Quote:
As of 2011, commercial products are available that claim the ability to test up to 2,800,000,000 passwords per second on a standard desktop computer using a high-end graphics processor.
Quote:
Picking easy passwords allows the use of a "common password dictionary", however, even this method requires the testing be done on the target system, as not all systems use the same algorithm or seed.
A 'simple' password of 8 characters made up of only lowercase letters and digits allows 2821109907456 possibilities, which at 1000 possibilities per second still requires 32615 days to test.
Given these two quotes above, jgt's example goes from 32615 days to test to 0.0116 days to test, or a bit more than 15 minutes (around 17 minutes, I think if my math was right).
Edit: Confirmed 16.79 minutes using a high end desktop computer in 2011 per the wikipedia number in the reference