The problem with random salts is they have to be stored somewhere, which probably makes them available to the hacker, especially if they are prepended to the hash, which is apparently common. Can my suggestion be broken? Sure, but it will take far longer than an unsalted password, requires that the hacker crack each password separately, and it's easy to implement. Password protection is like using a physical safe, you know it can be broken, you just have to decide how long you want the cracker to have to work to get in.

Here's another stack overflow discussion on the topic http://stackoverflow.com/questions/536584/non-random-salt-for-password-hashes

And a site with a password entropy calculator http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php