(05-31-2017, 11:13 AM)Kurausukun Wrote: This functionality is usually not needed by Wiis because most people keep theirs updated, and it's especially not really needed by Dolphin, but it's definitely removing data that cannot be recreated, hence why it is indeed "lossy." I'm not sure if it also skips other partitions, like Brawl's masterpieces for example, but the update partition alone is enough to make it a very lossy process which will fail any checksum tests to make sure you have a good game rip.
Okay, I get what you're saying... there's no real analysis required... it's leaving out partitions that don't contain the game itself.
(05-31-2017, 11:13 AM)Kurausukun Wrote: It's a knife right in the heart of data integrity. Please don't argue that this is not a lossy scheme or try to redefine "lossy," because it is already a well-defined black-and-white term. I'm in a data science major; I do, at least to some degree, know what I'm talking about.
Spare me the dramatic metaphors.
I have a masters in computer science, and have been working in the field for 11 years. MP3 encoding is lossy. H.264 is lossy. JPEG is lossy. This is because the critical data you want to listen to or see has been changed and does not sound or look the same, even if it sounds or looks very similar.
Leaving out a chunk of data that is not required for the program to function is not "lossy." The apt analogy would be that you write a "hello world" program and discard the vast majority of the libraries available in your development environment because they aren't required to make "hello world" work. That doesn't make your project "lossy."