Other thing I was wondering is how much RAM you would need to brute force (trying every combo of characters) a 10 character password in a reasonable amount of time (under 24 hours). I'm thinking about the kinda passwords I like to use. Dictionary attacks are useless against my passwords and a brute force attack would take my computer years. The pdfcrack program I used only tries combos of letters (both cases) and numbers but didn't include special characters so it'd be useless against some of the passwords I use. An example of the kinda passwords I use is $nArKlErS56. Its easy to remember because I can sound it out in my head, 56 is a number I like the sound of and I usually arrange the cases so the password looks cool. Its very simple how I choose my passwords but its not so simple to crack these kinda passwords with any methods I know of yet. I'm a noob when it comes to password cracking I'm guessing some of you here have ways you could crack the kinda passwords I use. Then again maybe not since I can't really imagine how there could be an algorithm (besides plain old brute forcing the character combo) to do this kinda thing.
That example password up there is one of the stronger passwords I use. I don't use that kinda password for every day shit because it takes too long to type so instead I usually use a similar password but only use lower case letters.
EDIT:
I just came across this article:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ha ... 123456.php
which shows this table listing the most popular passwords from a sample of 32 million passwords:

Thats a pretty high percentage of the people using these insanely bad passwords so the total percentage of people using weak passwords must be pretty high.