It’s pretty spectacular how nobody really understands salts.
The point, people, is so that you can invalidate pre computed hash values (rainbow tables) by pre-pending a constant but random string in front of your password. It doesn’t have to be hidden, it doesn’t have to be random each time. It just needs to be somewhat longer than the clear texts used to create rainbow tables. If a user has a ‘password’ for a password, cracking it will take the duration of a a seek and scan in a DVD full of precomputed hashes. If a user has 128 bytes of garbage + ‘password’ as their password, chances are the DVD won’t have the answer.
I wonder if anyone reads this far down. I know I didn’t…