i'm not sure they are meaningless, as in they lack meaning or content, but i think they are so loaded and overcoded with meaning and content that they collapse into an inability to fully understand and comprehend them in total, having instead only the possibility to work from some finite perspective and redefining the terms in that perspective as we go.

I know that you're talking about hardware, and the quote below isn't doing so exclusively, but the line between the two is nebulous, when the phrase "the computer" is used. I'm still unsure whether it's useful to talk about hardware separately from the software through which we inevitably interact with it. Blame this on a book review I'm writing:

"To be sure, media are far from neutral, inconsequential carriers of "content," but the essentialist idea of "the computer medium" as a singular structure of well-defined properties of communication is just as untenable and can be based on only a very limited understanding of both computer applications and media theory. Computer technology can sustain many different types of media, with very distinctive characteristics. Such a pluralist perspective will help us avoid the traps of technological determinism and let us see the technology as an ongoing process of, rather than a cause of, human expression." -Aarseth, Cybertext, 19.

The notion of "the computer" seems to include (a usually poorly understood idea of) hardware and any software written onto it. We never do actually deal with anything but representations of hardware.

Thanks Vika, that's a good bit from Espen which I'd forgotten about. The line between hardware and software is blurry at best, or perhaps it's best to say that the transition from one to the other is analog rather than "digital": that is, there's no clean break or dividing line. (The term "firmware" is applied to microcode--instruction sets responsible for basic system behaviors--stored in the ROM.) Software as such did not emerge until the 1950s.

Jeremy, you're probably right of course. Nicely put.