1. A storage medium comprising application software that performs one or more operations and that directly manages a device, said application software comprising: instructions that initialize an application data structure usable by the application software to manage the device; and instructions that map the application data structure to a memory associated with the device thereby avoiding the use of a device driver function call to access the memory associated with the device on behalf of the application software; wherein the format of the application data structure is different than the format of memory associated with the device.