"...with modern hardware, like the "budget" cracking rig, we can…

"...with modern hardware, like the "budget" cracking rig, we can almost exhaustively search the highest probability keyspace for candidate passwords, against fast hashes like MD5, NTLM, SHA1, etc..., in a reasonable amount of time. Normally anything above 8 characters isn’t practical and/or feasible to brute force against standard fast hashing algorithms. When factoring in language and human peculiarities, like the average English word is only 4.79 characters long and people preferring multiple common words when creating 10 characters or longer passwords, you are within cracking distance of these passwords."

http://www.netmux.com/blog/cracking-12-character-above-passwords