"... keyboard shortcuts ..." is a common response to defend Mac design choices.
The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.
The single shared menu bar has one huge advantage over per-window menu bars: infinite mouse target size along the vertical axis. When moving the mouse to a narrow strip menu bar at the top of a window you need to accelerate the mouse towards the target and then decelerate in time to stop on the target without overshoot. With a menu bar at the top of the screen you can skip the decelerate part and just slam the mouse to the top of the screen without worrying about overshoot.
You’re right about giant displays though. The best menu system for those is pie menus [1]. Although I would still dispute the advantages of the second mouse button for activating those. The F1-F12 function keys would be much better since you could have instant access to 12 different pie menus instead of a single one with right click.
Around 1996 I worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation (Hercules, Tarzan, Mulan, Dinosaur era). I was talked with implementing the Disney multi plane 2D scanning camera in a digital environment, Maya, a 3D modeling and animation package. I was given full specs and it was straightforward. One thing was odd, the 2D coordinate system used 5000,5000 as the origin, I forget what units. No one seemed to be able to explain why. A while later the original mechanical multi plane scanning camera was put on display. Looking at it, it made sense. It used a 4 digit mechanical counter for the position of each axis with a range of [0,9999] so 5000 is approximately the center. Warner Brothers Animation used software called Animo and it had the same origin. I ended up working with an Animo developer at my next job and asked him about it. He said Warner Brothers told them to implement it that way with 5000,5000 as the origin because that’s how they do it at Disney and Disney must have a good reason.
From personal experience, I took a 20" Sony Trinitron from Los Angeles to New Zealand in the mid 90's. the reversal in the Earth's magnetic field between the northern and southern hemisphere's meant I could never completely get the RGB guns to line up correctly.
To me, this sounds a lot like the directional flow of toilets flushing. I'd have to see this as an actual experiment before I can be convinced of what the webopedia page is claiming.
Check out my previous comment on the time a friend and I watch his TV upside down. There was zero difference that I remember.
Consider where most of the monitors are shipped from. Did they send "southern hemisphere" specific televisions and crt monitors? And what happens at the equator?
Could your monitor have been fritzed on the flight? Did it work normally when you brought it back?
This would actually be a fantastic YouTube video, whether it debunks or proves the claim being equally interesting.
This is simply not true. If it were, then a monitor at the equator would be ruined merely by rotating it to face east instead of west, or north instead of south. They would have needed to sell four different monitors, to accommodate customers who were going to face their monitors in different directions. Even away from the equator most of the magnetic field points north/south rather than into or away from the Earth. More likely vibration during shipping defocused your monitor somewhat; a TV–repair shop probably could have fixed it.
It's much more likely that your TV suffered in-transit knocks and bumps that rendered it out of alignment, and too out of alignment to be able to be re-aligned.
The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.