Quote Originally Posted by Dr Unne
http://www.gentoo.org

If you can't easily identify what a running program is, you shouldn't be running it, is my philosophy.
The short names for processes usually make no sense, and if you're not a total technical whiz, it's likely you won't know what a lot are. Some may be minor things that aren't actually important to running your computer, but just run because of some other thing you have installed. In this case I think it's useful to know what you can safely close down. Which was the main idea of the link I gave, and not really meant as a solution to spyware/adware either.