Are hashed and salted passwords secure against dictionary attacks?

Question

I understand that salts make the same password hash to different values. However, salts are usually stored in the database with the password. So let\'s say I am attacker,

Answer 1

Salt doesn't prevent dictionary attacks, just precalculated dictionary attacks. In particular, it protects against rainbow tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table) and also ensures that cracking one user's password doesn't automatically let you crack any user who shares that password.

The article I linked to mentions some ways to improve upon salting, incudling key strengthening (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_strengthening).