It's not the sort of thing a hacker can easily "figure out" -- as I understand it, the procedure involves calling Apple's Service Provider Support, proving you're an authorized service provider, reading them a code from the computer and typing in the countercode they give you...

Mind you, that doesn't mean you're out of luck. If you have admin access, and a 10.6.x install DVD or USB key for your Mac, this MacEnterprise posting has instructions to use setregproptool to enable/disable the firmware password. If you have Lion, it's probably on the recovery partition somewhere, but I haven't investigated.

I've been an Apple user for the past 20 years. The absolute best way of finding information about a product before you buy it is from the serial number. You can ask your vender to give you that from the box (or note it down yourself.

Once you have that, there is this really awesome site that decodes your serial number and gives you detailed information about specs, year/month/date of manufacturing, OS, hardware, software, etc. The link to the site is below ::

http://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.php