An instant NT password cracker

While searchin the net for some information on hash algorithms i came accross a paper by Dr Philippe Oechslin titled Advances in Time-Memory Trade-Offs claimed to crack the hash passwords in matter of seconds albeit at a cost of large hard disk space.
This is what he had to say.

While a traditional brute force cracker try all possible plaintexts one by one in cracking time, RainbowCrack works in another way. It precompute all possible plaintext - ciphertext pairs in advance and store them in the file so called "rainbow table". It may take a long time to precompute the tables, but once the one time precomputation is finished, you will always be able to crack the ciphertext covered by the rainbow tables in seconds.

The site is http://www.antsight.com/zsl/rainbowcrack/.

I feel this could have far reaching consequences in cracking. how about trying this strategy out on a crypto crackme. any ideas or any contribution.