[thadeus_venture]

What kind of impact would having used something like sha-512 with a 128 bit salt have had over md5? How many more cycles do those take to generate? I assume the attacker had to brute force the salt from a known password as well, if that's sufficiently random that should provide some security as well shouldn't it?

[getsat]

I'm pretty sure this article[1] is posted daily on HN. General purpose hashing functions are all fast (which, for a password storage system, is synonymous with bad).

[1] http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/