Are Hardware Assisted Brute Force Attacks practical ?

Via Coding Horor comes news of hardware designed specifically to assist in brute-force password hacking.

Hardware-assisted brute force attacks will never be a credible threat. But short, simple passwords are still dangerous.
If your password is only 8 alphabet characters, and if it’s exposed in a way that allows brute force hardware assisted attack, you could be in trouble. All you need to do to sleep soundly at night (well, at least as far as brute force attacks are concerned) is choose a slightly longer password. It’s much safer to think of your security in terms of passphrases instead of passwords. And unlike “secure” 8 character passwords, passphrases are easy to remember, too. Have you considered helping me evangelize passphrases?