I know I am incredably niave when it comes to this stuff, but I do not bank or pay bills on line. My pharmacist knows me by name and my emails are bland and boring. Why would anyone want to hack my AOL account is beyond me. I use the same password whenever I have to register one. I think it is much more likely that some company I do business with, Master Card,etc., will lose my information or I will lose my wallet than some hacker will try and invade my computer.
My son-in-law is an IT guy and has such incredibly complex passwords that he has frequently locked himself out and needs to get onto his records kept on my computer so he can look up his pass word. I am sure there is some logic there, but I do not know where.
That is a great idea. I do that with TV remote controls. That way when the batteries die and it loses its memory, I do not have to scrool through all of the product codes to reset for every device.
A friend of mine recently bought a bunch of Epson projectors at a college auction. One thing you can do with them is set a password so they can't be used. Some had it some didn't. I happened to buy one from him that did. I had to call Epson, convince them I didn't steal it...lol and give them the serial number that they then used to make a new password....with some app. They were nice about it and I actually did it again for another projector he needed to sell. Thank god Epson is so nice! well...it was an Epson reseller.
In my town, (A suburb of major urban area.) there is no competition for Comcast. (Tried DSL, way to slow.) Many municipalities have agreements with their cable providers that makes it difficult for more than one vendor to exist.
Nonetheless, are two megaliths like Comcast and ATT real competitors? You'd think so, but I'd have to have both available to find out.
Wow, what a bad combination: AT&T's classic, impervious "too big to think outside the box or ever be of any actual help" mentality plus your friend's memory loss. The first time I got a laptop that required a password, I remember thinking what disasters could ensue if I ever forgot it or if someone else had to access the machine while, say, I had a 103 degree fever or was vacationing in Fiji.
I have a similar problem, which s a TV receiver latched into the "test and calibrate" mode. The FUNAI website does provide instructions on how to get out of this mode, but those instructions call for issuing commands from both the original remote control and also using the control buttons on the set. Powering off will not reset it. Unfortunately I don't have the original remote any more. Getting into that mode was easy, all it took was a power glitch during a storm that came up at night. Now my choices are to purchase a new remote or pay a service center to do the reset. Why not have the reset done by some combination of buttons on the control panel?
I have found the same thing. No one knows electronics any more. I hired a guy who completed a two-year electronics technician course and was teaching him differences in the various types of capacitors. His first remark was, "Capacitors. We talked about those once."
We are leaving the hardware to the Orientals. We produce the software, the the Far East uses it and then we are totally out of the loop except to go to Walmart and buy back what we designed. And, what's worse is that they are getting good at software, too, and soon we will feel lucky to flip hamburgers!
It is time we got back to basics and learn physics, engineering, chemistry, math, and all the hard sciences and take back our heritage. NAFTA shoved it all overseas. How about a SSFU program (Save Something For Us) to bring it home again. Even our farming is "farmed" out to South America. What in the world is Washington thinking?
Slightly off topic, but important to me anyway. I have an employee who really needs some remedial basic electronics. I looked into what our local community college might have and was amazed the dropped this subject some years ago. Talking with a buddy this morning who is a retired EE professor, he tells me that electronics is being dropped at most universities. Everyone wants to be a programmer or IT guy, but no one is interested in the actual electronics anymore. This seems to confirm my recent research on the topic. In the late 60s we had very few ICs and something like a micro could not be imagined. I myself often said that "in the future we will see computers that will fit entirely into a 19" rack". I sure missed that one! Even in the 70s I took a micro class that used the 8004 and 8008 chips. Smuggly stating; "These micro things have no future other that maybe in lab instruments." Missed again!
But now I wonder if repairs and those who can fix equipment are dying off. Seems like everything is micro code driven any more. While I can replace BGA chips, I cannot get access to the code within them or access to the programmed parts. Everything seems throw away. I feel like a buggy whip maker.
A simple solution would have been for the designers to put a switch on the back to enable a new password. You'd have to break into the house and find the thing to change the password but were not protecting Fort Knox here anyway; it's a bloody modem for god's sake. The switch could have the label "PASSWORD" and may be you might not even have to have the manual.
As energy efficiency becomes more and more a concern for makers of electronics devices, researchers are coming up with new ways to harvest energy from sound vibration, footsteps, and even electromagnetic fields in the air.
The government wants to study your brain, and DARPA wants to use similar information to give robots true autonomy beyond any artificial intelligence developed to date. Sound like science fiction? It's not.
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