EDIT to explain what it is: In getwork days, the pool provided you a single unit of work, you finished it, and asked for more. Discarded was a figure of how much work you had asked for that you never got to use due to longpolls making it obsolete. In GBT/Stratum, pools don't provide you with a unit of work, but they provide you with a template to make work locally.
Is there a good plain english write up explaining pools and how they operate or is it all programmer-speak gobbledegook ?
My inclination was that a pool just divided the potential solution space amonst live workers and gave them alll something to do
Is that anywhere near correct ?