A program that crashes in a spectacular way has died horribly. Simply crashing is not sufficient to be called horrible, the program has to kill several other running processes, overwrite random parts of the disc, or freeze the whole system . Horrible death is rare on UN*X boxen, fairly uncommon on windows 95 and 98 systems, and entirely too common on DOS machines and Apple IIs. Horrible death is related to crash and burn, but the latter usually involves corrupting the video ram, giving a crash with nifty graphics.
To make your linux box die horribly run "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/kmem" as root.

die = D = diff

die horribly v.

The software equivalent of crash and burn, and the preferred emphatic form of die. "The converter choked on an FF in its input and died horribly".

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.