Zynga Shares Fall on News It Is Ending Plan for Gambling

“Zynga is making the focused choice not to pursue a license for real money gaming in the United States,” the company said in a statement. “Zynga will continue to evaluate all of its priorities against the growing market opportunity in free, social gaming, including social casino offerings.”

The announcement, which came on a day when Zynga reported quarterly results mostly in line with investor expectations, sent its shares down 13 percent, to $3.06 in after-hours trading.

Over the last year, Zynga’s business model has rapidly crumbled while it continued to lose online gamers to rivals. Executives have pleaded for time to turn around the company, arguing to investors that greater fiscal discipline and execution would stabilize Zynga’s position, while its foray into casino-style gambling could pay off handsomely in the long run.

That thinking has changed in recent months within the company’s upper echelons, with Mark Pincus, a founder, and his replacement as chief executive, Don Mattrick, returning to Zynga’s roots with free social games like FarmVille, which catapulted the company to stardom in 2009.

“We need to get back to basics and take a longer-term view on our products and business, develop more efficient processes and tighten up execution all across the company,” Mr. Mattrick said in a statement.

Zynga reported $231 million in quarterly revenue on Thursday, a 31 percent drop from a year ago, as the struggling publisher continued to lose players.

Zynga said the number of active monthly players dropped to 187 million this quarter from 306 million a year ago, its lowest since mid-2010. The company, which has acknowledged fundamental problems with its business model, went public in December 2011 at $10 a share.

Excluding certain items, Zynga posted a loss of a penny a share, compared with a penny-a-share profit a year ago.

Zynga reported $188 million in bookings, which is a measure of the value of virtual goods bought by players during the three-month period that ended June 30. That is a 38 percent drop from $302 million a year earlier.

Long Wait for a Green Card Could Be Ending

Then, he waited for the American government to decide if he could stay.

“I know this country better than my own country, and I still feel like an outsider,” said Mr. Sant, 35, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2006, and has been waiting for federal officials to approve his green card application for six years. “That’s the thing that bothers me.”

That is also the predicament of tens of thousands of workers here in the heart of the tech industry who were born overseas and educated in the United States. Though not living in poverty or in the shadows, as are migrant workers who are here illegally, they are nevertheless in a bureaucratic limbo while they wait in a long line for a green card.

Now, though, Congress is poised to end their uncertainty.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday approved a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws on a bipartisan vote, and sent the measure to the full Senate. The bill would make it much easier for science, math and engineering graduates of American universities to become permanent residents.

Crucially, it would also lift the limits on how many immigrants are allowed in from each country, which has meant that citizens of populous countries like India end up waiting far longer than others.

The provisions to ease the green card process enjoy bipartisan support, reflecting a stark reality: Nearly half of all engineering graduate students at American universities are from abroad.

Technology companies, like Facebook and Microsoft, want to hire many more of them, which is why they have lobbied to make it quicker for them to get permanent residency. So has the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a group that campaigns for American workers.

Still, not everyone is a fan. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, who has testified against the legislation, said easy, unlimited access to green cards for math and science graduates could encourage the emergence of “visa mills,” or schools established just to sell access to the United States. Also, he said: “American young people with bachelor’s degrees see these occupations distorted by large-scale admissions of foreign workers. That then changes their own decision making about what to do in the future.”

The green card provisions have been obscured by the louder, more polarizing fight between industry and labor over foreign guest worker visas, known as H-1Bs. But they stand to have a far greater impact on the men and women who drive this industry.

Mr. Sant, like many of his friends, was drawn to the United States for higher education. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available from the National Science Foundation, a government agency, 45 percent of master’s and doctoral students in engineering were from abroad, up from 35 percent in 1990 and 24 percent in 1980, according to the agency.

At some universities, the share of foreign students is even higher. At Carnegie Mellon University, which has one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the world, 62 percent of engineering graduate students came from abroad, and at the Rochester Institute of Technology, 56 percent.

This year, at the University of Southern California, the figure is 68 percent, according to university officials.

Among those who come to study in this country, about one in three end up staying on temporary work visas, mainly through the H-1B program. An analysis by the Brookings Institution concluded that in 2010, 30 percent of those who were working on H-1B visas were former students at American universities. Their wait for permanent residency can be frustratingly long, depending on their homeland.

According to data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, more than 150,000 of them have filed for green cards since 2010; nearly a third of them are from India, the largest single block.

Kartik Shah, 29, was among them. A native of Mumbai, he went to the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, for a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He graduated in 2007 and swiftly landed a job as a software engineer at Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, just south of here.

The company soon filed a green card application on his behalf, which it says it does for the vast majority of its H-1B workers. The government cleared his application, essentially ruling that his skills were needed. Then, it told him to wait.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 24, 2013

An article on Thursday about the potential effect of federal immigration legislation on tens of thousands of American-educated workers in the technology industry incompletely identified the university from which one such worker, Sanket Sant, received his doctorate. It is the University of Texas at Dallas, not simply the University of Texas.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Extending (And Ending) Support for Windows XP

What is “extended support” for Microsoft Windows XP and do I need to worry when it’s supposed to stop next year?

Microsoft has a defined period of time for things like help-line calls, warranty claims and security updates for the hardware and software it sells. This period of time is called the Support Lifecycle Policy and is supposed to give customers a firm idea of how long they can expect Microsoft to provide services for a product before the company considers it obsolete.

Microsoft’s current policy states that its Windows operating systems will each receive a total of 10 years of support. The first five of those years are “mainstream,” in which that version of Windows still has all the telephone support options available (including some free help by phone along with paid technical-support calls), security updates and some development work for requested features and design improvements.

After the first five years, the system moves into the “extended” support phase where security updates are still free, but any technical help by phone costs money; online troubleshooting articles from Microsoft’s Web site are still free and available for at least a year after a product’s extended support phase ends.

A significant amount of PC’s out there are still running Windows XP — about 38 percent as of March 2013, according to the research form Net Applications, which uses information from computers connected to the Internet. Still, Microsoft has been very open about the fact that it will be retiring Windows XP on April 8, 2014. The Support Lifecycle page for Windows XP even tells visitors to “Buy Windows 8 now!”

A post on one of its official Windows blogs basically states that while PC’s running XP will still continue to work after April 8, 2014, they could become targets for malicious software looking to take over newly discovered vulnerabilities in Windows XP. This situation could put users at risk since no Microsoft security patches will be available to plug the holes. The same post also says that antivirus-software companies that still support Windows XP will not be able to fully protect computers running the system. For those inclined to heed the company’s persistent warnings, information about upgrading from Windows XP can be found here.