Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their locations mostly secret

Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by happywolf on Thursday November 05, 2015 @09:14AM (#10513368)

I would treat anything from Baidu with a grain of salt, mainly Baidu is not the most technical competent company, even among Chinese companies. There are other researches on ghost cities using methods like at night counting the number of units with lights on and do this for consequtive n nights, or measure the total power consumption over a period of time.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by hodder on Thursday November 05, 2015 @09:34AM (#10513482)

What makes you say Baidu is not technically competent? Andrew Ng's work alone seems to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and voice/image recognition.

While Andrew Ng's work gets a lot of press, there appears to be other interesting work coming out of Baidu in O2O, search, wiki, image,video, self driving cars etc.

They also appear to be a well run business as evidenced by rapid revenue and earnings growth for over a decade.

I'm biased as a BIDU shareholder, but that is precisely why I'm interested in your critism.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by happywolf on Thursday November 05, 2015 @10:09AM (#10513693)

Simple. Did you actually use Baidu? I do, on a regular basis.

Let me elaborate

Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine learning while using Baidu services.

To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu.

Here is the screen capture of the results I got (http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g), basically there is no mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are very important to shareholders.

As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results from news sites, which are very to the point.

Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million Android devices (http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backd...), and unfortunately, this isn't the first incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency.

Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by ethanbond on Thursday November 05, 2015 @10:23AM (#10513778)

It seems unfair to jump from "it's a shoddy product" and "they introduced a security hole" to "they're not technically competent."

A lot of American and European companies have done, and consistently do, the same things. It seems like there's some hypercriticism due to underlying suspicions of intentionality – however well-founded those suspicions may be.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by happywolf on Thursday November 05, 2015 @10:33AM (#10513848)

No doubt there are good people in Baidu. This happens everywhere, including the now defuncting Nokia, however those people are not put in good use.

To turn the question around: what makes you think they are technical competent? Can you provide 2 examples instead?

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by Gigablah on Thursday November 05, 2015 @10:02PM (#10517621)

1. I searched for "cars" on Baidu. I got search results with cars.

2. I searched for "cats" on Baidu. I got... the musical, a pop group... okay, maybe you're right.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by anunderachiever on Thursday November 05, 2015 @10:16AM (#10513735)

Maybe that is intended:

"China's replacement for Windows is an XP ripoff"

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/25/9396769/china-NeoKylin-ope...

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by nickff on Thursday November 05, 2015 @12:37PM (#10514758)

This would be an especially good reason not to trust Baidu; if they are an arm of a totalitarian state.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by Retric on Thursday November 05, 2015 @09:39AM (#10513511)

Without massive support from the Chinese government they would get crushed. That's not the environment that breeds competence.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by sbilstein on Thursday November 05, 2015 @09:52AM (#10513591)

Huh? The Chinese govt is known for not allowing foreign web companies lots of freedom to compete but there are certainly domestic search engines to compete with. Baidu has about 71% share of the search market in China.

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Re:Baidu found China’s “ghost cities” but is keeping their l... by hueving on Thursday November 05, 2015 @09:45AM (#10513546)

They exist primarily because competition was pushed out by the government.

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