate setting all you care about is will a computer run programs X,Y, Z and not cause me issues. The only reason I care about a game working on one of the systems in my office is that there should be no games running in my office.
My office is moving away from Microsoft products for a couple of reasons.
1. Away from Outlook to Thunderbird. Some of us already use Thunderbird all we are waiting for is VCard support. Calander would be nice as well. PS a Windows version of Evolution would be nice to help in migration.
2. Away from Office to OpenOffice. OpenOffice has worked well for us in tests and is a LOT cheaper then MSOffice.
3. Away from NT and Novell towards Linux for our severs. This is pretty much done. We have one Windows box running. The only reason we keep that is for our accounting system. All of the print, database, mail, DNS, and file servers are Linux
To answer your final question. "In short, what's in Linux for someone like me other than headaches?" Knowlege. If you just want to play games and surf for porn Windows is fine for you. This artical is not about people like you. It is about companies. It would be the same as if artical was about tractor trailer trucks and you said, "My Ford pick up is easier to park, and it works just fine when I need too haul some plants home from Home Depo, Semi trucks are usless!."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Throwing good money after bad isn't always the smartest option. If you're vendor is truly responsive to your needs, by all means, stick it out. If they're not however, don't be afraid to make the threat of dumping them. Because they're obviously not looking out for you, their customer.
I do understand what you're going through. I'm having similar problems as well with a particular vendor who seems to think MS SQL Server, IE 6 and Windows 2000 are all that exist in the world.
I'm glad someone acknowledges two facts in one statement: Office is an important application and Office keeps people on their platform.
If this is not acknowledged, it can't be properly addressed. Next time you say "it's just marketing" or whatever other BS on Office's success, realize you're not doing yourself and your favorite alternative Office program a favour.
Allow me to rant a bit on what's needed to get people (companies) to replace Windows and Office...
The big challenge is that apart from having to be every bit as good as Office, the working environment should also be better.
I think with KOffice and OpenOffice, Linux has two excellent candidates, KOffice for the more simplestupid crowd (me and most people although most won't admit it) and OpenOffice for the "power user". For obvious reasons though, they should be 100% interoperateble. Even if features are not fully supported, they should not result in document hell.
Right now, in a lot of environments you can't do away with MSOffice. Find out why (without resorting to arrogant BS) and fix it. Sometimes it's easy: a few people are seriously into Powerpoint, and the company distributes them to others. Well, that's enough reason not to switch.
But also, apart from having the clip art, dictionaries, etc etc etc all that stuff, there might be a lot of things that arguably are outside the scope of the software, but need to be looked into in order to fulfill the full productivity cycle people are running now with MSOffice.
Their Office runs on their OS and they don't really differentiate. So if you can map the whole experience and make that good, only then you can claim to be able to replace the desktop.
The same goes for the Gimp btw. If you already *have* Photoshop, there is not ONE single reason to go to Gimp.
Disclaimer: This mail not to make things seem easy or to in any way berate Linux developers (bless you) but in response to the many derogative remarks here on MSOffice.
Comparison: SCO is not being beaten up and undressed by "Fuck You" comments but by a bunch of highly skilled lawyers - and appropriately the Groklaw crowd.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Yeah, ofcourse man! I mean, who would release an Office package for the mainstream without perl and scripting support? That's the one feature that everyone needs.
After they learn about locating their own files on the harddisk, that is.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I'm asking this as a legitimate question, not trying to troll...
Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?
Because I can tell you that's the primary thing that would keep my company (and the vast majority of the companies we deal with) from moving away from Office. I'd also be willing to bet we're not unusual in that regard.
Not so much because we already have tons of complex macros written that we wouldn't want to convert, but simply because it IS so powerful and relatively simple. We do some truly sick shit with VBA.
Note also that I'm NOT talking about simple macros to recalculate cell values and such. I'm talking about the ability to pop open a form on top of a spreadsheet with a bunch of buttons on it, each that execute hundreds or even thousands lines of complex code, some of which upload and download files via FTP, some of which make use of other Office apps via automation to do various things, and then export out the resultant data as a Viso document with an Excel spreadsheet embedded and links to a presentation that was generated and uploaded to a web site at the same time. Yes, we have some that do most of that, and some that do more. Let's not get into the debate about whether that was the right way to do things, because it's a much larger discussion, and the bottom line is that if the people in charge say do it using those tools, you either do so or look for another job, so it is what it is, and that's that.
If another office suite could match that capability, I doubt we'd have much incentive to stay with Office, but it truly would have to match or exceed that capability, and to the best of my knowledge, no other suite can do that.
Am I mistaken?
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
I read through most of the comments and to be honest it sounds like most people came here to unload a spleen on Office. Did anyone actually read the article?
/. says the company refutes Windows TCO claims with a throwaway line or two. To whit:
I did, and I find it amazing
"The PeopleSoft back end is moving to the AIX system and we would move the Windows front end to Linux if the application gave us the option," Peters said. "We have no interest in staying on Windows for those types of applications as there are just down sides. In our organisation Windows is not a threat as we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all."
My reading of the article is that large Australian energy company focused on UNIX / Linux / Sun / AIX technologies that happens to have some Windows boxes has come to the conclusion that if they were in a position to centralize even further (by ditching Windows) it wouldn't cost them any more money.
B F D
This is news?
I'm not sure, I mainly use the word processor and spreadsheet, and only in their most basic ways. A good place to start checking out what OpenOffice can do would be here Also, remember that it is a free download. You could grab a copy, and poke around to see if it does what you want, all without having to resort to warez.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Yes. It's called open basic or some such. It is somewhat VBA compatible, but not totally, and lets you do REALLY COOL things with Java. You can write Java classes (which are really easy to write), and import/call them in VBA. Much easier than writing a DLL in VB6 or .Net and registering a COM object and some such.
As a junior, I worked in the Oracle IT department, and MS Access was forbidden in any computer in there. I found it really weird, because at the time I thought Access was a pretty useful tool. It still is, at home, I mean.
Later I understood the reasons for forbidding Access. I worked for many customers who had their backoffices full of really shitty applications built on top of Access, Excel and VBA. I mean, they had their whole business built on that! More than a couple times I had to debug horrible stuff made by the local programmer wannabe, usually a financial or sales guy with no knowledge whatsoever of computer engineering, who learned a little bit of VBA and started coding away, turning his office in an intricate mess of redundant data, scattered files, and very shitty VB code.
Even worse is when some company has its customer database in Access, and each employee in the sales department has a local copy that they update regularly until nobody can track accurate information about anything anymore. Then every guy starts giving the others his password so they can read his files! Help!
And when we tell the manager their stuff is completely unsupportable and propose that they buy a suitable application or have a custom one built, the guy starts crying like a baby about the price of it. Sooner or later they will have to make that decision, but only after spending thousands in support, calling us every week to customise a little shit here or solve a little bug there. Not trying to put you down, though. If you work with VBA, and it works, my congratulations. You must be a pro.
OpenOffice has multiple levels at which you can extend it. There's OpenOffice Basic, which is more powerful than just simple macros, but less powerful than your examples above.
Secondly, there's UNO bindings for C++, Java and (less well implemented) Python. From here you can do A Lot Of Stuff, including your examples, with ease. Additions like this don't require recompiling OO, they can be distributed (simple zip file) and linked with a single command (pkgchk)
Thirdly, as it's OSS, you could just hack the source code directly, though obviously option 2 is better.
-- Azaroth
>> Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?
t ml).
OpenOffice 1.1 supports automation via Python scripting (http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.h
You might find that Python is a much easier to use and powerful language than VB for this sort of task.
From the article "I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that" pretty much sums it up.
Why don't we look at what an outage would cost, the expenses necessary to create a redundant infrastructure to minimize those potential outages, and then compare costs.
I wouldn't have my job either if I didn't plan for network failures and the recovery mechanisms in place. Although cost is a factor, uptime and reliability are much more important.
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"